People, spaces and places - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 38

can differ. The organisation of people over space, and through time, is what
makes place important.
Constrained by the limits of time, people are forced to live close to where
they work. In cities they work together, but live apart. We used to live together
in villages and work apart in fields; now many live apart in suburbs and work
together in offices. This spatial organisation reflects the need for people to live
together and the wishes of some to be apart. As they are rewarded unequally at
work (if they work), this inequality is reflected in where, and how, they live. 4
In a country with growing inequalities more and more neighbourhoods are
created as areas where most of the people have a comparable income. Here they
live in houses that are alike, have similar backgrounds and, to some extent, a
common future. When a firm closes down only those localities from which its
employees came are directly affected. If the supply of labour is spatially compact,
so too will be the spatial impact of job losses. Only pupils in the locality of a
certain state school will go to that school. People downwind of a particular source
of pollution will be most affected by it.
If people in one place suffer, so eventually will all others in some
way. However, it is the spatial reinforcement of certain trends that makes
the importance of place so clear. Just as the pattern of commuting allows
the neighbourhoods to exist, so the pattern of migration serves to exacerbate
neighbourhood differences (Figure 2.5). As a few people in poor neighbourhoods
do well, they move to richer ones. More importantly, the vast majority of
migration is between similar places in the spatial social hierarchy, reinforcing
and perpetuating the existing differences.
The term 'locality' defines, here, a group of people who live in close
proximity. They do not necessarily have to know or even recognise one another.
What the study of human geography has shown is that they will tend to have
more in common with each other than with outsiders. 5 This is because of what
put them there, keeps them there and moves them away - the forces that sort
people in space, the institutions underlying social structure.
Place is important to the understanding of the social structure of society
because it is through places that the structure is most directly visible. Not only is
it visible in our everyday lives, but some of its many facets can be made visible,
if still blurrily, on paper (Box 2.2).

4 Showing any of this is harder than describing it. A century and a half ago a man, 'the Superin-
tendent', tried to work out a way of mapping the production of a given agricultural crop. He tried to
do this using a topographic map and failed: 'the Superintendent satisfied himself that no one simple
ratio could be found which would not, in many cases, grossly exaggerate, and in other cases as
unjustly disparage, the importance of the crop to the county and the county to the crop' (Walker,
1870, p. 367).
5 This is known as Tobler's first law: 'Everything is related to everything else, but near things
are more related than distant things', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobler's_first_law_of_geography,
which perhaps should have said ' '. More prosaically: 'To insist

on the continuing importance of place, therefore, is not to deny that processes beyond the locality
have become important determinants of what happens in places. But it is still in places that lives are
lived, economic and symbolic interests are defined, information from local and extra-local sources
is interpreted and takes on meaning, and political discussions are carried on' (Agnew, 1987, p. 2).

... are usually more related ...