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Urban Geography
ISSN: 0272-3638 (Print) 1938-2847 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rurb20
Editorial—A World Without Data? The Unintended
Consequences of Fashion in Geography
Richard Shearmur
To cite this article: Richard Shearmur (2010) Editorial—A World Without Data? The
Unintended Consequences of Fashion in Geography, Urban Geography, 31:8, 1009-1017, DOI:
10.2747/0272-3638.31.8.1009
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.31.8.1009
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Urban Geography, 2010, 31, 8, pp. 1009–1017. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.31.8.1009
Copyright © 2010 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.
1009
EDITORIAL—A WORLD WITHOUT DATA? THE UNINTENDED
CONSEQUENCES OF FASHION IN GEOGRAPHY1
Richard Shearmur2
INRS Urbanisation Culture et Société
Université du Québec
Montréal, Canada
THE DEATH OF THE CENSUS
The issue raised in this essay—the abrupt abolition, without consultation, of the
census’s mandatory social questionnaire, by a minority government with a strong ideo-
logical bent—is primarily a Canadian one.3 However, in light of news from the UK and
debates (of an admittedly different nature) concerning the U.S. census, it casts light on
wider issues such as the nature of statistics, their role in constructing a shared social imagi-
nary, and the role that academic fashions may inadvertently play in paving the way for
such destructive political decisions.
The outline of the story is simple. On 10 July 2010, articles ran in the Financial Times
and the Telegraph (Hope, 2010; Pickard, 2010) announcing that the British government
is going to abolish the national census. It is considered too expensive and intrusive, and
the data are out-of-date before they can be compiled (data more than one year old are
considered to be of no use, according to Britain’s Cabinet Office minister). Instead, it is
proposed that administrative data and private data (such as credit ratings) can be relied
upon to gather a quasi-instantaneous picture of the British people and society. Similarly, in
late June 2010 during the G-20 riots, the Canadian Minister for Industry quietly announced
that the Canadian census’s long form—the form distributed to 20% of Canadians and from
which detailed income, housing, language, employment, occupational, family, and ethnic-
ity information is gathered, all at a fine spatial scale—will be made voluntary (Proudfoot,
2010). The reason given is that an (unspecified) number of Canadians have complained
that it intrudes on their privacy—probably while using Facebook and purchasing goods by
credit card over the Internet.
This should come as a relief to some geographers. Ever since David Harvey (1973)
seminally put the first nail into quantitative geography’s coffin, a number of radical, post-
modern, cultural, and other geographers have been hammering away, as indeed have
social scientists in other fields. Thirty years of academic bludgeoning seem finally to
have borne fruit: a generation of innumerate students, some of whom are now politicians,
1I would like to thank Susan Hanson, John Adams, and Elvin Wyly for comments made on earlier versions of this
essay. It is much improved as a consequence, although its contents remain solely my responsibility.
2Correspondence concerning this essay should be sent to the author at INRS-Urbanisation Culture et Société,
Université du Québec, 385 Sherbrooke East, Montréal, H2X 1E3, Québec, Canada; telephone: 514-499-4052;
fax: 514-499-4065; email: richard.shearmur@ucs.inrs.ca
3The questionnaire will henceforth be voluntary. The unanimous view taken by statisticians and data users is that
a voluntary survey will incorporate unknown and unknowable spatial and social biases, and that response rates
will be far lower than for the mandatory questionnaire.
1010 RICHARD SHEARMUR
has understood the truth of the oft-quoted adage “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The
message has even traveled across the political spectrum, because it is coalitions led by
right-wing parties that are in the vanguard of this final burial of authoritative numbers!
It is true that some geographers (e.g., Tickell et al, 2007; Kwan and Schwanen, 2009)
have recently offered counter-arguments that numbers can be important for critical and
radical geographies, and it is also true that numbers have continued to be used by many
human geographers since 1980. However, there is a feeling, expressed by a variety of
researchers (Markusen, 1999; Fortheringham et al., 2000; Shearmur and Charron, 2004;
Tickell et al., 2007; Kwan and Schwanen, 2009) that quantification has, since the 1980s,
been on the defensive compared to qualitative, case-based, culturally informed, and radical
geographies. Influential thinkers have damned numbers with faint praise: Lynch (1994, p.
