People, spaces and places - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 46

published for average people in these areas - for example the average Yorkshire
and Humberside person. 7
Other large areas used in the illustrations shown here often include the
seventeen 1980s planning regions, the sixty-four counties, the four hundred
and fifty-nine districts (Figure 2.10), the six hundred and thirty-three mainland
parliamentary constituencies (Figure 2.11) and so on (Box 2.3). These areas
define regions the size of small towns, often containing as many as a hundred
thousand people, or more, or as few as a few dozen thousand. The spatial social
structure hardly manifests itself here, for, in these areas, to sustain such areas,
are people from all walks of life. Towns and cities are made up of the rich and
poor. There are not rich and poor towns, at least not in the sense that there are
rich and poor people.
What is more, the boundaries of the many areas for which we have data rarely
coincide, neither with each other in space nor with themselves at different points
in time. We are left with most of our geographical knowledge being mixed into a
plethora of ephemeral places, the shapes and sizes of which do as much to alter
the appearances of what is happening as do the numbers that are gathered about
the people within them, even though they may be very accurate measures. The
average for a large area destroys knowledge of the variations and defines people
who do not exist - a bit of everyone and all of no one.
One way to try to overcome this confusion is to draw another set of lines,
but this time defined not for the convenience of collection or to administer gov-
ernment or to distribute services, but on some functional grounds. These are
called 'functional regions'. They are zones that try to encompass the areas within
which people live and work or between which they tend to migrate. Although
such exercises might usefully tell us something about the patterns of commuting
and migration, they do not necessarily serve well for seeing social structure any
better than the existing divisions - for several reasons.
One problem with the use of functional regions, in effect watersheds for peo-
ple, is that they have tended to create even fewer places than have commonly been
used and so the gross aggregation of communities is sustained, again creating the
illusion that there is little spatial division. Administratively defined areas created
for voting purposes tend at least to collect the same numbers of people within
their boundaries; those made to operate local government at least divide London
into boroughs. In contrast, these functionally defined entities exhibit some of the
greatest variations in population of any set of boundaries in use. 8
The very nature of 'functional' areas, created from flows of people, dispenses
with the spatial aspect of society by creating a set of (semi-autonomous) places,
which can be studied on their own, ranked and (supposedly) profitably listed
7 Now called the average 'Yorkshire and the Humber' person as the boundaries have been tweaked
a little. North East Lincolnshire is today in with the Humber (Dorling and Thomas, 2011, p. xx).
8 One result is that when 'functional regions' were created by the centre I worked in when the
first draft of the dissertation that became this topic was written (CURDS), they were criticised for the
statistical effects of widely varying denominator populations: 'The CURDS use of relative indices
biases their account by emphasizing the growth of rural areas' (Savage, 1989, p. 255).