El incidente de Los Alamillos (Comunidad “La Joya de los Martínez”)

Representatives of Durham County Council had been interviewed during the initial phase of the project (see chapter 2) and were willing to continue working with us. A first step was to discover what data they had access to and how that was already being used in evaluating socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion.

There were basically three ways of addressing this issue depending on the context in which the question of inclusion/exclusion arose. One, important with respect to overall investment and the concentration of resources, was to refer to the index of multiple deprivation. In this case, socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion was simply equated with a high level of multiple deprivation. Areas around Easington and Seaham were prioritised on the basis that the Easington District included 48% of the population within the county who were living within wards ranked within the top 10 most multiply deprived in England.

A second approach related to the need to better understand and anticipate the consequences of specific developments and initiatives. Recent reorganisation of health care in the area - typically involving centralising and concentrating services - had for example, meant that certain patients and visitors would face especially complex and long journeys. In this case efforts were being made to track the consequences for those who might be worst affected (never mind how they scored in the more generic index of multiple deprivation).

10 _{Rather than trying to discern the full range of situations in which people want to be co-present with}

others, an alternative strategy might be to focus on 'blocked desire'. In keeping with our model, exclusion arises when people cannot meet what they take to be obligations of co-presence. We might therefore think about measuring such frustrations.

Similar efforts were made with respect to the relocation of work places and the development of new call centres in areas not well connected by public transport. In these instances, first hand familiarity with the region was extremely important as was local knowledge and an appreciation of the history of the area.

The third reason for gathering data on socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion related to the need to prepare bids for funding. As described this was a more or less continual process and one that was particularly demanding in that each bid had its own rules and criteria for success. As a result, much effort was invested in assembling information and conducting local surveys in order to make the case for quite specific projects. One side effect of this was that much more was known about parts of the county that were in receipt of specific packages of funding (for one reason or another) than about those that had yet to fit such criteria. In this context, information gathering was clearly driven by the needs and interests of initiatives like those of regional development, the rural bus challenge, or whatever.

As these paragraphs indicate, there was not much existing information 'between' the highly generalised index of multiple deprivation or the aggregate analyses presented in County strategy documents, and a patchwork of highly specific (bid driven) studies of particular issues in selected localities. This realisation forced us to re-consider our methodology once again and to think about what might be gleaned from publicly available data such as the census, neighbourhood local area statistics, and local bus timetables.

Our meetings with Durham County Council were important in helping to focus our enquiry. Our intention was to experiment with ways of representing socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion by looking at a number of selected locations. Two came to the fore as relevant and interesting candidates. Seaham and Easington, on the East coast rank high in the index of multiple deprivation (a factor that is being used to structure investment in public transport) yet they appear to be relatively well connected. By concentrating on this area we might be able to discover whether Seaham/Easington is in fact socio-spatially 'rich', even if deprived on other counts. Stanley and surrounding 'villages' (further to the West) represented another potentially useful location on which to concentrate on the grounds that there were (at the time) plans to develop a demand responsive bus service in this area and bids for the rural bus challenge were in preparation.

Though we have concentrated on Seaham (and surrounding areas) and on Stanley (and surrounding areas) for these reasons, it is important to keep in mind that this is a

methodological experiment. In piecing together data from different sources we are well aware of the fact that we are setting more than ten-year old census results alongside contemporary bus timetables. Likewise, though talking about 'areas' and 'localities' it is quite clear that the geographical boundaries of our analysis vary each step of the way, when considering indices of deprivation, when looking at the census and especially when reading the bus timetables. For these reasons there is little point in placing much weight on the substantive conclusions drawn from this exercise. To make the point again, our limited aim is to see what, if anything, can be gained from trying to characterise and draw together specifically spatial-temporal and mobility related data.

Is it, for example, possible or reasonable to relate census data on car availability to the use of cars for journeys to work and to relate both to the richness of public transport provision (based on analysis of bus times) and the extent to which people use public transport for their journeys to work (from the census)? Can we compile a composite socio-spatial portrait of Seaham and Stanley? And can we do so with limited resources?

We gathered data together for a selection of 12 ward areas. These were chosen to include a range of more and less dense rural-urban areas scattered around the two focal points of Seaham/Easington and Stanley/West Durham. The selected areas in the first category were:

Thornley, Shotton, Murton West, South Hetton, Seaham and Easington Colliery. Chester central, Craghead, Stanley Hall, Tanfield, South Stanley and Annfield Plain were included in the second 'Stanley-related' group. This selection interprets the Seaham and Stanley areas quite broadly.

The map below shows where these ward areas are located.