330) deplored the fact that quantitative analyses of cities are “flavorless” and “tedious to
read” and Soja (2000, p. 190) lamented that the broad social geometries revealed by quan-
titative analyses “mislead not because there is disagreement over their degree of fit … [but
because] geographical covariance in the form of empirico-statistical regularity is elevated
to causation and frozen into place without history.” These sentiments seem to have become
pervasive throughout much of human geography, and although numbers are still used by
many researchers, the status of quantitative analysis as a worthwhile intellectual pursuit (as
opposed to a background technical occupation) is questioned.
There is increasing realization, however, that radical and critical geographers have in
fact relied on numbers to elaborate their critiques (Kwan, 2009), and that numbers, there-
fore, may need to be taken more seriously than critics such as Lynch or Soja suggest.4
How better to explain the importance of work on feminism than to demonstrate, using
census data collected in a transparent and rigorous way by census statisticians, that women
are systematically underpaid for similar work as men? How better to draw attention to
inequalities in urban areas than to have recourse to authoritative income and employment
data at the census-tract level? And how better to demonstrate that the benefits of economic
growth are concentrated geographically and socially into fewer and fewer hands than to
have income data cross-matched with place of residence and ethnic origin—data that only
the census can provide?
Unfortunately, numerate geographers who are today attempting to reassert the intellec-
tual value of numbers and their relevance for all brands of human geography may be too
late. The current whittling away of the census’s authority is consistent with arguments dili-
gently constructed over the past 30 years. To the extent that these arguments have served
to demote statistical analysis as a worthwhile intellectual pursuit within human geography,
it can be argued that, as a discipline, we are to some extent reaping what we have sowed.
Even if the British and Canadian censuses survive, they will survive weakened because
it is now up for debate whether or not geographically and socially representative data on
social trends are worth gathering. Powerful coalitions, relying on populist arguments, have
already decided that they are not.
4It should be noted that neither Lynch nor Soja, nor indeed most other critics, deny that numbers have some uses.
But they are seen as rather uninteresting background information for the truly important radical, critical, and per-
son-centered work that occurs elsewhere. There has been a tendency to downplay the idea that numerical analysis
may be just as important to our understanding of social processes as these other ways of comprehending them.
EDITORIAL 1011
WHY BOTHER WITH A CENSUS?
STATISTICS AND AUTHORITATIVE STATISTICS
But what is the census, and why is it important? The census, and the data it collects,
is a vocabulary. Just like words, each number in the census represents a concept, and that
concept can of course be debated and deconstructed, as can the associated measurement
techniques. However, even Derrida managed to express himself: the words and sentences
he so skillfully deconstructed still carry meaning because words and grammar are the
results of long histories of cultural refinement. So even though deconstruction can some-
times be useful and illuminating, communication is only possible because most of the time
we choose to accept the consensual and historically constructed meaning of words and
word combinations, as good, if approximate, starting points.
The census can be viewed in precisely the same light. Each concept (income, family,
place of work, occupation, ethnicity, etc.) has been arrived at after slow refinement (over
nearly 200 years in the case of the Canadian and modern British censuses), and each
concept is further refined, usually at the margin, in each census through ongoing debates
in academia, government, business, and society at large (Alonso and Starr, 1987; Skerry,
2000). In order to make sense of the world, most statisticians—and indeed most research-
ers who rely, however indirectly, on census-derived information—choose to accept the
consensual meaning of the data, as a good, if approximate, starting point.
It is because census concepts and measurement techniques have been arrived at through
slow cultural consensus, and because the sampling framework, survey methods, questions,
and definitions are all in the public domain (and thus open for debate), that the census has
authority unlike other statistics (in a similar way that the Oxford Dictionary does in the
domain of word definitions). The census is not just numbers, but includes the institutions
and history that lend credibility, weight, and meaning to the numbers. Doing away with the
census is, for a society, the equivalent of abolishing dictionaries for a language. Without
any authoritative definitions and etymology, whether for numbers or words, no one will
be able to ascertain what is being said or what is being disagreed upon, and each group or
subgroup will begin to believe what they choose in isolation from the rest of society, with
whom no common words, or statistical reference points, will exist.
