Mapping Society : The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography

Despite its shifting meaning, mapping remains ‘a way of representing the world’, a visible image of, if not the world, then an aspect of that world.2 This book is about a very specific type of mapping, social cartography – namely the creation of maps whose purpose is to represent specific aspects of society at a given time and place. Histories of maps abound; where this book differs is in its aim to convey how social maps can also be records of social enquiry in relation to the role of urban conf iguration in shaping social patterns over time. It will demonstrate 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 emphasises the power of space in shaping society over time. In addition, 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. Coincidental with the concern with urban ills throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century were developments in cartography that 1enabled map makers to convey complex population statistics illustratively by presenting them on a map. It is this context of urban upheaval caused by industrialisation that explains why nineteenth- century Britain became one source (but not the only, as we will see) of the phenomenon of the social reformer as urban investigator, replete with maps and statistical data for surveying and tabulating the ‘uncharted’ territory of these mushrooming urban settlements. As social environments these rapidly growing cities were as alien to the understanding and taste of classically educated elites as those of imperial acquisitions in India and Africa were to the mass of the British population. The founder of the Salvation Army William Booth made this explicit by comparing England’s ‘darkest’ slums to those of Africa: ‘The foul and fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp.’3 At about the same time William Booth was writing this, his contemporary, the social reformer Charles Booth, was producing his extraordinary street maps which revealed to the world the extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty that existed cheek by jowl in London. The development of mapping technology and practices, from the Ordnance Survey to temperance organisations, from municipal boundary commissions to Goad fire insurance plans, all emerged in the context of the nineteenth- century enthusiasm to map the uncharted ‘urban interior’ of cities as well as to bring scientific rigour to analysing and solving the many ills that had befallen cities.

source :

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10056449