The Image of the City
The most surprising part of my research came out of the interviews I did with people I could stop in the street. I found people in or around New York’s Madison Square Park who I found to be using maps. I asked them one question: “what are you using your map for?”
The answers I received were mostly predictable: people were looking for public transit, a specific intersection, or wanted to identify themselves in relation to a known location.
But while analyzing the things people said to me, I was able to determine some things regarding the perception and utility of maps. Sort of philosophical, but bear with me.
In Kevin Lynch’s The Image of The City, he presents maps as tools for envisioning “the environmental image”, the mental picture we have of our surroundings. I seek to use this (and many of his other insights) as I continue on my thesis journey.
So what are the images held by those I interviewed? People had pretty common answers to my question. But what those things meant to people could be seen in a different light. The subway station was a portal to a new neighborhood; the intersection, a goal; their current location, an important question that needed an answer. And each of these challenges have numerous solutions.
Maps do more than tell us where things are; they’ve become one of the primary methods with which we exercise control over how we experience our city. Maps have a certain duality: they present the constraints of imposed by natural and manufactured terrain, but also present the available options for getting around those same features.
