Statistical boundaries and small area data: something worth saving?

By Nissa Finney, CCSR, University of Manchester

Statistical and small area boundaries are invisible on the ground. Yet they shape the physical nature of cities because they demarcate areas that are governed. And they are part of the construction of places because they determine a space that has political representation, or is served by a care trust, or is provided with services by a particular local authority.

Statistical boundaries are ‘territorial units’ within the UK for which data are collected and collated by the national statistical agencies (Office for National Statistics in England and Wales, General Register Office for Scotland and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency). The Office for National Statistics (ONS) provides a useful guide to the geographical boundaries it works with (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/geography/beginner-s-guide/index.html). There are many types of sub-national boundaries for which small area data are produced – administrative, electoral, census, health, postal. And the boundaries within each of these types change frequently. For example, census boundaries change in an attempt to provide statistics that reflect geographical areas with some social meaning and amendments to electoral boundaries may reflect demographic change. Statistical boundaries both shape and reflect society.

In the UK, statistics are produced for very small areas. For example, census data are published for ‘Output Areas’. Output Areas have a recommended size of 125 households and are generated from data after the completion of each census. Output Areas are designed to have similar population sizes to each other and to be as socially homogenous as possible based on tenure of household and dwelling type. Output Areas are small enough to sit within larger boundaries and always fit exactly within local authority districts.

What kind of data can we get for these small areas? Good examples are provided by the Neighbourhood Statistics website, (http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/) the portal through which ONS disseminates its small area data. By selecting the area you’re interested in, you can view hundreds of data tables on all kinds of topics drawn from census and other data that ONS manages. You can find out about population, education, health, work, deprivation and more for small areas. For example, we can see the area of the University of Manchester (Lower Super Output Area Manchester 018B; Figure 1). If we’re interested, for example, in immigration and diversity we can quickly learn that:

• 772 households live in this area
• of the 2,802 residents over the age of 3 in 2011, 1,766 (63%) have English as their main language
• 671 (23%) of the 2,893 residents have lived in the UK for less than 2 years
• the three largest ethnic groups are White British (816; 28%), Chinese (478; 16%), Indian and Pakistani (215 or 7% each)

How might this type of data for small areas be used? Perhaps it is used by providers of health care or education in Manchester to tailor their services for their population. Perhaps it is used by the University to monitor how well it is engaging with the community within which it sits. Perhaps it is used by the local authority in population and economic forecasts. It is certainly used by academics interested in population change. For example, census data for small areas have been used in Dynamics of Diversity: Evidence from the 2011 Census Briefings produced by the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) in association with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. These analyses of census small area data have revealed increases in ethnic mixing residentially   (Simpson, L (2013); Catney, G. (2013), available at www.ethnicity.ac.uk). Indeed, such data allow us to identify places that are superdiverse, including Moss Side, the most diverse ward in Manchester district (Figure 2). They also allow us to examine where certain population groups have grown. For example, Figure 3 shows that, between 2001 and 2011, the populations of Pakistani, African and Other White ethnic groups in Manchester and Greater Manchester grew more in areas in which these groups were less concentrated than areas in which these groups were most concentrated in 2001.

Figure 2: Superdiversity in Moss Side, as shown by 2011 Census small area data

Figure 3: Minority populations have grown most in parts of Manchester in which they were least clustered (as shown by Census 2011 small area data)

In other words, these ethnic groups have spread out residentially in Manchester over the 2000s. To the contrary, the Chinese population in Manchester district and Greater Manchester grew most over the decade in wards in which it was most concentrated in 2001, perhaps reflecting a growth in the Chinese international student population who settle in the central parts of the city where other Chinese people already reside. These patterns tell us something interesting about how Manchester’s population is changing, and allow us to speculate about and investigate what’s driving these patterns of population change.

How else are small area data being used? Perhaps you have used them. Perhaps you have used them without realising their origins.

