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Social and Economic Structure of the South East

Recent work for the Greater London Authority (GLA) has involved analysing the social and economic structure of London and the surrounding regions in the South East of England. We applied the technique of fuzzy clustering to find the places most similar to each other in terms of these characteristics. The purpose of this research was to extend and deepen our understanding of the relationship between London and its surrounding regions.

 

For this analysis we used two datasets to perform two fuzzy clusterings. Both sets of data split the South East geographically down to a Local Area District (LAD) basis. The first data set detailed the employment structure of the LADs, breaking total employment down into 60 industrial sectors. From this data we created an employment fuzzy clustering.

 

The second set of data detailed the physical attributes of the LADs, containing the following variables:

• Land area

• Employment density

• Population density

• The proportion of people who work locally

Using this data we created an area fuzzy clustering. These two clusterings allowed us to find groups of LADs that share similar social and demographic characteristics.