Mapping Society

Front matter

Laura Vaughan

The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography

The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography

Foreword

The city is a human construct within which the different facets of the social condition evolve and exist. In this scholarly and absorbing volume, Professor Laura Vaughan deconstructs ‘The City’ in order to explore its constituents. In the context of this book ‘The City’ is not bound by one spatial or temporal location. Rather the volume focuses on the urban environment per se as the place under the microscope. Vaughan uses history as one of her tools to analyse the development of urban society and its social problems. One of the core themes of this impressive work is the way in which, over time, urban expansion and the parallel growth of a socio-economic infrastructure resulted in the creation of a disadvantaged and dispossessed sector of ‘The City’. However, it is the way in which negative aspects of ‘The City’ - namely disease and poverty, crime and disorder and segregation as the result of differences of nationality, race and religion — have been highlighted by means of mapping that forms the spine of this book. As Professor of Urban Form and Society at UCL and an expert in the discipline of space syntax, it is not surprising that Vaughan has used her discipline’s theories and methodologies as her main tool. Yet though this is a sophisticated and complex mode of research and analysis its use in this book is by no means inaccessible. The author ensures that her field of study, when applied, is eminently comprehensible, and is complemented by historical, geographical and sociological associations.

By the close of the nineteenth century London was a city without equal, its population numbering some 6.5 million. But the growth of global dominance and power was accompanied by the damaging features referred to above. And, as some gloried in the glittering aspects of the capital city others, particularly Charles Booth, worried about the ‘problem of problems — poverty’. As the chapters in this book highlight, while Booth was not the first to use mapping to illustrate the negative characteristics of a city, his mapping of the levels of poverty in certain areas of London — though, as Vaughan tells us, very much ignored by later social studies — was at the time received as a ‘most remarkable and important contribution’.' Booth’s first map of poverty, published in 1889, shocked society. It was, according to The Guardian, ‘a physical chart of sorrow, suffering and crime” which, The Times recorded, ‘drew the curtain behind which East London had been hidden’.* The map provided an instantaneous coloured depiction of the darker side of London; the rare instances of affluence signalled in yellow and red descending to the all-too-frequent presence of darkest blue or black poverty. Ten years later Booth updated and added to his original map of poverty and in an absorbing chapter Vaughan reproduces these maps, providing detailed textual analysis which highlights the ways in which urban space had expanded and been violated by the development of the capital’s transport system, new roads and railways frequently separating the poor and underclass from the rest of society.

Though London may have been the leading city of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Vaughan ensures that her readers are introduced to the way in which mapping has been used from the early nineteenth century by social enquirers in a range of disciplines in other major metropolises both at home and abroad. The multi-ethnic mix and variance of wage rates in Chicago were published in mapping form (and accompanied by explanatory essays) in the Hull-House Maps and Papers in 1895. These were edited by the social reformer Jane Adams, who had visited and been inspired by Toynbee Hall, the settlement in London’s East End founded in 1884. Adams acknowledged her debt to Booth, stating that she had used the same colour coding as he had in his ‘wage maps’ — as she referred to his maps of poverty. Though the recording of ethnic difference was not on Booth’s agenda,’ it was on that of W.E.B. Du Bois, an African American who mapped the location of ‘Negroes’ in 1890s Philadelphia. Once again visual cartographic immediacy adds impact and import to the location of late nineteenth century African-Americans in a leading North American city. 1890s Chicago and Philadelphia cartography indeed informed where and how ethnic minorities in both cities were located and segregated. Some 120 years later what Booth, Du Bois, Hull-House and others achieved by arduous street tramping research, the ethnographic, social and religious make-up of cities such as London, can now be visually presented as the result of the fusing of up-to-the minute data and advanced computer technology.

The impressive collection of maps which illustrate the book’s chapters range temporally from one created by Leonardo da Vinci, of the town plan of Imola, in 1502, to two produced in 2015, one highlighting levels

FOREWORD vii viii of multiple deprivation in the Limehouse area of London and the other identifying the excessive walking distance from the peripheral banlieues to the nearest Paris Metro stations. These graphic illustrations of disadvantage provide an instantly visible insight into just some of the urban social problems that are extant in the early twenty-first century.

