Mental Maps vs. Cartographic Mapping:
Instead of considering a place in its absolute, old-fashioned latitude-longitude sense, in mental maps a place is considered for its relative location...
Mental Mapping is everybody's own environmental perception, the images that people have of their own, or of other places and the way those images are formed. It is a subjective view of everybody's own world, but it is conditioned by the amount and the type of information we have of a certain place (of some we have first hand experience, whereas some others are little more than names). It is also proportional to the education, the knowledge and the social class of an individual.
Patterns of Ignorance
... some people have images of places and a "tube of ignorance between two points on the earth's surface" people don't know geographically where they are or they've been, they recall pictures, fragments and images of places.
"the information that a group of people have about a region in the national space is determined to a large extent by their location within the country, and is directly proportional to the size of a region's population, and inversely proportional to the square root of the distance away from their location"
Think of Tashkent.
Your brain will bring up images and memories associated with the word. Maybe not
many, but still...
Think of getting around in Tashkent.
Now the image will be a big blur if you've never been there. If you have, a few
landmarks might come to mind. The way to get from the station to the square, or
to some other place. Maybe you cannot remember where things are, but know how to
get there. You have got a mental picture of Tashkent, your own map of the city.
No grid lines, no set
proportions, no square kilometres etc. Mental maps are a fluid collection of areas,
paths and landmarks. Many gaps and blurs.
This is the system of orientation we use daily to get around. It's a subjective image of the city, the sum of our personal experiences of it, built up through time, layer after layer, its thickness directly proportional to the sense of familiarity we have with the place.
The overlapping of each citizen's mental map is the public image of the city. The project that I want to try and do while I am in Tashkent, would be to ask people to map their Tashkent and collect a variety of interpretations of the city. Onle for the reason, that no matter how much I am attached to the place I do not have a continuous relationship to the place. During every visit I need to re-establish my status in Tashkent and set up, renew relationships.
What I expect to see as a result of the project is that local people would have added dimension of time - historical journey through Tashkent as much as a geographical one.
I suspect that I was a sad journey for elderly people as for years they watched their hometown being destroyed and rebuilt. Would they feel disorientated by the fast demolition of a familiar landscape, and rise of the new architecture? From the maps I will also be looking for the importance of what we might call the emotional value of a particular buildings. The sum of each individual emotion felt towards a particular building. It is a charge that grows with time. All new buildings are bland and soulless for the simple fact that they are new. They have yet to be lived in. Emotional value is something that can only exist with history.
I have very hopeful expectations from this work.
Thank you:
for your participation in my experiment... Your work is very valuable for my project and I appreciate your time and effort!
Natalia Serga