Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between social geography and digital representations of it. It argues that it is increasingly the case that vernacular, proximate, immanent perceptions of neighbourhood identity are losing their influence to a range of urban informatics technologies able to ascribe powerfully the supposed essential character of localities from afar (Burrows and Gane, 2006; Parker et al, 2007). Further, it argues that there are good theoretical reasons to suggest that these digital attributions of neighbourhood character are forming ever-more recursive associations with whatever passes for ‘ground truth’ (Pickles, 1995), to the extent that we may need to start thinking far more profoundly about the contemporary constitution of place as a complex process of co-construction between software and material social relations (Parker et al, 2007). The notion that we have entered an era of the automatic production of space (Thrift and French, 2002) is not just a theoretical issue; it is also one that will have profound implications for policy, practice and everyday life. The fact that new forms of technology are being utilised to construct evermore diverse and segmented notions of neighbourhood, and that these constructions may in turn influence dynamics of cohesion within and between neighbourhoods, linked to residential location choices and the imagery of neighbourhood characteristics, has to date been absent from policy discourses on community cohesion in the UK.

The social codification of neighbourhoods

Although the social codification of neighbourhoods has a long history, with a lineage that stretches back at least as far as Charles Booth's Descriptive map of London poverty in the late 1880s (Harris et al, 2005, pp 30–7), it was only with the introduction of a now very mundane technology for the social production of spatial location, the common postcode (or, in the US, zip code), that the construction of modern geodemographic systems – our main focus in this chapter – became a possibility. Of course, postcodes were not introduced with this purpose in mind. They were originally devised solely for the purposes of sorting and directing mail. The history of postcodes will not be the most compelling of topics for many people, but several of the historical decisions taken about their functioning and formatting in different countries have turned out to be crucial antecedents in explaining crossnational variations in neighbourhood informatisation processes.