My map of Harvard took up a lot more paper than I thought it would. When I was brainstorming the individual parts on a notebook, I tended to be very detailed with the shapes of the buildings, and I made them particularly large. This meant that I was struggling to ﬁt all of the pieces together into the giant map, without accidentally drawing buildings too large or confusing the proportions. My proportions and levels of detail are directly related to the importance they held in my mind and my knowledge of them. The River houses are therefore very detailed and my housing, Dewolfe, is pictured as the largest of all of them, although it is the smallest. The Yard takes up the large center portion of my map because I see it as the middle of campus and the hub of Harvard. Likewise, because most of my classes take place in the Science Center, that building was signiﬁcantly larger and more prominent than Sever or the Fogg or even Widener. I found this exercise to be rewarding because I am noticing more of the campus on my daily walks through it. I now have a greater appreciation for the buildings, streets, and park benches that I had excluded from my map and from my memory.
My map is a pretty accurate top-view rendition of how the Harvard Square area actually looks like. The places that I’m most inaccurate in drawing are places that I rarely visit (business school and the athletic fields, parts of the quad). I think the fact that my map is so accurate in naming streets is because I bike literally everywhere (in red I’ve marked all the bike parking areas I can think of) so I refer to Google Maps a lot. I’ve also been in Boston for three summers straight so I’ve had a lot of time to explore Cambridge. I can see that I pay most attention to exactly how all the streets intersect and are organized. What helped me create this map was actually closing my eyes and visualizing my bike rides and walks around certain areas. Also, since I have a lot of friends who live in the area I am very familiar with the order of the streets leading to Central Square in particular.
This assignment has illuminated that it’s easy for me to clearly picture small segments of the square, but it’s difficult for me to put it all together into one cohesive unit. The largest difference between my map and reality is how the CGIS and GSD area of the Harvard campus relates to the rest of the square. While I spend a decent amount of time around CGIS, it’s hard for me to visualize how that connects to the square since I’m usually cutting through the yard. Also, my interpretation of how Mass Ave intersects with Brattle and JFK is very off, something I suppose is due to the fact that I never drive in the square – Harvard Square as a walker is much different than Harvard Square as a driver. I don’t know the names of the streets and I cross through spaces inaccessible to cars. Furthermore, the space between the Cambridge Common and the Quad (Chauncy Street, Shepard Street, Walker Street) is virtually non-existent on my map, likely due to the fact that I hardly ever find myself over there. The one space that I accurately depict is the space between Mt. Auburn and Mass Ave. Since I live in Lowell House and walk to the yard almost everyday, it’s easy to visualize.
I'm generally happy with the final product, but here're some difference I noticed with the real map: 1. I misrepresented the triangle area around Cambridge common. With that, the size of science center and law school are both very off. 2. I missed the branch between science center and Quincy Street. The locations of firehouse and Art Museum were a bit off 3. I missed the triangle area around brattle square. 4. I drew too many horizontal streets between Mt. Auburn and Charles river. I started drawing my sketch from Harvard Square, but I misrepresented a lot of triangular areas around it. Generally speaking, The biggest mistake was the size of science center plaza.
I chose to do the most familiar path that I know of today: my route to class. I begin at Eliot House (bottom left corner of the sketch labeled with a cursive ‘E’) and I travel upward toward Harvard Yard (designated by the ‘H’). I then travel around the Science Center toward the Law School, cross over the lawn, and end at Pierce Hall at the upper right corner of the sketch. I chose to exclude almost everything else, since they are not very pertinent to my everyday life and I thus could not remember their exact orientation. It took me quite a few iterations until I thought I got as close as possible to what the plan drawing of Harvard Square actually looked like. I also included two of my favorite places in the Square: Park Restaurant & Bar (denoted by the ‘P’) and Crema Café (denoted by the ‘C’). I visit Crema Café often so it felt natural to include it in my path. I often sit facing the window and observe the activity occurring directly in front of me. It is a pause in my path that allows me to reflect upon how my path is simply one of an infinite number of paths.
The placement and proportion of the buildings within Harvard yard are fairly accurate on my map, probably because they’re enclosed in a square block (and then are located in specific geometric subdivisions within that block). This orientation helps me systematically rebuild the space in my mind. The general direction of landmarks in relation to each other is the only accurate characteristic on the rest of my map. The most striking difference and cause of inaccuracy is the proportion of buildings and streets – I tend to make them too large, or the space between them too distant. This reflects my perspective in that I only take notice of all the college-related buildings in the area (and some commercial stores); all other landmarks, buildings, and streets are hazy in my memory. This is likely true for all people – we only pass by, visit, and remember a very small portion of the environment we live in, and that portion depends heavily on our past interactions, memories, and habits. Most people do not have photographic memory (and do not need it because prioritizing is a natural survival instinct). In my map, Harvard Yard itself is proportionally too small in relation to the campus as a whole – perhaps the rest of the campus sprawled out so much in my mind because I didn’t have the simple geometric boundaries of the yard to judge distances and proportions with.
