"...navigation entails the production of a performative cartography of a terrain, field, or domain that is constituted in the very act of its exploration" (Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, 137). Exploration, put one way, is "the action of traveling in or through an unfamiliar area in order to learn about it." Though the field (city, body of academic literature) may be at first unknown and therefore unfamiliar, iterative navigation coheres a web of spatial relations that serves as reference. This is how I conceive of a mental map. Unlike google’s two dimensional map that directs navigation from A to B, mental maps are composed (and decomposed) through nonlinear, even destination disoriented navigations that form "those invisible lines of people, places, and networks that create the most common spaces we live in today" (Kurgan 2013, 17).
- I have come to realize the city is not a single fixed and bounded site which pre-exists my encounter and which I as researcher may separate myself from in order to map from a distanced, exterior position. Rather, “the city” is performatively constituted as a physical-conceptual field of encounter whose emergent topology is (practically) drawn through everyday navigations. As such, the city and I are entangled, continuously figured and reconfiguring in dynamic relation.
+ I realize the city is not a site with fixed boundaries and determinate properties which pre-exist my encounter and which I, as researcher-cartographer-geographer, may separate myself from in order to map from an exterior position. Rather, “the city” is performatively constituted as a physical-conceptual field whose emergent topology is drawn through everyday navigations. As such, the city and I are entangled, continuously figured and reconfiguring in dynamic relation.
- Maps meant for directed navigation from A to B render invisible the act of navigation which created them and which they may propel. Spatial awareness––be it of a software interface, web-map, or city––develops through use, through everyday practices of navigation. Spatial awareness is therefore practical knowledge. [briefly introduce/explain practical knowledge, drawing from Scott Chapter 9 - see ./tactics.html for more] Practical knowledge is legible within mental maps in a way it is not within Google Maps [re-articulate sentence] Google Maps doesn't account for the weekly re-configuring of pedestrian traffic around a major intersection due to a multi-year subway construction project. When the law of the proper attempts to map detours, tracing it inevitably leads to disorientation. Sometimes the best way to gain spatial awareness is to look/listen/feel/sense up at and around one’s surroundings.
+ Maps meant for directed navigation from A to B render invisible the act of navigation which created them and which they may propel. Spatial awareness––be it of a software interface, web-map, or city––develops through use, through everyday practices of navigation. Spatial awareness is therefore practical knowledge. Practical knowledge is legible within mental maps in a way it is not within Google Maps. Google Maps doesn't account for the weekly re-configuring of pedestrian traffic around a major intersection due to a multi-year subway construction project. When the law of the proper attempts to map detours, tracing it inevitably leads to disorientation. Sometimes the best way to gain spatial awareness is to look/listen/feel/sense up at and around one’s surroundings.