Now is an important time to think about how these small area data are used. That is because they are under threat. The Office for National Statistics is currently assessing alternatives to a census for producing population and small area socio-demographic statistics for England and Wales. The review programme is called ‘Beyond 2011’ (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/what-we-do/programmes—projects/beyond-2011/index.html). The impetus comes from the Treasury (Treasury Select Committee report ‘Counting the Population’, May 2008) and the UK Statistics Authority who would like to see feasible and less costly alternatives to the census that will make the 2011 Census the last of its kind. This call to find a less costly alternative to the decennial census came prior to the 2011 census. The 2011 census has been widely acclaimed as the most successful in recent times; efficiently run, cost-effective and producing a breadth and depth of data that is world-leading. ONS will have a public consultation on its Beyond 2011 proposals between September and November 2013 and will put its recommendations to government in 2014.

The Beyond 2011 proposals may mean that small area data are not produced. It is a real possibility that the future data landscape in the UK will not include the world-leading breadth and quality of small area data that we currently enjoy.

If small area data are to be included in the Beyond 2011 recommendations the case for them needs to be made. There is a danger that small area data will be lost because they’re taken for granted; because they are used by many, but their origins and the efforts to produce them, and their world-leading quality are not necessarily recognised.

It is with this concern in mind that I urge you to consider the appeal by the Beyond 2011 Independent Working Group (Members of the Beyond 2011 Working Group are Piers Elias, Tees Valley Unlimited, and co-chair of Local Authorities’ liaison with central government on population statistics (CLIP); David Martin, Professor of Geography, University of Southampton, Deputy Director ESRC UK Data Service and National Centre for Research Methods; Paul Norman, Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Leeds; Phil Rees, Emeritus Professor of Population Geography, University of Leeds; Ludi Simpson, Professor of Population Studies, University of Manchester, President of the British Society for Population Studies). to provide examples of how you have used Census statistics, particularly for small areas (local authority level and below). These can be sent to ONS at benefits.realisation@ons.gsi.gov.uk and copied to the Independent Working Group at AreaStatistics@gmail.com. You may also want to respond to the ONS consultation in the Autumn.

Perhaps it is helpful to think about this is terms of what we won’t have, and what we won’t be able to do, if we don’t have small area data. If small area statistical boundaries and the information about population, health, housing, education, work, migration that they contain were not to exist, what would we not know about cities, and about how cities are changing? How would our understandings of contemporary cities be different without the backdrop of the world-leading quality small area data that we currently enjoy?

 

Enacting equality through insurgent housing practices in Spain

By Melissa García Lamarca, PhD candidate in Geography

 

Spain’s growth has always been intimately connected to the expansion of the built environment. (1) During the country’s third and most extensive real estate boom from 1997 to 2007, over five million units of housing were built – more than the UK, France, Italy and Germany combined – as housing prices increased over 200%. Even though real average wages fell 10% during this period, financial entities granted over 800,000 mortgages each year as the public administration, real estate sector and media actively promoted housing as a sound investment whose value would never decrease. Homeownership rates reached almost 85% of the Spanish population during this period, one of the highest rates in Europe.

 

Real estate cycles 1970-2007 Naredo et al 2008

 

Image 1. Spanish real estate cycles, 1970-2007. Source: Naredo et. al. (2008:184) from National Statistics Institute (INE), Ministry of Development and Ministry of Housing

 

But since the bust of Spain’s boom, unemployment has skyrocketed to over 26% and more and more people are unable to pay their mortgages. A critical situation exists as the country’s Mortgage Act does not cancel the entire debt of a mortgaged household if the confiscation and sale of their house by the bank does not cover all outstanding costs. As banks are unable to sell the foreclosed houses they repossess, those evicted find themselves hugely in debt; including late payment interest and legal costs this can total up to hundreds of thousands of euros. As over 325,000 foreclosures and 200,000 evictions have occurred between 2007 and 2012 according to Spain’s justice department, hundreds of thousands are left with no place to live and a debt to pay for life. This is happening, paradoxically, as millions of homes stand empty, unsold or repossessed by banks upon developers’ bankruptcy, and banks have been bailed out with hundreds of billions of euros from public purses.

