Understanding Place : Mental Mapping
I recently came across the following article entitled, “5 Provocative Ways to Think about Cities and Neighborhoods” from Kaid Benfield of the Sustainable Cities Collective. His #3 recommendation suggests complementing traditional forms of research and analysis with a variety of mapping techniques, including mental mapping.
Mental mapping is nothing new. It was first popularized by Kevin Lynch in the classic urban planning book The Image of the City. Lynch challenged urban designers and planners to think about how people in a place actually use and perceive their physical environment compared to the traditional way we tend to learn about things (through data analysis, reports, plans and formal maps). Lynch’s methods pushed beyond streets, intersections and buildings to capture the mental perception and emotional experience of a place. For example, gang territories are rarely ever displayed on formal maps but residents of a neighborhood plagued by gang activity are painfully aware of the invisible boundaries between rival groups.
Thinking back to the few days I spent in Bluefield, wandering around the downtown, my eyes were constantly drawn upwards, scanning the facades of the buildings, searching for life in the windows. My mental map would have resulted in a study of all of the great buildings that flank the downtown streets. It would note which ones were vacant, which ones were alive, which held mystery and which were haunting. A lot of my colleagues in Design Revival also went through a similar exercise, noting sidewalk conditions, streetscape and building potential. (The promise we saw in the City was captured in the set of catalytic design projects that we presented to the community at the conclusion of the event.)
And while the perspective through the DR24 designer’s lens is undeniably valuable it has to be balanced with how the citizens of Bluefield perceive downtown? If a group of residents were to take an afternoon and set out to map their downtown how similar or different would the results be? Would everyone mark Chicory Square? Would someone pay particular attention to the amount of litter on the street or the type of art in storefront windows? Who would notice the variety of views of the rail yard or the availability of parking facilities? What would a teenager’s map look like compared to that of a 65-year old?
It seems for the City of Bluefield to successfully reinvent itself there needs to be a better understand how residents truly view downtown. Where are those invisible boundaries and psychological barricades to future growth and development? What elements of downtown are critical to preserving the past and linking to the future?
Grab a notebook and a few colored pens and see where the sidewalk takes you.
Excerpt from “5 Provocative Ways To Think About Cities & Neighborhoods” by Kaid Benfield
3. Map them in new ways.
I’ve learned to my occasional amazement that not everyone thinks as spatially as I do and that, perhaps as a result, maps are far more fascinating to me than they are to many others. But nearly all of us encounter them and use them: they bring seeming authoritative definition to places both large (e.g., South America) and small (even a single block, as in the case of the redevelopment of Seattle’s Thornton Creek or St. Louis County’sJamestown Mall). Most of us have had the experience of being rescued from disorientation by a good map as well as of being confused or misled by a bad one. We tend to see a place the way it is shown in the map.
If maps are your thing, right now life is a candy shop and you are the kid. The combination of easily accessible satellite imagery made possible by such providers as Google Earth, along with constant improvements in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology allowing us to map not just places but also increasingly precise spatial distributions of land, population, health, environmental and economic characteristics, has opened up worlds of possibility.
Seizing on that possibility in immensely creative ways, the UC-Berkeley project “Visualizing Mental Maps of San Francisco” has produced map images that provide fascinating new insights about places we previously thought were entirely familiar.
The best thing about this project – directly responsible for its power to help us think in new ways – is that it uses both highly subjective skills such as sketching places from memory (thus, presumably, the “mental” part of Mental Maps) and very precise technology such as GIS. The idea is to represent the city not in the standardized way of, say, Rand-McNally, but in the various ways that people actually experience it. Fabin Neuhaus describes the project in The Sustainable Cities Collective:
“The great aspect [of] this project ‘Visualizing Mental Maps of San Francisco‘ by Rachelle Annechino and Yo-Shang Cheng is how they allow room for the method to breathe the uncertainty of its nature. Mental Mapping is not about accuracy and precision, or truth and objectivity, and to combine this with GIS or mapmaking is a very difficult task [if] not to say impossible.
“The essential thing is to give the playfulness a meaning and find a balance for mapping it in GIS. With this project it is not achieved in the detail, but in the overall construction, how the different sections combine and the picture the presented result paints.”
In this post I show see three intriguing examples from the project:
- A memory sketch of neighborhood locations in San Francisco, above (note the author’s question marks in the southern part of the city).
- A second map of neighborhoods (right), this time illustrating the degree of neighborhood completeness represented by the presence of commercial and mixed-use streets. The map also illustrates the relative absence of completeness in “dead zones” of residential areas with little in the way of shops or services nearby. Places zoned for commercial activity are shown in shades of blue, light to dark according to relative population density, while places not allowing commercial activity are shown in shades of brown. (Click on the map for a larger version showing more of the detail.) Note that there are some very dense places (dark red/brown) that lack commercial zoning. It would be interesting to compare this map with Walk Score’s composite map of San Francisco, showing how that service’s scores (which measure nearby shops and services) are distributed across the city.
- For me the most intriguing is a map (below) showing the location of pedestrian barriers such as high-speed roads and steep slopes, marking potential boundaries between neighborhoods.
The cartographers themselves put it this way:
“The Visualizing Mental Maps of San Francisco project taps into San Francisco residents’ perceptions of the city and its neighborhoods, which aren’t always reflected in the geography of a street map. The first part of the project was a qualitative investigation in which we interviewed residents and asked them to draw pictures of their internal images or ‘mental maps’ of the neighborhoods they lived in and of San Francisco. The second part was the creation of visualizations informed by the qualitative research, resulting in this atlas of mental maps.
“Every map has a perspective, and every map is ‘wrong’ in some way . . . A precise, accurate map asks us to believe that we know what a place is called, what its borders are, and where it belongs within a standardized hierarchy of space. But do we really know all those things? From whose perspective?”
Some of the maps on the site are interactive.
Beyond the UC-Berkeley project, neighborhood mapping may be inherently more art than science. For some alternative approaches, see Aaron Renn’s recently completed neighborhood map of Indianapolis on his blogThe Urbanophile. Like Steve Mouzon and the Mental Maps duo, Aaron refers to the usefulness of naming places. He also references one of his influences, the neighborhood maps of Chicago and other cities by Jenny Beorkman for her enterprise Ork Posters. To those I might also add Mary Belcher’s colorful neighborhood map of Washington, DC.
Design Revival 24 