Though mapping is at the core of this book, the reader cannot ignore the array of photographs that Vaughan has used to supplement the mapped information, images which reinforce the reality of the deprivation and hardship that was, and in some instances still is, the lot of the poorer members of society. Indeed, one of the important lessons of this book is that social research needs to combine textual analysis with maps and images. In this way the composition — spatial syntax — of the urban environment can be explored through a selection of lenses which enable both the instant recognition of ‘the problem of problems’ through maps and images and its implications as they emerge in accompanying documented data; this combination can — and should — lead the way to the amelioration of urban social problems.

Whilst this volume was written from the viewpoint of an expert in urban form and society, its appeal goes far beyond that discipline. Academically itis multi-disciplinary, but its reach should not stop there: the quality and variety of the maps and photographs, together with its accessible text, makes it a book for all those concerned to understand the way in which the growth of the urban environment determined the way in which people lived — and still live — in ‘The City’.

Anne Kershen Queen Mary University of London

1. Daily News, 6 April 1889.

. The Guardian, 17 April 1889.

. The Times, 15 April 1889.

. The one exception (though it was not commissioned by Charles Booth) was the mapping of the Jewish community of East London which appeared in the Russell and Lewis book The Jew in London. This was published in 1901 and is reproduced and discussed in this book.

AWN

FOREWORD

Preface

Sitting in a seminar room at UCL in 1992 while studying for my Master’s in Advanced Architectural Studies (nowadays the MSc Space Syntax), it was seeing Charles Booth’s maps of poverty for the first time that sparked my interest in what has become a career-long project of unpacking the social complexity of cities. The period of the early 1990s was a time when Bill Hillier, the founder of the field of space syntax, was developing his conception of the city as a ‘movement economy’, a theory which viewed the city as organising different land uses and economic classes within the same area by separating them marginally, with only a turning or two separating the rich and poor. Using the Booth map as a source to identify an urban phenomenon allowed Hillier to hypothesise that the way in which nineteenth-century London organised class spatially was the outcome of a dynamic process that first shaped flows of movement through a city’s streets and then arranged land uses to follow the spatial logic of a city. By identifying a phenomenon of ‘marginal separation by linear integration’, Hillier was using the historical map not only as a source of information on how cities worked in the past, but also as source of inspiration for building a broad theory of how cities work in general. My work builds on this tradition and on the incredible body of scholarship constructed by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, Alan Penn and myriad colleagues within the space syntax community, from which I have spun out my own specific combination of urban design, geographical and historical readings of urban society.

A few months after my first introduction to the Booth map I was browsing in the Hebrew and Jewish Studies section of UCL library and came across a fragile book from 1901, with an even more fragile map inside: the map of Jewish East London, 1899. Looking at the way the map, with its shadings of blue from light to dark, was used to accentuate the density of Jewish immigrant settlement in the area, immediately struck me as showing some fundamental spatial regularities beyond simply being a ghetto — as it was known then. This was the start of many years of research into the complexity of socio-spatial segregation and one direct outcome was an intensive study of the Booth maps of poverty in London, in which I used space syntax methods to consider if there is a relationship between social and spatial exclusion.

In fact, this book reflects two decades of enquiry into the spatial nature of society, with a specific focus on the detailed patterning of social phenomena as these are laid out in historical maps. The importance of a spatial analysis of historical data is not to be underestimated. Going beyond placing the data on the map to a deeper analysis of the geographical patterning of the data allows the researcher to pose a variety of questions: regarding the spatial character of the urban setting, regarding whether social data of a single type have spatial characteristics in common, and — in general — to control for spatial effects when analysing social patterns.

For me, the Booth maps have become the quintessential starting point when exploring the relationship between the spatial organisation of cities and how societies take shape over time. I have written about the spatialtemporal evolution of cities in my earlier book, Suburban Urbanities. This current publication effectively goes back to the origins of my research, starting with my most fundamental subject of interest: how the spatial configuration of cities shapes social patterns and, specifically, urban social problems.

This book does so by taking maps of social statistics and developing a close reading of the maps themselves as well as the context within which they were created. A side product of this inquiry has been the discovery of the extent to which social cartography is frequently used not only as a tool for communicating information on patterns of settlement, but also for other purposes: for propaganda, to collate evidence or to support scientific argumentation. The use of social maps as an analytical device is less prevalent and this book will show how a reading of the spatial patterns captured by such maps can reveal some fundamental rules about how cities work according to a specifically spatial logic of society.

