Invitations and Becomings

The spatialisation of thinking needn't be at the service of its mathematicisation: sometimes it resists it.

Question: is there a one to one mapping of suburbs to postcodes?

Because we can make lists of suburbs and postcodes, it seems as though the question is one of counting. Not the total number of each. Rather, if I have one of these, how many of those do I have? However, it turns out counting is completely the wrong way of thinking about the problem.

On the one hand, it's easy to see that more than each postcode covers more than one suburb. For example, I live in Forest Lodge which shares a postcode with Glebe. And this is what makes the counting approach tempting.

But it's not so obvious that each suburb has only one postcode.

Actually the assumption that each suburb only has one postcode is invalidated by the fact that postcode boundaries do not follow suburb boundaries.

I think this is a fascinating example of how thinking about mapping one group of objects to another (which seems a lot like comparative counting) turns into topographical thinking about boundaries.

Something to think about Monsieur Bergson!