People, spaces and places - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 41

Aspatial views of society can capture many things. Gender relationships
within households may not express a national geography. Those whose school-
ing was entirely in a private institution will never have experienced the spatial
inequality of the state education sector, in which the place where you live can
determine how well you learn (Figure 2.6).
In two dimensions we can see the environment in which people live as a
whole, not only how they vote and work, but how everybody around them votes
and works, and how other things about them are distributed - where they and
their neighbours came from, how they live, who they are. Perhaps it is because
this spatial structure is so strong, so well known, that we so often seek to find
more ethereal aspatial relationships. We should first take a look at the wood
before trying to classify the trees (as if they were not part of it).
There are, however, some fundamental problems to be overcome in trying to
see the structure of society through its spatial apparitions. 6 To begin with, there
is the problem of drawing a line around a group of people to be called a society,
for which Britain was chosen for this topic. Then, there is the question of how to
cut up that space and what effects such divisions can have. Numerous lines have
been drawn across Britain defining communities and cities, regions and villages
(Figures 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9). How the spaces of interest can be rebuilt from the
dissection of the nation is the central problem in relating places to people.
2.4 Drawing lines
... the 'whole' should be greater than the sum of the parts, or else
we are dealing merely with an aggregate. This property of 'wholeness'
of an object is reflected in its relative self-containment of activity.
Boundaries around the object are characterised as zones of greater
impermeability between the object and the outside world ...
(Coombes et al ., 1978, p. 1181)
Just as the line that surrounds Britain is dictated to us, so too are most of
those that divide its people. Most seriously, for many purposes these lines divide
the country into areas that contain far too many people to come anywhere near
to the idea of the neighbourhood outlined above. Very small areas can also be
too small to be a neighbourhood. At a ridiculously aggregated scale Britain is
often divided into ten or eleven regions and numerous statistics periodically
6 'At least as long ago as 1950, it was demonstrated that not only the strengths of relationships
between different variables change at different levels of aggregation but that, in some cases, the
sign of the relationship also changes! Even worse, the effects of country-wide variations in size of
areal units within the same level of the administrative hierarchy certainly provide variable levels of
resolution and may also induce severe biases' (Rhind, 1975b, p. 9).