On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

What are Germans interested in on the Internet? And how is their interest distributed regionally? Die Zeit’s “Google Karte” shows how 64 keywords score across the country – the map indicates where something was searched the most using Google. For example, ‘Work’ is searched nowhere as much as in Rostock. ‘Wealth’ and ‘progress’ are predominantly East-German. Westeners are searching mostly for ‘career’, ‘greed’ and money.

Related words are often searched in particular cities: Dresden is searching for ‘flirtation’ and ’suspense’. Augsburg for ‘infidelity’ and ‘passion’. Bielefeld for ‘happiness’ and ‘laughter’. ‘Hope’ as well as ‘fear’ are found close together – in Gießen.

Die Zeit’s Google Deutschlandkarte

In his text The Theory of Dérive (1956), Guy Debord seeked to convince the reader to let emotions resonate when looking at and experiencing urban spaces; The Dérive – the French word for an aimless stroll – institutes the city as a network of narratives, of experiences and events. Space itself becomes the product of inhabiting. “To dérive is to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It is very much a matter of using an environment for one’s own ends, seeking not only the marvellous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world.” ¹

The Dérive is somewhat related to Flânerie, a word coined in the mid-eighteenth century by the French poet Charles Baudelaire to describe the typically Parisian leisurely exploration of city streets by pedestrians, detached observers of the industrial metropolis. The Dérive can also be likened to the surrealist street adventures of André Breton ², in which night promenades in the city are raised by a succession of dreamlike impressions and romantic fantasies.

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¹ Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationst INternational in a Postmodern Age. London and New York : Routledge, 1992.

² André Breton, Nadja . Paris : Gallimard, 1927.

In a particularly influential study about city-planning, Kevin Lynch conducted methodical interviews of inhabitants in three major US cities, asking them first to draw a mental map of the city, and then to give detailed descriptions of their trips as well as an account of the parts they felt to be the most distinctive. The results of the survey were then analysed, and Lynch identified how some aspects of the city were the most readily represented: He came up with an interesting classification system for ordering people’s “readings” of a city, composed of five items:

1. Paths. Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves […] People observe the city while moving through it and along these paths the other environmental elements are arranged and related.
2. Edges. Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer […] Such edges may be barriers, more or less penetrable, which close one region off from another.
3. Districts. Districts are two-dimensional sections of the city, which the observer mentally enters “inside of” and which are recognisable as having some common, identifying character.
4. Nodes. Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is travelling […] Nodes are related to paths, since functions of nodes are typically the convergence of paths, events on a journey.
5. Landmarks. Landmarks are another type of point reference but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external. They are usually a rather simply defined physical object: building, sign, store or mountain.

(Lynch, 1960, p. 47)

Lynch’s primary concern is the Image of the Environment: “Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings.”¹ The subject orients him/herself according to a visualisation of their environment in map-like form, heavily tied to the legibility of the city: the ease with which parts can be recognised and organised into a coherent pattern.

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¹ Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960, p.1.

“Mapmaking fulfils one of our deepest desires: understanding the world around us and our place in it. But maps need not show just continent and oceans. ¹” By nature maps are inherently spatial, yet they are often used as a metaphor for mental processes. Ultimately, maps are a mean to an end: unlike mere pictures, they carry additional functions and purposes, they transmit information. “Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, processes, conditions, or events in the human world. ²” Most importantly, all maps are ‘indexical’, i.e. their meaning is dependent for their truth on their context. A Ptolemaic map from the second century A.D. (illustration) looks remarkably accurate for its time whereas the Ebstorf map featured in the illustration below presents a somewhat malformed view of the world, apparently against the sense of progress. Yet it serves religious interests as well as topographical ones; it is embedded in conventions and symbolism of early Western Christian mappaemundi (maps of the world). Such maps, dubbed ‘T-O’ divided the world by three major waterways symbolising the cross, with east at the top and Jerusalem at the centre.

Mental maps versus physical cartography

Mental maps are a personal way of representing geographical space: instead of considering a place in its absolute sense, a mental map looks at it in relation with other places emotionally close. Each mental map is particular to the the environmental perception of its author, the images they have of their own life, known places and the way they are connected.

Cognitive maps shows not just where we are and what we know, but who we are. Because of their serendipitous quality, they have a great potential for the discovery of relationships not explicitly intended; they allow appreciating the internalised spatial structure upon which a person is operating. The most significant differences are those between people (or the same person at different points in time) of the same places. “It’s possible to take one geographical area and to demonstrate that it really consists of a set of overlapping places depending on which group of people we are considering. ³” Mental maps are thus interesting indicators of how we interpret our neighbourhood.

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¹ Katharine Harmon, You are Here, Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination . New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
² Harley and Wooward , The History of Cartography , 1987, p.16 quoted by David Turnbull, Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas. University of Chicago Press , 1994, p.3.
³ David Canter, Psychology of Place. Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, p.68.

Parkinson’s geographical analysis of social class and movement in Britain ¹ shows a sarcastic picture of England projected into social space – a humorous expression of how the country’s regions are prone to encourage social ascent (or descent), from desperation to privilege either side of a line drawn from Hastings through London to Liverpool

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¹ Quoted in Peter Gould & Rodney White (1974) Mental Maps. London: Penguin Books, p.43.