 

A vocal and highly mobilised anti-eviction platform has emerged in response to these dynamics. The Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) was formed in Barcelona in 2009 to defend the constitutional right to housing, specifically focusing on three struggles: stopping evictions, retroactively forgiving the debt of evicted households through reforming the Mortgage Act and enacting social rent. (2) Now with over 160 branches in cities across Spain, the PAH has successfully blocked over 700 evictions through their Stop Evictions campaign and are constantly in the public eye through street protests, occupying banks to demand debt forgiveness for affected households as well as lobbying for legislative change. As the latter, culminating in a Popular Legislative Initiative with almost 1.5 million signatures presented to Congress in February 2013, has led to no substantive change, the PAH is enacting equality through its most controversial campaign: occupying vacant, unsold buildings owned by banks to house evicted families.

 

Terrassa bloc Unnim

 

Image 2: A housing block owned by UNNIM occupied by the PAH and evicted households since mid 2011. Source: PAH.

 

Driven by the motto “no people without houses, no houses without people” and “we rescue people, not banks”, this campaign seeks to recuperate the right to housing through first rehousing evicted families in empty flats owned by banks that have been bailed out by public funds and then entering into negotiating with them for families to pay social rent. The campaign was founded in November 2010 and occupations have slowly but surely increased since, particularly in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region where there are close to a dozen buildings occupied by the PAH to date. One of the first buildings occupied, in Terrassa in December 2011, recently won a victory at the end of May 2013: after one and a half years of negotiations, Caixa Cataluyna – one of several financial entities bailed out with billions of euros through the Spanish Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB) in 2009 and merged into Cataluyna Banc – agreed to rehouse those occupying the building under a 150 euro per month social rent. Perhaps in part spurred by this success, a handful of building occupations have followed in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region and in early July the PAH released a how-to manual laying out different phases plus legal and other considerations when organising individual and collective occupations of buildings, in an attempt to roll the campaign out across Spain.

 

Occupied housing block PAH Barcelona city centre source público.es

 

Image 3: Housing block owned by Valencia Bank in Barcelona city centre occupied on 11 July, 2013 by the PAH to rehouse four evicted families. Source: Público.es

 

The PAH’s building occupation and recovery strategy is an insurgent practice that exemplifies a powerful enactment of equality. As lobbying for legislative change – in an attempt to create equality through government institutions – has failed, equality is instead being actively taken or enacted by the subjects of equality. (3) These insurgent practices are deeply political acts and, arguably, are the types that constitute politics; as Ranciére (1999: 11) would say, “politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.” (4) Those who constitute the anti-eviction platforms in Spain were people who allegedly “had a part”, who obtained the credential of “first-class citizens” through being property owners (5), but are now the part with no part as they have been evicted and indebted for life. Their building occupations rupture the police order – the structure, justification and legitimacy of a socio-economic hierarchy, or what we normally call politics – into a space for the appearance of a subject, making visible that which had no reason to be seen. (6) Such actions question and break with the current system, filling a critical gap left by the state, private sector and other institutions.

 

In Spain, as well as in many places across Europe and the world, the crisis has shown that the state and market have failed in their claim to provide a secure reproduction of our lives (7) – that is, a framework for us to provide ourselves with shelter, food and other basic needs fundamental to human life and flourishing. Yet the Platform for Mortgage Affected People’s anti-eviction struggles, in particular occupying buildings with/for evicted families, give hope for actively claiming equality in cities across Spain. The outcomes and larger transformative potential of these acts, of course, remain to be unfolded.

(1) Daniel Coq-Huelva. 2013. Urbanisation and Financialisation in the Context of a Rescaling State: The Case of Spain. Antipode, (April): 1-19.

David Harvey. 1978. The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis. International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 2(1-4): 101-131.

David Harvey. 1985. The Urbanisation of Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.

(2) Social rent is proposed by the PAH as a rent constituting no more than 30% of a family’s income.

(3) Todd May, 2008. The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

(4) Jacques Ranciére. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

(5) Ada Colau & Adrià Alemany. 2012. Vidas hipotecadas: De la burbuja inmobilaria al derecho de la vivienda. Barcelona: Cuadrilátero de Libros.

(6) Jacques Rancière. 2001. Ten Theses on Politics. Theory and Event, 5(3): 1-11.

(7) Midnight Notes Collective. 2009. Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons.