Among the most famous examples of social cartography are John Snow’s maps of cholera in London and, from later in the nineteenth century, Charles Booth’s maps of poverty. Other, less well-known maps, such as the Russell and Lewis map of Jewish East London, stemmed from a desire to capture the apparent disorder of urban areas and to solve what continue to be viewed as urban problems: slums or ghettos.

Writing about cities as socio-spatial artefacts demands a theoretical approach which sees the physical city as a measurable artefact. By

PREFACE considering social space as one of the many variables which make up the complex patterns of urban cityscapes, it is possible to gain deeper insights into the significance of the spatial patterns of the data that are captured in social cartography. The complexity of these patterns requires an ability to describe and analyse them beyond simple descriptions of patterns on the ground. The use of space syntax theories and methods, which have at their heart the concept of spatial configuration — namely a consideration of how each space in the city relates to other spaces, results in a mathematical reading of social space that has, since its inception in the 1970s, led to hundreds of studies and thousands of practitioners worldwide. The introduction to this book will explain these theories in greater depth and the reader will observe, throughout the book, points where space syntax theories are used to illuminate the cartographic representations of society and so to illustrate how spatial configuration is a fundamental (and oft-overlooked) aspect of social cartography. The application of space syntax theories in this book is primarily as a way of considering socio-spatial patterns systematically, but the appendix additionally provides a description of the fundamentals of space syntax theory as well as a worked-through example of analysis. Moreover, where relevant, the endnotes indicate where other detailed scientific expositions of space syntax analysis can be obtained.

Ultimately this book’s ambition is to demonstrate how an interdisciplinary reading of social maps can provide a richer understanding of how society and urban spatial systems interact with each other. Thus, phenomena such as segregation can only be fully understood once we take account of a wide variety of factors, including economic, political, social as well as spatial context — and all this in addition to the changes that cities and their inhabitants undergo over time.

PREFACE xi xii

Acknowledgements

I open by thanking Anne Kershen, founder of the Centre for the Study of Migration, Queen Mary University of London, whose work as a historian and expert in migration has been an inspiration to me since we first met over two decades ago. Her constant support as a mentor over the years has shown an intellectual (and practical) generosity I can only aspire to in my own academic practice.

Iam also grateful to Lara Speicher from UCL Press, who has encouraged this project ever since I first mentioned to her my interest in historic maps. Thanks must also go to the team at the press; especially Jaimee Biggins and Alison Fox.

While most of the research reported here has been done alongside other academic activities, I would like to acknowledge the sabbatical funding from the Architecture Research Fund of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL in 2017, as well as research funding received from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the latter of which supported my analysis of several of the maps in this volume.

I would also like to thank the many people, mostly anonymous, who have donated maps to various repositories around the world, as well as the curators of some important map collections, without whom this study would have taken a significantly longer time. A special mention is due to the David Rumsey Collection and the University of Chicago Map Collection, as well as to Cornell University Library’s Persuasive Maps Collection whose vast repositories were invaluable for my research and whose (mostly anonymous) archivists and curators provided some excellent leads for background reading on the maps.

Iam grateful to the following people and institutions who granted me permission to use their own map copies, in most cases responding within a number of hours to my request: Emmanuel Eliot and the Geoconfluences project; Stephen Ferguson from Princeton University Library; the Science and Society Picture Library, the Science Museum; Ralph R. Frerichs, the UCLA Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health; Sam Brown from the University of Chicago Map Collection; Jenny Schrader for information on the Blind Alleys of Washington; Chris Mullen for providing (and scanning for me) his copy of the Rowntree map of York; the University of Pennsylvania archives and Amy Hillier for access to the Du Bois map; Oliver O’Brien, Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC); Alex Werner, curator, Museum of London; Tinho da Cruz, librarian, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool, who brought the Hume map of Liverpool to my attention and provided me with a copy of it; Edward Denison and the Asmara Heritage Project; and Jonathan Potter Ltd., whose responsiveness, as a commercial business, is one of many examples of the generosity I have enjoyed throughout this project.

Note

1. The funding in question was an EPSRC PhD studentship, which supported research into patterns of Jewish settlement in nineteenth-century Manchester and Leeds, and an EPSRC ‘First Grant’ (no. GR/S26163/01), which ran from 2003-5, funding research into the spatial form of poverty in nineteenth-century London using the Charles Booth maps of poverty. This was titled ‘Space and exclusion: the relationship between physical segregation and economic marginalisation in the urban environment’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii