London's 100 Poorest Areas

The theme for this post follows on from some work I did recently which looked at the increasing level of deprivation in Outer London, as reported in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago - see also the maps on the Guardian datablog. It's true that housing market pressures (among other things) are helping to push poverty away from Inner London but the majority of London's poorest are still within the inner city, and Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham in particular. In order to provide a clearer picture of where exactly the very poorest (most deprived) areas are, I produced a map and animation of London's 100 most deprived areas. 

Animated version

The results are not at all surprising. Of the 100 most deprived LSOAs in London, according to the 2010 Indices of Deprivation, the Borough with the most areas is Tower Hamlets (18), followed by Hackney (17), Newham (13), Haringey (12) and Brent (10). Deprivation is increasing in Outer London relative to the past and I was particularly taken today by the news that Newham Council were looking to re-house poorer residents in Stoke (more than 150 miles away). That's taking the suburbanisation of poverty a bit far! 

Some work I did with Ed Ferrari last year looked at residential mobility patterns amongst the richest and poorest sectors of the population in England. What we found surprised us at the time. Our analysis showed that it was often the poorest areas which were associated with the longest residential moves. We didn't have enough fine-grained data to make more of this but it was an interesting insight into what might be happening more broadly.

Taking the 100 most deprived locations is of course arbitrary but the point here is that despite debates about whether 'the poor' should live in 'rich areas' the fact is that many of the poorest people living in London are in areas which in recent years have changed considerably so that they are now experiencing very high demand, inflated rents and severe socio-economic inequalities. This represents an intensification of existing processes rather than something entirely new but it does mean that policy makers need to think carefully about what to do about it...

100 Essential Books of Planning

Since this is my 100th attempt at a coherent post, I thought it would be a good idea to reflect upon something numerically appropriate.

In 2009, to celebrate 100 years of the American planning movement, the American Planning Association decided to put together a list of 'essential books of planning' - which of course contains 100 books. All good planners own well thumbed copies of all 100 and most have committed them to memory. Perhaps not. Actually, there are many people may have forgotten about/never heard of. The quick, at-a-glance pdf list is worth downloading just to check this.

The list is compiled by decade, and it makes interesting reading. Some examples below (can't say I've read them all but I did particularly like Leopold's A Sand County Almanac)...

• Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000)
• The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002)
• The Devil in the White City (Larson, 2004)
• The Geography of Nowhere (Kunstler, 1994)
• Edge City (Garreau, 1991)
• Cities of Tomorrow (Hall, 1988)
• Life Between Buildings (Gehl, 1987)
• The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Whyte, 1980)
• A Reader in Planning Theory (Faludi, 1973)
• Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1973)
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961)
• The Image of the City (Lynch, 1960)
• Towards New Towns for America (Stein, 1951)
• A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Leopold, 1949)
• The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Hoyt, 1939)
• Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier, 1923; in English, 1927)
• Cities in Evolution (Geddes, 1915)

...if you're wondering why Garden Cities of To-Morrow is not on the list, check your dates. Obviously, the list is US-centric but it does make interesting reading. There are even some 'methods' books on the list, such as Krueckeberg and Silvers' 1974 text on Urban Planning Analysis. Also, there are many on the list that are not really 'planning' books as such, like von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944).