role of maps in today’s society
City perception is a personal experience. Each human being has different associations with specific places, created memories and ways of moving around the city. This experience provides significant amount of data that could be used in urban psychology studies yet it is hard to materialize. How to translate such individual findings into a form the can be studied and analysed? Is there a way of reflecting such multidimensional experience onto the 2D surface? Here the idea of mental maps gains extra attention. I noticed a surprising growth of their usage in variety of forms which makes it a fascinating topic to look into.
Personalized Google Maps
Let’s start with „google maps”, that you can personalize in your own way. You can save places giving them a label of your choice e.g „favourite” or „ to go to”. I myself have tens of spots saved in every city I go to or live in. This is not only a great way to keep track of your favourite restaurants or bars, but also it stimulates your understanding of the urban fabric. It develops the ability to translate 2 dimensional drawing into three dimensional world. It improves the awareness of scale and distances, and the links between places. This sort of „map personalization” creates a special relationship with the built environment. At the same time, the data could be used in urban studies. We can analyze simple things like „ Which parts of the city are visited the most ( this is already highlighted in brown in google maps) but also it could be used in the long term analysis of the urban interventions and their impact on the city. For instance, tt could allow us to evaluate the progress of the urban development projects, being able to track their everyday evolvement and its impact on the city users, collecting information on the amount of people, the duration of time spent in the specific place, the engagement within the urban fabric etc.
source: google maps
Art Maps
Maps, besides being the source of information, lately they have been gaining more and more appreciation becoming form of an artistic expression. Strongly inspired by Nolli Maps*, this minimalistic drawing of the cities are not only attractive images to decorate your wall with. It is also an evidence of growing relationship between the humans and the urban fabric they live in, as well as the improvement of abstract thinking about the space. I also consider it as some kind of phenomenon of growing place identity and sense of belonging through the appreciation of a map image.
* Map of Rome by Giambattista Nolli from 1748 that represents the city as a combination of enclosed private spaces -aka buildings( marked in black) and open public spaces marked in white)
Maps by Anne and Anouk, PLAATs, https://www.plaatsprenten.nl
Mental Maps
Mental maps can be seen as an individual interpretation of spaces, yet they could also bring an invaluable input when used in the urban psychology research. The most popular example of mental maps is the one proposed by Kevin Lynch in his book „ The image of the city”. He asked the participants to draw a sketch of the city as if they were explaining it to a stranger. In such way, the details were overlooked and only the essence of the city image remained. Kevin Lynch did not focus though on the emotional aspect of the associations. On the contrary, his interest laid strictly in the physical aspects of memories like lines, spots, barriers etc.
I have used this tool in my research on the highway Ring A10 in Amsterdam, when working on my graduation project. This time however, I put extra attention into the emotional relationship with the space trying to get to know how people actually feel about the highway cutting their city. This task created an opportunity to discuss what has been drawn and what has been left behind, as well as the reasons behind it. You can read more about the research and its outcome here:
Maps have been with us for thousands of years in many forms and shapes from carved stone and cave drawings, through terrestrial globes to google maps. These days, while becoming a form of personal expression, they hold knowledge otherwise hard to collect. At the same time, they improve the ability of abstract thinking in two and three dimensions, allowing us to strengthen the relationship with the built environment. This is why I find it crucial to use them in urban analysis as well as the design process and post construction development evaluations.
