On friday (10/07) I attended a workshop on the usage of the Output Area Classification (OAC), aimed at local government and the public sector. I have experimented with a number of geodemographic classifcations, both commercial (experian’s mosaic, CACI’s acorn and health acorn) and non-commercial (OAC and Petersen et al’s LOAC (2007)) and was interested to see the experienced line up presenting.

Tim Allen of the LGA introduced why customer insight is increasingly important, in the public sector this translates to understanding the situation and needs of your constituents, and directing spending accordingly. This introduction of the potential of OAC in the public sector pushes the merits it holds to assess neighbourhoods, communities and places. This trinity was oft mentioned, however I am suspicious that they were being conflated to mean similar things when in fact OAC is only realistically a window into neighbourhood/areal characteristics.

Second up was Dan Vickers of Sheffield University, who developed the OAC for the Office for national statistics, who went onto describe some of the characteristics of OAC and the decisions that went into its construction.

The remaining sessions focused on how OAC can be used to examine dataset and find trends, Martin Callingham, visiting Professor at the University of London, showed its use in profiling populations, essentially tagging locational data with the appropriate group and comparing it to the national average. In doing this he gave a lot of examples, but went onto describe OAC as fundamentally being about ‘place’ something I’m not convinced is true.

Likewise John Fisher of local futures, described how OAC can tell “stories of Britain”, which brings the work of Doreen Massey to mind, the idea of place being the composite of “stories so far”, however this is a post-structuralist view of place-construction which itsn’t reflected in the way OAC is cast, with strongly defined boundaries, absolute assignments and statistical relevance. Fisher brings in further element of government into the OAC agenda, referencing ‘place-shaping’ and ‘total place’, sustainable communities and localism. All elements which OAC may have a role in, but a role that needs careful shapign and consideration not broad geodemographic strokes.

Keith Dugmore, of Demographic Decisions, was more measured in his talk, which was quite interesting and revealed a geodemographic approach to assessing sample surveys, this is achieved through OAC coded surveys such as the British Household Panel Survey, or the Expenditure and Food Survey and allow for small area estimates for local areas based on the results of these surveys. The key failing picked up was a lack of confidence intervals, but these are easily added in reality.

Michael Willmott wrapped things up with a forward looking commentary on the trajectory of OAC and social research, unfortunately given apparent inability to distinguish neighbourhoods, communities, and places in some of the talks, and amongst some of the participants, it may have been overly optimistic.

I do think that geodemographic classifications have a role to play, simply that there needs to be a greater understandng of how they are best interpretted.

I’ve been thinking about populations recently, perhaps unsurprisingly after the recent PopFest conference, nevertheless I tend to justify the presence of certain groups as characteristics of particular neighbourhoods or communities. In itself this seems entirely valid, certainly no population is perfectly homogeneous, they exist along a spectrum of heterogeneity. We can see simply from our own experience of the world that some areas exhibit spectacular diversity of inhabitants, particularly urban areas, my case study area of Southwark, London springs to mind. Situated in central London, south of the River Thames it contains a population that spans the inequality divide from the wealthy, young, City workers resident along the redeveloping ‘Bankside’ and the older, settled familied of the leafier southern part of Southwark, to the poorer, often non-white, communties in central Southwark living in social housing, to the poorer, older white residents historically attached to the docklands to the north-east of Southwark. Notably rural areas tend toward greater homogeneity, but still exhibit some diversity in some characteristics even if others, particularly ethnicity are constant.

This is, however, not the point, the real issue is the difference between neighbourhoods and communities. Both are very difficult to define clearly, my snap judgement is that communities realte to people and neighbourhoods to the territories that people inhabit. However some deeper research will show cracks in this simplistic approach, sure neighbourhood usually relates to a metric space, things that are near to, or contiguous to something else, however creating neighbourhoods for individuals seems like an approach to constructing communities for those individuals, likewise geodemographic classifications are increasingly being conflated with indicating something signifcant about the underlying communities. Similarly, communities occupy particular areas, the practice of mapping communities which come from government requirements seeks to territorialise community and new pratcices in public service causes further confusion: community policing for safer neighbourhoods?

The main rule that I have been able to extract from much of this is the propensity for communties to represent a ‘softer’, perhaps more public facing approach and conversely, by neighbourhoods a ‘harder’, more quantified method is often implied. There are notable splits within the disipline of geography between those who are willing to engage ‘communities’, which are intangible, temporally variable, socially realised relationships (perhaps) and come with the baggage of uncertainty and those that would rather deal with the geographically discrete entity of the neighbourhood, safe in the knowledge that the implied precision of areal units are not widely questioned. Even within GIS there has been a diversification of approach, from the mainstream GISci enforcing a ‘spatial science’-style approach that has persisted since the quantitative revolution (at least), to the public participation GIS discourse which actively engages communities and individuals, and by extension critical GIS which for a time has critiqued territorially bounded ‘descriptions’ of community. Finally consider the governmental binary of ‘neighbourhood statistics’ and ‘community cohesion’, many councils use neighbourhood statistics to ‘measure’ community cohesion!