Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography, by Laura Vaughan

Laura Vaughan, in Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography, suggests that social maps can be ‘records of social enquiry in relation to the role of urban configuration in shaping social patterns over time’ and that, through their analysis, scholars can better understand ‘the power of space in shaping society over time’. To Vaughan, a professor of Urban Form and Society at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, social maps capture a moment in time and can be read to consider life at that moment: ‘does it capture data in sufficient detail that we can learn from it something about how urban society worked at the time?’ To historians of cartography, Mapping Society presents a very different take on familiar maps