Week 8 Round: Count what your suburb lost

An archive Round. You pick one place, one span of years, and produce a number you are prepared to defend.

22 April 2027

Pick a suburb — yours, or the one you grew up in. Pick a boundary you can draw on a map and a span of years, twenty or thirty, ending now.

Count the third places. Pubs, cafés, clubs, halls, libraries, pools, video shops, churches with a hall, RSLs, scout huts, corner shops with a bench outside. Decide what counts before you start, and write the rule down. You have done this twice now; by week 8 it should be automatic.

Two sources, minimum. Old telephone directories and street directories. Council development applications and minutes. Digitised local newspapers. Aerial photography, which is the most honest of the lot and the hardest to read. Licensing registers. A long-resident relative is a legitimate source if you record it as one.

Report the disagreement. Your sources will not match. That gap is data. A count presented without it is a count nobody should believe, including you.

Name three things you missed. The place that traded under three names. The club that met in a room inside something else. The informal spot with no registration anywhere — a car park, a stretch of beach, a bench. Putnam’s critics make exactly this argument against him, and making it against yourself first is the whole exercise.

Then commit to a number, with a confidence you are willing to say out loud. “Eleven, and I would defend nine of them” is a better answer than a hedge. We put the numbers on the board and the spread will be large, which is the last thing this Round is for: everyone counted the same kind of thing and the answers are not comparable, and that is the state of this literature.