Of course, I do not mean to imply that people are not free to believe what they choose.
But anarchy and totalitarianism are avoided in free societies at least in part because some
minimal elements are agreed upon as “facts”:5
… where statistical collecting and reporting agencies enjoy a reputation for pro-
fessionalism (as they generally do in our society), their findings are commonly
presented—and accepted—as neutral observations (Alonso and Starr, 1987, p. 1).
For example, sector and occupational category of employment, jobless rates, commuting
patterns, and income distribution—all of which are derived from the census, particularly
for subnational spatial units—are widely accepted and relied on as facts. Their signifi-
cance and what should be done about them can be hotly debated, but so far—in Canada at
5For a more complete and nuanced discussion of the connection between democracy and census statistics, see
Prewitt (1987).
1012 RICHARD SHEARMUR
least—their status as facts upon which there is broad agreement has not been a matter for
discussion or ideological distortion because of the professionalism, neutrality, and open-
ness of Statistics Canada.6 Henceforth, there will be no such facts in Canada.
The absence of authoritative statistics is profoundly regressive. Policies will no longer
even pretend to be evidence-based, and all that will be left to guide them are impressions
of social trends seen through lenses of ideology. Who will benefit from this numerical
polyvocality? Surely not the underprivileged and powerless. Indeed, as has been amply
demonstrated by obfuscation over the count of Iraqi civilian deaths, a lack of authorita-
tive statistics allows the powerful to (literally) get away with murder (Ellis, 2009). And
those among the powerful who seek to use their power humanely will, in all but parochial
spheres, be unable to do so, because even they will be bereft of the comprehensive and
authoritative guidance that the census provides.
Without an authoritative source of concepts and data that allow us to track inequalities,
women’s participation, incomes in peripheral areas, and longevity, how will social problems
be identified, interventions targeted, or policies assessed? Of course, there will be wrench-
ing stories of inequality and oppression, and there will also be happy stories of prosperity
and growth; but that is all that will be left, disjointed stories with no common thread.
STATISTICAL IMAGINATION, STORIES, AND OTHER NUMBERS
As Benedict Anderson (2006) has eloquently argued, the communities that we live in,
our nation-states in particular, are built of stories, but not of disjointed stories. When they
thread together into a coherent narrative they are an important way of imagining society,
of explaining where it comes from and of projecting it into the future. But as Anderson
himself points out, and as Desrosières (1998) and Curtis (2002) convincingly demonstrate,
stories and imagination are built from numbers as well as words, and specifically from the
census that carries the history and authority to allow for the building of a shared narrative
(Anderson, 2006, pp. 164 ff.). The census enables people to imagine the materiality of
entities, be it countries, cities, or social groups, which stretch well beyond their ability to
perceive. Indeed, if one were asked to describe the United States in a few words, almost
certainly these words would either include numbers or be based on certain numbers: how
else could its size, diversity, and dynamism (for example) be fully imparted without at least
some numerical concepts?
It is argued (Hope, 2010) that there are many other sources of data, particularly admin-
istrative data, that can be used to track social changes and feed the imagination. These
data do exist. They are even backed by state authority. But they are not authoritative—
at least in countries such as Canada and the UK—in the manner of the census. Each
government ministry department collects information specific to its function, using popu-
lations and concepts specific to current needs, and using classifications, formats, and data-
gathering methods adapted to a particular use. There is little need to ensure the historical
or geographical consistency of such data, which are collected for short-term purposes.
6Prewitt (1987) emphasizes that professionalism and peer review are important bulwarks against political
intervention in the data gathering and dissemination process. Of course, professionalism does not resolve issues
surrounding measurement error, underlying concepts, and the like—these are objects of slow cultural refinement
and ongoing debate.
EDITORIAL 1013
Crucially, the concepts and methods that underlie these data are not open to public debate,
critique, and appraisal, and the surveyed populations are not designed to be representative
of society at large. Furthermore, these data are usually not accessible to researchers or to
the wider population, and certainly not in any clearly organized and aggregated format
amenable to cross-tabulations. This is because of privacy concerns, because each admin-
istration guards its data, and because no one has the mandate (or possibly even the power)
to harmonize these data and use them to provide society with the means to forge identities
that build upon the past and project into the future.