 

Melissa García Lamarca is a second year Geography PhD student investigating the insurgent practices and forms of being-in-common of anti-eviction platforms within the context of the financialisation of housing in Spain. She is attempting to understand the role of these practices and forms in creating urban commons in Barcelona. Melissa is also a contributor to Polis, a collaborative blog on cit

Mayoral politics and the migrant economy: talking elections and “illegals” in Moscow

By Madeleine Reeves, Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences

It is election season in Moscow. On September 8th, for the first time in a decade, Muscovites have the opportunity to vote for a new mayor. The election is a small concession to Russia’s political opposition, which saw a vocal Moscow-based middle-class take to the streets in 2011 to express their disillusion with a presidential party that was stifling political debate. Shortly after the last mayoral elections in 2003 Putin reinstated direct appointment of the Moscow mayor and regional governors as part of his assertion of a “vertical of power” throughout the country. In the case of the Moscow mayor, that decision was quietly reversed following the 2011 demonstrations: a PR coup, many said, that would not really affect the nature of politics as usual.

Dormitory accommodation in Moscow

Today the billboards are out, with their pictures of mayoral candidates in decisive poses. There are slogans that speak to the concerns of an increasingly aspirational middle class (“Order, Comfort, Plenty” for Zhirinovskii’s LDPR; “Moscow power under the control of Muscovites” for the liberal Yabloko party). State buildings are getting a hasty coat of paint; there are election ads and TV debates (albeit without the participation of the incumbent and likely winner, Sergei Sobyanin), as well as pop-up campaign booths near the entrance to metro stations. The poster boy of the political opposition, Aleksei Naval’nyi, is running a slick campaign to “change Russia, starting from Moscow”. Amid the polemics over public transport and parks, bike-paths and Moscow’s escalating real estate costs, one issue has dominated the campaign: the place of Moscow’s highly visible, economically marginalised and legally precarious population of seasonal migrant workers.

Election season has seen a normalisation of anti-migrant sentiment that had previously been confined to the far right. These include the publication of some questionable data (such as the claim that half of all crime in Moscow is committed by out-of-towners in Naval’nyi’s election manifesto) and calls by several of the mayoral candidates for the introduction of a visa regime with the states of Central Asia—states that are today some of the most remittance-dependent in the world. In recent weeks, there have been highly publicised raids on markets and at metro-stations and vigilante sweeps of migrant apartments. Video footage shows scores of Central Asian labour migrants being frog-marched, prisoner-of-war style through a Moscow suburb. A huge tented community of 600 mostly Vietnamese textile workers, growing by the day, has been constructed in Eastern Moscow as a holding centre ahead of deportation, one of eighty planned across the country. The mayoral candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party has urged that the migrants detained there be given survival rations and be made to work “for the good of Moscow” before they are deported.

These populist public crack-downs on illegal residence and labour in the city belie a profound tension at the heart of Russian migration policy. On the one hand, fears of demographic decline, depopulating mono-industry towns, and an oil-fuelled building boom have generated huge demands for low-paid, un-unionised and tractable migrant labour. Whole industries, including market retail, catering, cleaning, and construction, have come to rely upon seasonal migrant workers from poorer states to Russia’s south, often employed in sweat-shop conditions. There have been simplified procedures for some post-Soviet citizens to receive Russian citizenship, and ethnic Russians in former Soviet states have been actively courted as compatriots to be helped with finding housing and work in a “motherland” where most have never previously lived. On the other hand, politically restrictive quotas for documented, legally recognised labour, and the lack of a minimum wage policy mean that those (mostly non-Slavic) seasonal migrant workers who cannot access privileged routes to citizenship are often, of necessity, working or living in conditions that are in violation of civic administrative codes.

There is a stark political economy to the illegalization of migrant labour that goes unremarked in much of the election-season hand-wringing over the city’s growing population of nelegaly (“illegals” in derogatory officialese). For one thing, demand for labour that is low-paid, verbally contracted, un-unionised, and flexible far exceeds the city’s (deliberately minimalist) quota of work permits. Perhaps as many as four fifths of the city’s migrant workers are therefore employed without an official work permit, or individual patent permitting private employment. There is an open market for official work permits, as well as a (near indistinguishable) market for fakes. As I have explored in my research on the difficulty of creating documented selves in Russia, the degrees of intermediation for obtaining a work permit means that “cleans” and “fakes” are often distinguishable only at the point that they are checked by the police.

