100 words - day 5

How do we construct a map anyway? I think we start building mental maps of our world from a pretty young age. I recently sat with my 6 year old nephew and he was able to point out places on google maps that were close to his home…it included his school, the closest park and where his best friend lives.

When I started my undergrad degree at University of St. Andrews in Geography, one faculty member asked our whole class to draw a map of the town after we had all lived there for a couple of months. They had been doing this with first year students for years and collated the data in an anecdotal fashion to illustrate how we all craft maps of our world as we experience it. We include things that are important to us or we visit regularly, there will be big blank spaces where we know nothing and may even attribute negative attributes. In the case of our student maps the phrase ‘badlands’ was sometimes used to describe areas of the town we never visited and where locals lived! It was more a blind spot but in our minds and someone provided a term for it! Were the locals actually ‘bad’? No of course not, but we just didn’t go there so it was perhaps the opposite of the ‘good’ feelings associated with places of familiarity.

This binary approach is challenging as we all do this in our own ways with unknown spaces and places and probably level emotions to anyone who inhabits these places. Perhaps a healthier approach is to be curious, actually visit these places, sit in them, absorb the smells, tastes and sights … experience them and the people in them. Perhaps we might even be surprised and broaden our mental maps.