CityReads│How to Map the Spatial Logic of Society?

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How to Map the Spatial Logic of Society?

Cities are places of segregation and integration.

Laura Vaughan. 2018. Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography. UCL Press. 

Sources: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/mapping-society

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/01/10/book-review-mapping-society-the-spatial-dimensions-of-social-cartography-by-laura-vaughan/

Mapping remains ‘a way of representing the world’, a visible image of, if not the world, then an aspect of that world. Social cartography is about a very specific type of mapping,– namely the creation of maps whose purpose is to represent specific aspects of society at a given time and place.

In Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography, Laura Vaughan at UCL traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries, from a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris. 

The book covers themes such as the use of visual rhetoric to change public opinion, the evolution of sociology as an academic practice, changing attitudes to physical disorder, and the complexity of segregation as an urban phenomenon. While the focus is on historical maps, the narrative carries the discussion of the spatial dimensions of social cartography forward to the present day, showing how disciplines such as public health, crime science, and urban planning chart spatial data in their current practice. Containing examples of space syntax analysis alongside historical maps and photographs, this volume will appeal to all those interested in the long-term forces that shape how people live in cities.

By tracing a long century’s worth of social cartography from the 1790s onwards, this book aims to provide an overview of a sub- set of maps, demonstrating not only their graphic power in conveying data, but also the way in which each of them expresses a single point in urban history, marking key points in the evolution of urban social space. This book shows how social maps can also be records of social enquiry in relation to the role of urban configuration in shaping social patterns over time. It demonstrates how a better understanding of the relationship between society and space can shed light on fundamental urban phenomena that normally tend to be seen purely as by- products of social structures. By bringing spatial analysis into the foreground, it emphasizes the power of space in shaping society over time. 

The scope of this book is the century following the earliest experimentations in putting statistics on maps: starting with a map of yellow fever from late- eighteenth- century New York, through to maps of contemporary cities across the world. 

One of the earliest examples of these is Valentine Seaman’s maps of yellow fever, published 1800, which used dots and circles to show individual occurrences of the disease in the waterfront areas of New York.

In its earliest incarnation, the social map was concerned with epidemic disease, particularly cholera. It associated disease with problems of urban poverty and the need for sanitary improvement of cities followed logically. The use of mapping as a tool of social investigation reached its peak with the emergence of a science of social investigation in the 1880s, which coincides with the publication and mass dissemination of Charles Booth’s revolutionary methods of social cartography. Later in the nineteenth century the perceived problem of mass migration to the growing cities led to the application of segregation as a political device to separate disparate populations. Emerging from usage within laboratories, ‘segregation’ took on a weightier meaning with its evolution as a synonym for quarantines against disease contagion and – subsequently – for racial separation. Social cartography became more prevalent throughout the nineteenth century as cities grew, alongside which a growing concern with the moral, as well as the physical, health of the nation became more central to public debate.

The book’s geographical scope is centered on London, with examples from across Europe and (in particular) the United States. The focus on London is not accidental: it was at the forefront of cartographic innovation and it was amongst the first cities in modern times to experience mass urbanization, and hence, to have a need to manage a diverse, densely crowded population.

The preceding chapters have discussed nearly 50 maps–produced over a span of well over a century – each of which constitutes a social cartography of a singular time and place. Mapping Society begins with an overview of how maps have been used to illustrate various societal concerns. Nineteenth-century social empiricists, with their thirst for gathering information and data to help better explain society, saw the potential for maps to display such raw data and help tame the underlying knotty complexity. Yet, as is made clear, making data fit the visual iconography and classification schemes of maps could change and distort the meaning, creating a tension between the apparent neutrality of the maps and the issues they were revealing.

What then follows is a series of chapters, each focusing on a different ‘social ill’ that has been the subject of cartographic analysis, starting with maps of disease, health and housing; followed by Booth’s study of London poverty; later investigations into poverty and social isolation after and beyond Booth’s London; maps of race, migration and religion; and, finally, depictions of crime and disorder. The closing chapter discusses the future of social- spatial analysis in an era of online data availability and raises a word of warning to those considering the supposed democratizing of data on issues such as crime as being necessarily a social advancement. The power maps have had in the past to effect positive change can be used also to ill effect, especially in such complex issues as segregation.

The book makes use of a considerable number of sources and uses them to tell many fascinating and sobering stories. While the maps themselves are often historic, Vaughan also showcases contemporary research which has been carried out using older maps and sources. In the first chapter she draws attention to Richard Keller’s work, which showed the impact of the 2003 heatwave on Paris. Thousands of people died following little respite from record high temperatures both night and day. Keller was able to draw significant parallels between the deaths in 2003 with the patterns of mortality as depicted on a map of the 1849 Paris cholera epidemic. Vulnerabilities can build up over decades, the outcome of urban planning along with a political culture and social structure. Residents living in certain parts of the city were still more likely to be at risk from such health crises a century and a half later. The Parisian maps showed how the outcomes of repeated patterns of spatial inequalities could have dire consequences for the health of city residents. 

Chapter Five, with its focus on race, gives examples of how data and information displayed on maps could be used for much more expressly prejudiced purposes. The ‘redline’ maps were ostensibly drawn to show credit risk for mortgages and loans across different American cities in the 1930s. Their gradation ran from highest credit worthiness (A) to lowest (D) and areas were shaded different colors in relation to those grades. Vaughan reveals that whilst the grades were assigned according to relatively benign-sounding categories such as ‘transportation methods’, ‘topography of the area’ or ‘age and type of building’, almost inevitably given the highly racialized patterns of settlement, areas predominantly occupied by black people were much more likely to be graded D. Existing inequalities were thus exacerbated as black citizens found it much harder, if not impossible, to gain access to financial credit in order to start businesses or purchase property.

The idea of cities as places of segregation and integration is key and referenced throughout the book. One of the principal methodologies used by Vaughan and other researchers to show how cities can segregate or integrate populations is space syntax analysis. This method is closely associated with the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment where it was formulated and where Vaughan is based. The appendix of the book includes a fuller explanation of this methodology, but it essentially takes into account the ways in which the spatial configuration of cities (particularly streets and thoroughfares) can help or hinder interactions among people. Space syntax methods provide a reading of urban environments as multiscale entities that have evolved over time.

Mapping Society is a scholarly and thoroughly researched book which unpicks the context behind many of the foremost examples of social cartography. Vaughan does give a platform to analyses of modern social issues and contemporary research, though this is less prominent given the book’s historical focus. The modern methodological tool of space syntax analysis effectively underpins the work and reveals how the layout of cities can exacerbate or ameliorate social ills.

Mapping Society aims to convey how cartographic records of society reveal much more than a social pattern on the ground. It will show how maps can also be records of social enquiry; specifically, in relation to the role of urban configurations in shaping social patterns, in some cases over time. It shows how the organization of society in urban space follows systematic regularities in the built fabric of cities that can be measured, quantified and analyzed to powerful effect. The city is not always a benign setting for emergent social systems to take shape; it can be used negatively, either through poor planning that creates unsafe streets or through a cynical use of the power of physical separation to remove unwanted groups from the city center. By considering maps as researchable artefacts, we can put the spatiality of society at center stage. It is important that we think the urban social phenomena spatially.

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