The visualization of local urban change across Britain

The author argues for the increased use of population cartograms to visualize changing geographies and uses British localities as an example. Population cartograms are increasingly being recognized by researchers as a major solution to many spatial visualization problems. The gross misrepresentation of many groups of people on conventional topographic maps has long been seen as a major problem of thematic cartography, highlighting difficulties such as the modifiable areal unit problem in preventing the development of visual palliatives. Population cartograms made up of many thousands of areal units are simple to construct with an appro pilate algorithm. The author has designed a particular solution for use in the visualization of high-resolution spatial social structure. The problem now is not of writing more computer programs, but of convincing other researchers of the necessity of using cartograms in place of conventional choropleth maps for showing many population-related distributions. The author shows how our pictures of space can be changed and argues why they should be.