It should be noted, however, that a census per se is not necessary for a shared statisti-
cal language and numerical imaginary to exist. In Sweden, for instance, social data are
gathered through government departments: except for a head count, there is no compre-
hensive data-gathering exercise. However, Statistics Sweden coordinates data-gathering
across government departments and ensures that concepts, questions, and methodologies
are consistent (Statistics Sweden, 2006). Thus what is required for census-like data to exist
are a set of institutions and an authoritative coordinating agency that ensure that a coherent
body of data, comparable over time and space, is gathered and organized. In Canada and
the UK, this has led to the development of the census apparatus, in Sweden to a strong
coordinating agency for official data-gathering. It is these institutions, rather than any
particular form that they may take, which are crucial.
It is also argued—if for a moment we grant the census some importance—that it costs
too much. There is no doubt that good data cost money, but at $567 million every five years
(Bonoguore, 2007) the Canadian census is a bargain. The recent G-20 meeting in Toronto
cost $1.2 billion to host, and each of the 65 F-35 fighter jets ordered by the Canadian gov-
ernment in the summer of 2010 will cost $250 million (including maintenance expenses;
Canadian Press, 2010). For $16.65 per person7 spread over five years (i.e., for one cup
of coffee a year) the census provides authoritative information on the very societies that
the G-20 leaders claim to lead. It assists researchers, policy makers and businesses in
understanding, governing and enriching the communities that the fighter jets purportedly
protect, and it helps tell the story of what society is, where it comes from and where it may
be heading. If the G-20 leaders no longer have the means of knowing the societies they
govern, if these societies fail to have some shared and authoritative information with which
to imagine themselves, what are all these outlays for? What, exactly, will the fighter jets
be protecting?
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY AND THE DEATH OF THE CENSUS
One of the underlying problems behind the Canadian and British politicians’ easy will-
ingness to forgo authoritative statistical knowledge about their societies and their evolution
7$567 million divided by 34 million. The cost is comparable (actually slightly less per capita) in Britain; the 2001
census, for a population about twice the size of Canada’s, cost £254 million (i.e., about 600 million Canadian
dollars at 2001 exchange rates, or $700 million allowing for inflation between 2001 and 2006) (BBC, 2002). At
£487 million (Hope, 2010; $780 million at current exchange rates), Britain’s census costs remain comparable
to Canada’s. The cost of the U.S. census, which was less than $5.00 per head in 1980 (Gauthier, 2002), was
projected to be more than $46.00 for 2010 (GAO, 2009), three times the cost of the Canadian or British census.
Clearly, if these cost estimates are comparable between countries, cost is an important issue in the U.S. but one
that is under control in Canada and the UK.
1014 RICHARD SHEARMUR
across time and space is that numeracy is undervalued. In 1959, C. P. Snow (1960) decried
the increasing gap between the humanities and the sciences, the breakdown in commu-
nications between words and numbers. This rift has evolved but has not healed, shaping
disciplines such as geography: ‘‘[C]lear lines of demarcation are today still widely rec-
ognized as separating quantitative geographers who count, calibrate, map, and model the
thing-world from qualitative geographers who converse, consort, engage, and empathize
with the people world’’ (Philo et al., 1998, p. 191).
This rift means that techniques necessary for manipulating and using numbers are
rarely taught outside of technical disciplines (such as economics), where numbers are often
unquestioningly used (they measure the “thing” world) and skill is judged by the ability to
perform complex numerical manipulations (“models”). But mathematics is a language, and
technique is not sufficient for meaning to be derived from numbers (McCloskey, 1998);
indeed technique can become obfuscating, just as pedantic grammatical contortions can
stifle an argument expressed in English.
Of course, the rhetoric of words is recognized and valued in human geography (and in
the social sciences and humanities more widely), so no one seriously thinks that special-
ists in grammar are the best creators and interpreters of text. Language is seen as a tool for
expressing ideas and meaning. In contrast, particularly in the more recent “turns” of the
discipline of geography, the ideas and meaning that can be derived from numbers (which
are just another type of language) have been downplayed: numerical and statistical imagi-
nations are devalued, sometimes, it must be said, by quantitative analysts themselves who
place technique before substance. Criticism, which has rightly been leveled by human
geographers at this overemphasis on numerical techniques,8 has slowly extended to all
research based on numbers, including that which attempts to focus on their meaning and
interpretation, and (more prosaically but just as importantly) on their descriptive capacity.
