My map was focused on me and therefore decent for the paths I take most frequently—upperclassmen houses, buildings I have classes in, and stores and restaurants that I visit. I also included certain markers that I use. For instance, on my way to the Quad, I know I’m almost there when I see the second Longy Music School building, but I don’t pay attention to whatever is in between. Similarly, I see Boston only in terms of the buildings and roads that I am familiar with. Additionally, I realized that I drew almost all buildings as rectangles, because I never thought about what they looked like from above. This may suggest that I relate to places and buildings in a city for their functions rather than their architecture. I also noticed that I prioritized fitting everything in rather than geographical accuracy. As a Harvard Band member, I play at hockey, basketball, and football games, but I realized, I had no idea how big the buildings were, just their relative placement. Quincy house, for instance, became over-elongated because in my head it went two blocks, so that took precedent over its realistic size. Even though I know the streets, I don’t really have a sense of size when thinking about a city.
The general layout of the map I drew is very similar to the official university map, with buildings appropriately located relative to each other. The level of detail for different areas are very apparent though. The areas with the greatest detail include the cluster of River Houses and Harvard Yard. However, most of Harvard Square, the Business School, the Athletic fields, the area up to and including the Quad and east of the River House boundaries have significantly less detail. This difference can very likely be attributed to the way that I use the space. Because I do not visit these areas as regularly, my memory of them are evidently vague. On the other hand, the River Houses and Harvard Yard, which I walk through daily, are drawn with greater detail and accuracy. These differences suggest that how people use and relate to the city are acutely individualized. If I lived in the Quad and was an athlete, my vision of Harvard would be uniquely different. What I notice and not notice and even what I choose to include and not include uniquely represent my experience. With a city being used by a multitude of people in several different ways, designing spaces that consider as diverse perspectives and functions can be critical to creating a space that will be well-remembered by all.
I am very surprised by how difficult it was for me to do this sketch. I have always had a terrible sense of direction and no artistic ability, but I have now realized how terrible my memory is as well. I could not remember any street names or true orientations. I have certainly forgotten entire streets that I only wander down occasionally, and things are definitely not drawn to scale. I was afraid to make any truly inerasable marks on the page because I was so unsure of the placement of all of the buildings, so the diagram comes across as light and hesitant. My map is an extremely inaccurate birds eye view of the city. I think this is because I often take the shuttle from place to place, and as a result I only know destinations rather than the streets I take to get there. I definitely only remembered landmarks that I visit often, and that are relevant to me in my everyday life like The Crimson, Starbucks and HAS. Additionally, I include almost exclusively public spaces because I don’t think of my private spaces as places that belong on a geographical map.
My ability to reproduce Harvard Square from memory was greatly shaped by my limited area of daily access. I live in Dunster House, which is on the eastern-most side of campus and all my classes are on Quincy Street. I rarely head north or west, even into the Yard—which also limits my awareness of how other people use those spaces. My process was to sketch from the bottom-right of my page (the south-east corner of campus) from what I knew best to what I knew least. Errors definitely compounded and I was fairly aware that I was choosing between correct orientation and scale. Scale was really difficult to keep constant as well.
I sketched a few routes that I’ve recently walked, along with landmark buildings that come to mind when I think about neighboring areas. My path is in red, landmarks are blue, and I made the sketch on top of a horizontal black grid to organize my thoughts. The fact that naturally wanted to use a grid made me realize that my perception of Harvard is in layers of distance from the river—and that most of my navigation is by getting to the right layer before walking “east” or “west” (as I perceive it) to my destination. My layers turned out very accurate in terms of scale and component buildings, though the actual grid is distorted by about 30 degrees above and below the Yard and varies somewhat in layer width. What was especially inaccurate about my drawing is the size of buildings and their horizontal alignment within the layers. For example, Chipotle is barely west of the Yard, and I botched how the SEAS buildings near the top ﬁt together. I also couldn’t recall most street names (a detail I didn’t attempt to include) and names of businesses around the Yard that I don’t frequent but walk past regularly. These seem like practical details not to know, since they aren’t important to navigation. What matters is getting to the right horizontal layer and walking in the correct direction.
