Unit 5: Reading and Analyzing Cultural Maps

To date, we can find no consensus among cultural mapping practitioners or theorists on how to interpret cultural maps. They tend to be used as prompts for discussion and display, valued because of the participatory process that produces them, and meaningful in terms of the stories depicted and shared. The practical guides to municipal and community cultural mapping take the form of toolkits offering step-by-step processes for community consultation, mapping perceived resources and assets, inventorying and synthesizing the data (sometimes drawn from town hall meetings and surveys, rather than participant maps), creating data categories, and, normally, presenting a composite map as a reference or guide for local planning. The academic literature tends toward a case study approach, detailing the collection of maps, arguing for the importance of the participatory process, and, like the toolkits, describing the shared context of their creation in terms
of broad themes. One notable exception, however, is found in the work of Kevin Lynch (1960), an early proponent of personal mapping as a method to understand how city-dwellers move through and conceptualize their urban environments.

Mental Maps and Kevin Lynch’s Five Distinctive Features

Lynch’s pioneering work provides us with an initial guide to reading and interpreting cultural maps. Here we have adapted the mental mapping and journey mapping analysis techniques first introduced in his book, Image of the City, where he pioneered methods for tracing movements in urban environments. Lynch found that people orient themselves in urban settings by means of mental maps. In his discussion of these maps, he introduced the notion of urban legibility (also called imageability and visibility), arguing that the cityscape can be “read.” People moving through the city engage in wayfinding, recognizing, and organizing urban elements into a coherent mental pattern.

Lynch proposed that, in the process of reading the city, we develop mental maps consisting of five distinctive features:

Paths: routes along which people move throughout the city
Edges: boundaries and breaks in continuity
Districts: areas characterized by common characteristics or purposes
Nodes: strategic focus points for orientation like squares and junctions
Landmarks: external points of orientation, usually a easily identifiable physical object in the urban landscape

Once formed, legible mental maps give people an important sense of belonging, a sense of place, and a ready if largely intuitive guide to finding their way around the city.

A Lens for Cultural Maps

When taken together, and adapted for more general application, Lynch’s list of distinctive features provides us with an initial way to find our way into the interpretation of cultural maps—a lens or schema to analyze, interpret, compare, and contrast individual maps collected.

An Analytical Schema

Paths: Paths can be physical, psychological, emotional. Respondents speak of life journeys, paths taken, habitual patterns of movement, rhythms. Look for the equivalent of the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels that enable travel, movement, personal development, change.

Edges: Boundaries and breaks and impediments encountered during that journey. Look for barriers, more or less permeable, which close one region or perspective or possibility off from another; or see if you can identify seams, lines along which two areas of experience are related and joined together.

Districts: Physical, social, economic, legislated, racialized areas for gathering and sharing experiences. Look for areas or experiences depicted or referenced that might be characterized by common characteristics, where respondents mentally enter “inside of,” engage, and thus feel a sense of belonging or alienation.

Nodes: Strategic focus points, often embodied in the form of centres and service agencies, or personified by guides, mentors, and teachers. Lynch described nodes as the strategic spots in a city: in tracing participant journeys, these nodes are more often personified. Look for the depiction of key pathfinders, the use of names that label depictions of human figures.

Landmarks: External points of orientation, achievement, a sense of personal failure or validation, often ceremonial in nature. Landmarks may be, as Lynch describes, key physical characteristics that can be distinguished as both unique and memorable; but in terms of personal research journeys, they can also mark “rites of passage” and include personal plateaus, significant impacts both positive and negative, comments heard or overheard, friendships made, press coverage, community recognition, public events, ceremonies, and so on.

Interpreting Maps

To interpret the maps we begin by creating a concordance (a system of cross-referencing) for every element (word or image) of the map that fits the five distinctive features of Lynch’s schema. As initially intimidating as such a process may sound, in practice it proves remarkably effective and easy to learn. Group your results under the five headings. The process may take up three or four pages of notes, but when you are finished you will find that the concordance has helped you organize your data into meaningful patterns, sometimes called “nodes” and “themes” by those well practiced in qualitative research.

[INSERT IMAGE OF “SAMPLE CONCORDANCE NOTES”]

The five distinctive features constitute a heuristic, a hands-on way of engaging with and learning about the maps. Once the maps reveal themselves, further questions drawn from qualitative analysis can be asked of the maps in terms of their spatial and conceptual dimensions, their affective dimension, and their temporal dimension:

Spatial and Conceptual Dimensions:	What is the conceptual frame or organizing principle of the map? Can you identify similar visual elements? Are there visual elements that stand out or seem out of place? Are there repeated words or phrases included in the map? How would you describe the prominence of elements? How would you describe the relationship of elements? How would you characterize the representational style of elements: colour? size? perspective? arrangement? movement?
Affective Dimension:	What feelings are revealed? Attitudes revealed? Beliefs revealed? Strategies revealed?
Temporal Dimension:	What time references (explicit or implicit) are included in the map?

Unit 5 Activities
Check your understanding of Unit 5 by completing the quick, automatically assessed activities below.
In your reflective journal practice, – concordance exercise?
You are invited to:

You are invited to keep a reflective journal to process key concepts, and to use for future reference. Drawing will be part of your journaling practice; if you choose to keep an electronic journal, you may want to consider ways to add images (taking digital photographs of hand-drawn work, or using a stylus and a tablet). Paper or video journals are another option – the choice is yours.

Concordance

Ideally, learners would have two sample maps to create a concordance

References

Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.