Laura Vaughan

Mapping 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 Laura Vaughan zoning map of early twentieth-century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris, Mapping Society traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Laura Vaughan examines maps of ethnic or religious difference, poverty, and health Mapping inequalities, demonstrating how they not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also constitute inscriptions of social patterns that have been etched deeply on the surface of cities. Society The book covers themes such as the use of visual rhetoric to change public Society opinion, the evolution of sociology as an academic practice, changing attitudes to The Spatial Dimensions 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 of Social Cartography 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 full-colour maps and photographs, this volume will appeal to all those interested in the long-term forces that shape how people live in cities. Laura Vaughan is Professor of Urban Form and Society at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. In addition to her research into social cartography, she has Vaughan Laura written on many other critical aspects of urbanism today, including her previous book for UCL Press, Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street. Cover image: Detail of Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889. Image copyright Cartography Associates, 2000 Cover design: Free open access versions available from www.ironicitalics.com www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Mapping Society Mapping Society The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography Laura Vaughan First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © Laura Vaughan, 2018 Images © Copyright holders named in captions, 2018 Laura Vaughan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial Non- derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY- NC- ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Vaughan, L. 2018. Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography. London, UCL Press. https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111. 9781787353053 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 307– 7 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 306– 0 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 305– 3 (PDF) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 308– 4 (epub) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 309– 1 (mobi) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 310– 7 (html) DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787353053 To Neil and Daniel from ‘U’ 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 meth- odologies as her main tool. Yet though this is a sophisticated and com- plex 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, geo- graphical 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 vi later social studies – was at the time received as a ‘most remarkable and important contribution’.1 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’2 which, The Times recorded, ‘drew the cur- tain behind which East London had been hidden’.3 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 trans- port 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 metrop- olises 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,4 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 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 disad- vantage 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 amelior- ation 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 it is 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’.

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