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There has been a great deal of drawing of lines. It is worth seeing what
is revealed when we begin rubbing them out, to see the real divisions, not the
ones imposed by the cartographer's pen, administrator's necessity or geographer's
algorithm. It is possible that just a few dozen carefully chosen regions do illustrate
the diversity of society, areas each containing a similar population of around six
hundred thousand people, for instance. However, to know if these can suffice
for some purposes we have to first know what we are missing; we have to first
include all the detail.
2.5 Picturing points
Place, therefore, refers to discrete if 'elastic' areas in which people
can identify. The 'paths' and 'projects' of everyday life, to use the
language of time-geography, provide the practical 'glue' for place.
(Agnew, 1987, p. 28)
To show the lived spatial distribution of people we need information about
places that are at least as small as the communities we envisage containing the
majority of everyday travels. These would be the areas on the map within which
children travel to primary school, people shop and within which almost all the
elderly live, the areas (increasingly) out of which younger adults commute to
work or college.
If you think of the number of neighbourhoods in a town of two hundred
thousand people, you should be able to count many distinct estates. Places ranging
in size from as few as one hundred to as many as twenty thousand people are
what many call neighbourhoods. Maybe it is with areas such as these that we
need to begin with in order to build up a more comprehensive picture of the
national spatial structure.
Even the smallest, conventionally used, administrative areas are usually too
large for our purposes (Figure 2.12). The boundaries of smaller places may well
be arbitrarily defined. However, that need not be a great problem if we are
careful about our imaging techniques. 10 It is the relationship between the places
in which we are interested. We should look at what places show collectively,
not their individual characteristics - there are usually far too many of these to
examine each one.
With enough small places we can create methods that produce results that are
not artefacts of the arbitrary lines drawn on the map, devising techniques by which
we can paint realistic pictures of social spaces. What are needed are techniques
where it does not matter precisely how the points representing communities are
defined. Using these techniques new maps of a slightly different set of areas
10 'It is not the areal units which are to blame. The difficulty is that the method of analysis used
was inappropriate. This tautology is immediate. If the procedure used gives results which depend
on the areal units used then, ipso facto , the procedure must be incorrect, and should be rejected a
priori ' (Tobler, 1989a, p. 115).
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