At the same time, the gulf between average wages and average rental costs in the city mean that many migrant workers live in conditions that violate administrative regulations: in multi-tenant “rubber apartments” (rezinovye kvartiry) without corresponding residential registration, in container-dormitories on building sites, or in the unventilated basement of a multi-storey apartment building entirely unrecorded within city housing stock. The choices here are stark: for those on a typical migrant wage in the catering sector of 15-17,000 roubles (around £300-£330 per month) the only way to make ends meet in a context where the rental costs exceed average wages three or four-fold is to share an apartment illegally with 15 or 20 other tenants, paying money to a notional “landlord” (another migrant who takes a cut) and paying off the local policeman to ensure that the apartment is protected from raids. In a city where the 2010 census identified over 92% of the city’s registered population to be ethnically Russian (russkii), the economic constraints upon legal migrant labour have made for an easy popular conflation between being visibly non-Russian, being a “guest worker” (gastarbaiter), and being an illegal.

Xenophobia is not new in Moscow. But the combination of a laissez-faire wage policy (with a race to the bottom for undocumented labour), together with excessive restrictions on legally documented labour, and the widespread use of bribes to circumvent administrative regulations has allowed for the normalisation of a casual racism in which discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is justified through concerns for security and comfort—or protection against “illegals”. One commercial website offering temporary accommodation to non-Muscovites, for instance, cites its own policy of ethnic selection in the following terms:

“we don’t have racist prejudices, but today the situation has developed such that the largest demand for a place to stay in Moscow comes from Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians. In accordance with the existing demand for inexpensive hostel accommodation in Moscow, we attempt only to house people of Slavic appearance (litsa slavianskoi vneshnosti), for the comfortable living conditions of all residents, and in so doing avoid any conflictual situations.”

The conflation between ethnic origin and legal status has also made its way into the heart of election talk, in which “Uzbeks”, “migrant”, “guest-workers” and “illegals” tend to be invoked interchangeably. Here’s the incumbent, Sobyanin in a May 2013 interview about his vision of the city and the role of its migrant population. Moscow is a Russian city, he insisted, “not Chinese, not Tajik, not Uzbek”:

I’m against the idea that just anyone is able to stay. If people are to stay it is first of all Russian-speakers, with an acceptable culture [s adekvatnoi kul’turoi], compatriots as we say. [But] people who speak Russian badly, who have a completely different culture, it’s better that they live in their own country. Therefore we don’t welcome their adaptation [ikh adaptatsiia] to Moscow, I consider that these people are seasonal workers who have worked and then should go home to their families, to their homes, to their countries.”

Finding a roof in Moscow

And here’s the opposition candidate, Naval’nyi, writing on his blog in characteristic polemic, criticising Sobyanin’s own city officials for employing irregular migrant workers (here simply “Uzbeks”) to take down Naval’nyi campaign banners:

“Dear Sergei Semonovich [Sobyanin],
You’ve not answered my previous questions [about how the mayoralty has been stealing paving slabs and trees]. But maybe you’ll answer me this, why you with your jobbing Uzbeks you are stealing our Navalnyi banners from the balconies of people who’ve put them there? As we know, you have given the order for the head of the building administrations to take the banners from balconies.

1. This is illegal. The banner is the property of the campaign HQ […]
2. It is dangerous. Your Uzbeks are rock-climbing without any safety nets for this kind of work. They’ll fall and kill themselves.
3. Those who don’t die will tell other Uzbeks just how easy and simple it is to get into Muscovites’ apartments this way. It will lead to an increase in apartment robberies. […]
Sobyanin’s and Navalny’s tone and intended audience are quite different here. And yet both rely on a series of reflexive conflations about culture, labour, exploitability, and the capacity (or not) for “adaptation” of non-Slavic migrants within Moscow society.

In this mayoral race, as in so many others in European capitals, sustained debate about what an economically vibrant and socially inclusive city might look like has been sidelined in favour of politically dubious stunts to look tough on irregular migration. In a context where whole industries depend on migrants’ documentary illegibility (and economic quiescence), it is the city’s non-Slavic migrants themselves who are bearing the brunt of this political experiment.