After having finished my sketch, I compared what I drew with some of the Google map renderings and realized a significant difference. Where I decided to notate things so that it was easier for me to draw, google maps shows much more detail. However, I have decided to include topological features to my map showing where there are slopes in the streets and the places most traveled by pedestrians and students. Google maps fails to include these features because their rendering is much more informational. Similarly, both my sketch and Google maps include the directionality of the traffic which I found to be pretty cool. The difference in both renderings could be due to the humans’ tendency to remember things based on landmarks. When I was drawing, I constantly tried to relate things to certain landmarks that I remembered seeing as I was walking. I also associated certain locations to certain memories so my renderings include much more of what I perceived as I walked through the square. In the end, our renderings achieve the same goal of showing the idea of what the square looks like, but they are represented in different perspectives.
Having visited both Newbury and Copley/Prudential shopping centers, I was most surprised by the difference of the vibes that these two places gave. In the Newbury’s shops/street, we notice that it has a more homey feeling due to the linear building of shops. All of the shops are accessible on the first floor whether. Another difference of the newbury shops that I found interesting was the outside sitting spaces provided by each of the shops. There were tiny patios made of brick which also made the viewer feel more comfortable because of the familiar brick structure. Along the top of the shops were residential buildings which contributed to the more at home feel. The wider streets also gave a feeling of openness and the natural light from the outside really made the shops on newbury more attractive and feel very homogeneous. Upon entry into Newbury St., you feel like you have entered a residential neighborhood rather than a commercial district. However, the owners of stores replicate the feeling of a commercial district by providing signs for their stores that really pop at you. The shops at Prudential had some similar things as Newbury such as the incorporation of natural lighting and lots of plants. I noticed that there were a lot of windows that let natural light flow through along with attempted greenery with artificial plants. However, one thing that really stuck out as a difference was the starkness of the shopping mall. The choice of white along with the narrow corridors and lack of sitting spaces made everything very “in your face”. The mall also felt very disjointed with very a different feeling as you step into a different part of the mall. Another theme that I noticed was that the mall was very vertically structured whereas the newbury shops were horizontal. This vertical architecture gave off a sense of grandeur and an elitist aura. The last difference that stuck out was the quality of stores in each location. While Newbury had more stores that were for the everyday customer such as smoke shops, convenience stores, etc., the shops at prudential were more high end clothing and accessory stores.
Comparing my map to an official campus one, it looks like my sense of where the streets are is a bit off. Before making this map, I walked around campus consciously, taking special note of where streets were in relation to one another so that I could better draw this map from memory. Another shortcoming of my map is its scale; I did not perhaps do the best job in portraying how big and far apart major buildings and parks are when compared to one another. Aside from this, my map does share general similarities to an “official” map. I used the Charles River as the starting point in making my sketch, which proved helpful in laying everything out. Although the scale might be a bit off, I seem to have gotten correct the general sense of where things are—the Quad, the Law School, Science Center, campus buildings, the River, the athletic fields, the Harvard Art Museums, and other campus buildings. The two are different largely because my rendition of the map was a reflection of how I walk around Harvard Square and the spaces I use most. When I sketched it out, I found myself marking the places I know best, and then going from there. This “skewed” my map a little because these spaces tended to be bigger and more defined than streets, buildings, and areas I don’t necessarily go to. This was a primary reason why, I think, my sketch is fairly different from the original, and why maps like this that are drawn from memory are inherently subjective representations of physical space. Apart from spatially mapping different major streets, buildings, and green spaces in my sketch, I also explore the relative density of different areas in the Square. These are represented by the dots. This allowed me to think back to my own experiences on the streets to note where people tend to congregate. Certain places, such as near the T and the Smith Center, are much more densely used than spaces like around JFK Park or between Cambridge Common and the Quad. This was a really fascinating look into how and why people congregate in certain places over others.
After a couple of drafts in which I made several buildings (namely, Annenberg, the Mac Gym, and Widener) the center of my sketch, I realized that I was having problems with the proportion of the streets. Afterwards, I came to rely on the streets as the most accurate outline for the sketch. The problem with this approach, however, is that Cambridge seems to be a city not really organized by streets. There's no other way to explain the sudden appearance of Oxford Street, the short-lived existence of South Street, and the strange looping shape that Massachusetts Avenue takes. On top of that, I started having problems with accurately representing the slant of the streets, often keeping something straight when the street was, slowly but surely, curving one way or another. Something that I realized as I was drawing, which was then confirmed when I looked at an actual map, was just how many green spaces there are around campus. Many of these spaces, however, are crowded and jammed in, so that, while you know they are there, they don't really contribute in any significant way to the landscape of the city. I think that, in order for these green spaces to really show up in our perception of a city, they need to border a well-frequented street. Most of Harvard's green spaces, however, seem to be surrounded by either dormitories or lecture halls.
