Analysing Cities
Modern cities began to be organised around the turn of the 20th century. Social issues such as communicable diseases and acute experiences of poverty became too much for authorities to handle. From the Eurocentric city perspective, two people in particular were foundational in analysis and change.
“Du Bois set environmental justice up with the tools for mentally understanding the link between health and place through spatial justice frameworks and the use of geospatial data in environmental/health/racial justice.”
W.E.B Du Bois
W.E.B Du Bois was concerned that the malaise he was observing in his fellow Kin was being inaccurately attributed to a person’s Blackness rather than the places, structures, and experiences they were forced to live. It was a continual intellectual justification by white society to mistreat People who were Black. In other words People who are Black get sick because of their genetic make-up, not because their bodies are responding to historical and current maltreatment. In the era of Du Bois those who were the recent and direct descendants of the violences of being held captive for 400 years were now forced to live in neighbourhoods with poor sanitation, high levels of violence, dilapidated/ inadequate housing, poor access to well paying jobs, safe jobs, and so on. Whilst his work didn’t focus on air pollution, Du Bois set environmental justice up with the tools for mentally understanding the link between health and place through spatial justice frameworks and the use of geospatial data in environmental/health/racial justice.
Du Bois sought to quantifiably reveal "life within the Veil," a term he used to describe the structural forces of oppressions that separated black and white populations, whether that came to educational attainment, voting rights or land ownership.
Du Bois critical work in cartography resulted from him being invited to study the 7th Ward district of Philadelphia, an area with a large African-American population living in poverty, and suffering from disease.
On her blog, Urban Formation, the UCL professor Laura Vaughan describes that the extraordinary colour coded map of the Seventh Ward revealed key data on the spatial concentration of poverty in the area. 87% had no access to a water closet, to hot water, and were living in overcrowded conditions. The ability to move out of the area, even if the individuals could afford it, was limited by landlords refusing to rent to African-Americans. This is revealed in the map’s visualisations of economic status, showing the persistent clustering in, or close to, the original point of arrival. The system itself was rigged, the city was displaying, the programme argues, structural inequality.
Charles Booth
The London School of Economics website describes Charles Booth as a successful Victorian English businessman who was profoundly concerned by contemporary social problems. He recognised the limitations of philanthropy and conditional charity in addressing the poverty which scarred British society. Following working for Lord Mayor of London's Relief Fund in 1884 in analysing census returns he was highly unsatisfactory about the nature of the censuses. Dissatisfied with the current approach, he devised, organised, and funded one of the most comprehensive and scientific social surveys of London life that had then been undertaken. Booth’s political agenda was to combat the conjecture, prejudice and potential social unrest resulting from the unprecedented scale of the problem of poverty in the rapidly growing Victorian cities that was often sensationally reported in the contemporary press, likely provoking a degree of fear among their readers. To reference an earlier lesson in this course, you can argue that Booth was unhappy with the taxonomies used to describe people and the associations drawn from those languages and data collection contexts.
Booth’s ‘Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London’, as a process undertaken between 1886 and 1903 whose original notes and data have survived to present day and have provided a unique insight into the development of the philosophy and methodology of social investigation in the United Kingdom.
As a form of spatial analysis and cartography it laid bare the trends resulting from urbanisation. These maps have come to be known as “Booth’s Poverty Maps”. It can be argued that this work set some grounds for the first parliamentary act to ensure a level of standards called the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 and consequently an ancestor to the Indices of Deprivation used by the UK government in present day.
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Du Bois had demonstrated structural racism in action. Whereas Booth was more broadly articulating the impact of urbanisation and capitalism on lower income people.
Whilst from two different perspectives, the maps share a commonality: to bring clarity to a situation - the role in place in determining human outcomes. The use of colour coding pioneered a way to visualise data in a relational way. Booth and Du Bois also demonstrated through spatial analysis that outcomes were not happenstance. They were conscious acts. They were the result of structurally racist lawmakers and exposed the prejudice within institutions such as the media whose prejudices resulted in physical, built environment outcomes.
These early processes of social epidemiology and urbanism began to give birth to the field of urban planning. In the UK, the first formal top-down approach to managing urban planning was the Town & Country Planning Act of 1947. This defined how local authorities both plan as well as approve physical changes to land within their authority boundaries - like most things, it has been a bone of contention since. As the 20th century developed and societies emerged from post war living it was deemed that for the economy to be healthy, people should be able to function without barriers. The emergence of modernist housing and cities such as the Heygate Estate in Southwark, London and the city plan for the new town of Milton Keynes were visionary and with good intentions. However, austerity and wider political forces resulted in the urban form not creating the social outcome as desired - many social critics have discussed this topic so we don’t need to address it here. Despite the outcome, the intention was to define the landscape to define the economy. As a result, the relationship between economists, governments, bankers, and business owners became tighter and tighter. In order to raise funds to build, bankers wanted security, economists would analyse business markets, and people wanted to know that they could house, feed, and clothe their families. This meant that cities had to be regulated in order to meet the stability required to sustain its financial underpinnings and achieve the desired social outcomes. Breaking from the norm became illegal; it was focused on permission from policy rather than the noble class. It also meant that wide and divergent geographies had to be retroactively put together under one plan.
Law- and policy-makers have a tough job. They are tasked with balancing the contemporary needs and wants of constituents with long term, often multigenerational, financially underpinned planning. There is a trade-off that occurs. These trade-offs sit at the heart of many of our built environment-induced health outcomes. We can see that despite the major protestations from city residents over the building of the Silvertown Tunnel and Heathrow 3rd Runway, building them is more important - both approved by Labour-led governments, make of that what you will. We can also see that the redevelopment of urban brownfield sites, despite the numerous campaigns, poor health outcomes, and expert warnings, is too important to not do. Since the late 1970s, governments have overwhelmingly adopted the neoliberal model of economics, however the only thing that trickles down is the bad stuff.