Sunday 7 November 2010

Mental (visual) mapping of Istanbul and my neighbourhood


In the first mapping I wanted to keep it as simple and abstract as possible. I wanted to explore how less it’s possible to reduce the content of visual communication = mapping. Of course it’s possible to add more information, but for the question, where my neighbourhood is circa located it is enough. I believe, in a way, this is also how our/mine mind works, when we/I want to get orientation in a city. For human beings there is an deep demand to get an sudden simple orientation. If we can’t get this orientation we sometimes feel uncomfortable or insecure, or in another way: we are used to make our one mental mapping, ourself reference topology in short time.

The second image is a mental mapping of my neighbourhood. In fact it is just the street i’m living, because this street is like an important axis for my mental reference in Istanbul. It connects the Bosporus at Findikli with the Taksim Square. Not that this is the only street I know in Istanbul, but it’s like a milestone in my mental-mapping of the city. The different directions from there are mentioned by the different places like “Besiktas, “Talabasi”,




In my personal mapping there are a lot of shops and other kind of consume related establishments. In the area there are not so many landmarks, so i orientate myself mostly by streetlevel establishments.

Maybe more interesting are the things I don’t mention in my mapping. For example a church or a carpark. Also the fact that i am an foreign student in the city, who doesn’t know the people in the street is important. For example i didn’t mention person-related things like “Ali’s house”, “place of the old mans” etc.

I also wanted to mention, that we all have learned to orientate in urban spaces. Maybe like human beings in the past, who orientated themselves through forest and nature, we also have to find ways to orientate. For example mapping tools like the open source Google systems are playing an important role at the moment.

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