Urban form and deprivation: a contemporary proxy for Charles Booth's analysis of poverty.

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between physical segregation and economic marginalisation in the city, contrasting 19th century and contemporary London. It describes the use of space syntax analysis to represent and analyse urban street systems as a spatial network. One of the main challenges with spatial analysis of contemporary deprivation data is the lack of sufficiently detailed data and summaries that can easily be related to specific elements of the built environment. Either constraints of privacy preclude the release of household-level data, or nationally collected statistics are unsuitable for detailed spatial analysis due to their being summarised for relatively large areas which do not correspond to the specific configuration of the street layout and its morphology. This article highlights how such detail and summaries can provide a powerful tool for policy makers and regeneration projects to address deprivation at the urban and building design scale. A variety of proxies for the Charles Booth map of poverty were considered in order to compare the same area 100 years apart, focusing on places that remained deprived over this period. Housing benefit and council tax benefit data at the household level were provided by two London local authorities. They were transformed into an equivalent to the Booth poverty scales. The first half of this article describes these methods and results and the second half reports on a study in North London using a different measure of spatial integration. Whilst there is some evidence from both the Booth and contemporary data of a connection between poverty and lack of spatial integration the relationship is not simple.