The main difference between my sketch and reality is that my sketch is a lot more grid-like, while the actual layout of Harvard Square has far more curved roads and diagonally-aligned buildings. For example, the engineering and law school portions of campus are at a diagonal to the Yard, whereas in my sketch they were aligned with the left and right sides of the yard. I also misjudged the area around the Eliot house cul-de-sac, and drew it along the grid rather than at a diagonal, following the line of the river, as in reality. This made it so that the area around Lowell house is distorted. There is too much empty space to the north of Lowell house in my sketch, because there is less space in reality because of the curve of the river. I also misjudged the spacing of many of the non-Harvard buildings and businesses, because I am not too familiar with many parts of campus. The part that I drew is where I spend 90% of my time while at Harvard, and most likely reflects my mental map of how to navigate it rather than any conscious memory of a map of Harvard. When I'm walking around, I think more in terms of whether I take lefts or rights, not whether a certain path is curved.
It’s immediately obvious, looking at my map, that my knowledge of Harvard is very much concentrated on the Square and the Yard and as one gets further towards the periphery of the campus and surrounding area, my knowledge rapidly diminishes. While the center of the map is pretty accurate and recognizable as the Harvard Square area, the Quad looks absolutely nothing like how I drew it—for one thing it’s further away, but it’s also much larger with more buildings. The Law School, Mather, Dunster, the Kennedy School, the Business School, and much of the athletic complex fare the same way. I even forgot Leverett’s dining hall. Many of my angles are wrong too: JFK street is parallel to Holyoke and Dunster, whereas mine are at angles, creating very wide blocks in some places. The intersection of Quincy Street and Mass Ave is disproportionately large and the block with the Old Inn is in the wrong place. It’s interesting that in many cases the shapes of blocks I generally got right, but their relations to one another are often off. Scale, too, posed a problem. The Science Center is enormous (about a quarter the size of the whole of larger Harvard Yard), while Memorial Hall is too small. Boylston and Dudley ended up tiny. Blocks which should be near the same size, aren’t. Kirkland (one of the smallest houses) is hue in my map as a result of the incorrect angle of JFK. The connecting bridge between the Yard and the Science Center is also not wide enough in proportion to the rest of the plaza and the part of Mass Ave by the Common more than doubles in width. Though I’m largely pretty accurate towards the center of the map (it’s telling that I unconsciously centered the entire thing almost exactly on my dorm (Claverly), pushing the map too far to the left on the page), there are certain blocks where I could recall almost nothing about what was in them, despite walking past them nearly every day. There are also many storefronts which I completely forgot about, though I was fairly certain I could remember all the stores in a certain stretch. I chose to focus my map mostly on the green spaces in and around the Square and on the pattern of traffic flow—the latter of which can get quite tricky around here and so was fun to think through. By picturing every street corner to myself and trying to call up which way the cars passed me, I was able to reconstruct quite accurately the directions of traffic flow, though I’m seldom ever in a car here. As for the green spaces, my approximation of their distributions in the yard and in the quads of various houses is sometimes quite accurate and sometimes wholly off, leading me to think that what was guiding me in drawing them was less real memory of what they looked like and more the knowledge of the fact that they had to be there.
My map is accurate enough that it could help a tourist get around the included parts of town with little trouble. I commute around campus by bicycle and am very familiar with the road network around Harvard, which would likely make it different from a map drawn by someone who, for example, takes the bus and doesn’t need to pay attention to the roads between their origin and their destination. On top of this, I grew up in Cambridge, and was able to bring other personal landmarks to mind when I was thinking about the shape of the campus. I found that it was easiest to produce a more accurate representation of areas I couldn’t initially remember by envisioning myself on the street in a familiar area, and then imagining myself moving to the misremembered area. The shape and elements in the map are noticeably more accurate in the places I spend a lot of time or travel through every day than in the areas I only go occasionally. Interestingly, there are some buildings that extend back much farther from the street than I drew, which I didn’t realize because I have not been in them, and have only seen them from the street. I drew my map such that you could draw grid-like lines going North-South and East-West along the major roads, but in reality, Cambridge appears “tilted” to the northeast – something I knew but didn’t feel comfortable enough to accurately incorporate. I hadn’t thought this about much before, but the city seems to be aligned with the orientation of the river rather than the cardinal directions, which suggests to me that perhaps Cambridge was originally settled along the Charles, with homes slowly radiating out from that boundary.
Compared to the actual map, the relative positions of the buildings and sites I labeled on the map are close to being accurate, but the scales and relative sizes are quite off. The most notable differences are the relative sizes of different blocks, roads, and buildings. Other key differences are the shapes of buildings and the curvature and presence of roads. These inaccuracies were expected because I am usually a destination oriented person—I only pay attention to WHERE I’m going, and thus do not put much effort to remembering either the pathway or the shape and size of the destination. In addition, I am not a driver, and this makes my memory of Harvard very pedestrian-centered. I am not as aware of where the roads end, at what angle they intersect, or how they curve. During this assignment, I recalled the roads by remembering where I had to cross them. Another interesting discovery I made is that it was harder to recall the academic side of campus compared to Harvard Square. Hurrying in between classes seems to be more detrimental in establishing a mental map than leisurely walking to my favorite restaurant. From these observations, it can be concluded that how we use and relate to a city determines how we interpret and remember the city. I, as a student and pedestrian, have a focus on pedestrian paths, academic buildings, public transportations and food. These are the parts of the city that I expose myself to, and as a result, is what consists of my personalized experience of Harvard.