When thinking about the Prudential/Copley commercial center, the connecting hallways are the first features that come to mind. Although these paths do have stores off to their sides, they seem to be constructed, primarily, with the express purpose of keeping people moving. I came to realize how difficult it is for someone to turn around in the middle of one of these pathways and go back where they came from. What keeps people moving forward, I think, is the hope of a larger space, of more breathing room. And some of these spaces are either open atriums where people can sit down (in the case of Copley, with green spaces and even a small fountain) or larger, more brand-name stores or restaurants that encourage people to stick around for longer. I also really paid attention to empty spaces at the shopping centers, so much so that it made it the center of my sketch. Malls, at least to me, never seem to be fully completed—there’s always another further stage of development. This means that there are sections of the shopping centers that are almost completely deserted, even if there are stores lining up the paths. In Newbury Street, I noticed how one side of the street was under construction, leaving the other one looking, for the most part, untouched. It also seemed to me that the more commercial side of the street—the right-hand side, as portrayed in my map, seemed to have many more stores, while the left-hand side seems to be more residential in nature, even if there are stores at the ground and first levels.
My map is quite accurate with regards to the buildings of the Yard, and relatively accurate with respect to the river house area of campus. However, it fell fall short of proportions on the location of the Quad. I was not familiar with the path to the Quad, as I do not spend a lot of time there. In addition, there were many paths in the Yard that I was not familiar with, as they are relatively randomly laid out. The shapes of the common spaces and houses by the river were also not clear in my memory, so I had to guess about a few of them. There was a large area West of the Yard the shape of which I had no idea, but none of it is part of the campus proper. Finally, the campus of the Law School and the Science Labs extends far North of where I drew, but I have not interacted with that part of campus yet. I am very familiar with the shape of the river and the bridges of the river because I have rowed on it, which helped me draw that part of campus.
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.
Both the Prudential Center and Newbury street are commercial shopping areas, but they differ in that the Prudential could conceivably be modeled on a central meeting place with radiating streets in a town, whereas Newbury street harkens to the main street in a such a place. The brownstones in which stores are housed almost like homes; however, the purpose of Newbury Street – to window shop – is clearly demonstrated by its design. The leafless young trees lining the sidewalk are strung with holiday lights, likely intended to create an inviting atmosphere for nighttime shoppers. There is no place along the street to do anything more than pause to tie a shoe, as there are few benches and no common areas. Stores on Newbury Street are also likely subject to local business association rules – the scarcity of lit-up signs is noteworthy. The business association likely pays or lobbies for attentive cleaning and police patrol, for it has far less litter than all of the nearby avenues (even with thousands passing through hourly), and there are no street performers – or homeless people – in sight. Copley and the Prudential, in contrast, each have a central common area, from which the various arcades radiate. Many people sit in this area for a break between stores, as along the arcades, people are in constant motion, just like on Newbury Street. An interesting difference between the two types of space is that because the indoor malls are contained, delimited entities, it is clear where the shopping area begins and ends. In addition, all of the doors are open, allowing for a comparably lower barrier for entry (after you have gained entry to the mall itself, of course – also restricted, by security near the doors, from “undesirable” parties).
The sketch that I made was for the most part accurate in the depiction of known regions yet struggled on its representation of places not usually traveled. For example, the yard is represented fairly accurately down to the walking paths yet the law school shows very little accuracy to what is actually there. I also did not do a very good job of encompassing the full size of the places I have less knowledge of. There are missing regions and buildings. The exact alignment of streets with landmarks was a difficult task where there were a few misaligned areas due to making structures larger than they are proportionally in real life. It showed that I relate to the city in a very practical way. The stores I go to and the buildings I walk around and go into are the ones that I remember. The irregular shape of some buildings also provides a challenge to the fixed grid notions of uniformity that are easier to imagine and work with. Many times I had to go back and add the interesting features such as the road splitting where the Lampoon building is. It was also true that the buildings that are more prominent in my own life were disproportionately larger on my map, another sign of implicit bias toward the self in the mind’s eye.
Comparing the sketch I drew from memory for this assignment to a map I bought when I arrived here in Cambridge three weeks ago, it stroke me that there were vast areas on the campus and in the city I did not know – let alone how they looked like. Whereas I was able to measure distances quite accurately - I believe this is thanks to my daily commute either on my bicycle or by foot - I was not able to sketch a “complete” map of Harvard Square and surrounding. Rather, I realized that my sketch only features the environment I interact with on a daily basis such as the buildings I have courses in, my local bakery or green spaces I use to go for a run – short, the sketch only featured what is important for me as an individual to be able to interact with the city and to get around in it. Furthermore, in contrast to the map I bought, I structured my sketch in commercial, residential and green areas – again a help for me to get around. Whereas the map only showed streets and houses and made no distinctions between different uses of the buildings and streets, my sketch allowed me to locate shops, private homes or University property and even bike lanes on the streets. In my opinion these differences between my sketch and the map stem from the following reasoning: maps are a highly simplified reflection of reality. By reducing complexity to one specific layer of a city – such as the street system and adjacent housing in the example of the map I bought – they allow their users to be able to orient themselves and find what they are looking for. However in order to be able to do so maps only show one aspect of the complex reality. If we for example included a heat map on top of the street map it would definitely serve the homeless person to find what he is looking for (a warm shelter) – however it would confuse the car driver looking for a specific street. Each map hence serves its own purpose. Therefore, I believe my sketch is different from the map I bought because it represents the layers important to me personally (green spaces, university buildings, roads were I bike etc.) – or put it differently because it represents my view of reality and how I relate to and interact with the city I now live in.