Words are valued, as they rightly should be when assembled into coherent arguments, as
descriptors and as rhetoric. But sometimes on the weakest of grounds (they are tedious to
read!), numbers—even those carefully analyzed and interpreted—are relegated to back-
ground information at best, or irrelevance at worst.
This attitude has smoothed the way for the Canadian and British governments to put
forward cost considerations and privacy concerns—both of which are important, but have
easily been surmounted in the past—as reasons to subvert an institution that has served
to imagine, understand, track, and critique society for more than two centuries.9 The easy
assurance that all numbers are the same, and that other numbers will therefore serve the
same purpose, displays these governments’ (deliberate?) failure to grasp what a census
is, not only as a collection of numbers but as an institution. This will be a great loss to
the people and social groups whose only way of being heard is through their presence in
8Good technique, like good grammar, is important, but is not an end in itself. I am not making an apology for
shoddy quantitative analysis, but am suggesting that there exist many simple and robust methods of analysis and
presentation, and that it is probably better to rely on these (wedded to good data and concepts) rather than on the
most elaborate technique (wedded to approximate or poorly conceptualized data). Furthermore, if a simple tech-
nique can provide an important insight, then relying on a more complex technique may merely make the insight
less accessible, even if it may impress colleagues more.
9The modern census is about two centuries old. Of course, according to the Bible, Jesus Christ was born in a
manger because of Herod’s census more than 2,000 years ago—so censuses are in fact much older. Old censuses
(such as the 1086 Domesday Book) are still vital sources of information millennia later.
EDITORIAL 1015
authoritative, diligently gathered, and widely available numbers. It will also be a loss to
any serious government—whatever its leaning—that seeks to understand the effect that
policies have on people and to design better ones. Finally, over the longer term it will alter
society because the census is one of the institutions that creates and maintains our imagi-
nary communities.
Within human geography, and the social sciences more generally, the role and impor-
tance of numbers as vehicles for intellectual debate have weakened over the past three
decades, and quantitative analysts have been put on the defensive. Some of the arguments
and attitudes that now lend credibility to the dissolution of the census have been rehearsed
within our discipline, and certain geographers may indeed applaud the end of this impe-
rialist, nationalist, patriarchal bean-counting institution. But I suspect that many geogra-
phers, like myself, will be driven to think deeply about what we will lose if the census (or
census-type institutional data-gathering) disappears.
We may wonder to what extent the demotion of numerical imaginations that has
strongly influenced our discipline has contributed to the current climate in which popu-
list rhetoric (possibly motivated, at least in Canada, by the government’s all too accurate
assessment that statistics which are fairly consensual can undermine ideologically driven
assertions) outweighs reasoned arguments, from academia, business leaders, municipali-
ties, and think-tanks, relating to evidence-based decision-making and to the importance of
finely scaled social information.10 We may also begin to wonder about the slash-and-burn
dynamics of academic fashion, whereby proponents of new ideas, methods, and episte-
mologies often feel compelled to fully reject the old. Maybe we should learn to tread more
carefully around institutions and approaches that do not happen to coincide with our own
current view of the world, and to exercise constructive criticism rather than wholesale
demolition.
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Alonso, W. and Starr, P., 1987, Introduction. In W. Alonso and P. Starr, editors, The Politics
of Numbers. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1–6.
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BBC, 2002, Census should be reviewed. March 6. Retrieved August 17, 2010 from http://
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10This summarizes the Canadian debate, and the UK debate seems to be similarly ill-informed, except that cost
is put forward more frequently there (despite costs that are no higher than those reported in Canada). The US
census is considerably more expensive (footnote 2), and the debate about the US census has been somewhat less
ideological and better informed than in Canada (for instance a voluntary survey was tested there in 2003 and
found to be wanting, rather than imposed without consultation as it has been in Canada).
1016 RICHARD SHEARMUR
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EDITORIAL 1017
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