My map of Cambridge expectedly captures the area from my unique point of view—specifically from that of a senior undergraduate football playing engineer who lives in a river house. Each of these qualities biases my perception and recall of my surroundings. The areas in my map with the most accurate detail are those that I visit most frequently: the paths between Mather and the science buildings, the athletic complex in Allston, the buildings around the yard (freshman dorms, Sever, etc.), and the various eating establishments and landmarks that I frequent along the river (area by Felipe’s and Chipotle, Hair Cuttery, etc.). On the contrary, the areas with the least amount of detail are those that I rarely interact with: various roads are missing or inaccurate (I have never driven a car in Cambridge), the land between the Yard and the Quad is almost entirely unknown, many non-university associated buildings were hazy, and many of the graduate school buildings are misplaced or absent. In general, my map features many block shapes and straight lines—quite the opposite of many parts of Cambridge in reality. I think this phenomenon can be explained by how I think about and use most parts of the city. Probably 80% of my time at Harvard has been spent in the same 20% of buildings. On the other hand, I have visited the other 80% of buildings on the map 1 time or fewer. Instead, I walk past them on my way to other things. In writing the map, I thought about these experiences, noting what landmarks and buildings I pass heading from one space to another.
In my map of Harvard, I prioritised the spaces that I interact with. I largely ignored places across the river, in the quad, or beyond the Science Center, because I rarely venture to those areas of the campus. I live in Eliot House. I started my sketch at this intersection between the river and JFK Street which leads up to the Square and the Yard. Sketching showed me that everything—campus, shops, streets—are crammed into a dense area. However, shops are clearly delineated from campus. While the buildings are physically close together, the stores in Harvard Square occupy an entirely different world than the college. This includes residential Houses. As a result, an urban campus exists without being hectically intertwined with the city around it. Doing my sketch, I think I did a pretty good job at mapping the streets, as they follow a loose grid. Towards the edge of campus, I found that I didn’t know what to draw next because, as I wrote earlier, there are places that I just don’t go. I tried to draw pedestrian traffic in blue pen as a nebulous, sprawling mess. I thought about where I walk on any normal day and thought about how many people I might see around me at those times.
My map is fairly accurate in the locations where I spend the most time, I struggled to draw and map out locations where I rarely or never go. I was surprised at how inaccurate my scale was and I had to essentially create roads which I believed or assume to be there but in reality may not be. I was drawing my relationship to the space and not necessarily the space itself. This is especially apparent in my representation of the upper classman housing – I know that they exist and I know their rough location but I struggle to remember any specific details. I have also left out Loeb House and the Houghton Library which I sadly must admit I have never been in. To further show how my relationship to the area differs from others I drew the spaces which tend to have more traffic (be it pedestrian or car) and overlapped it with markers that indicate my movements during a typical day. Although my movements overlap with the tourists it tends to be in public or commercial areas. Perhaps this is due to the nature of being a college student and that I am focused around the campus but none the less it shows the area that urban planners should focus on the most. Specifically looking at my map I would say that these areas are JFK Street and the junction between Massachusetts Avenue and JFK Street.
went into the exercise quite confident. After all, I don’t use a GPS to get to any destination between the Quad, athletic fields, HLS and the Square. In fact, I know many shortcuts and feel I give decent directions to the many tourists who ask for them. In the end though, I struggled so much I could not truly “complete” my map. I had a great deal of information still in my head that I could not represent spatially. I recognized this was the case when I started to draw Oxford and Kirkland Streets (two streets I rely on to get back to my dorm) and realized that my original placement and angle of the Quad, Yard and Law school were so wrong that drawing the streets between them in a sensible way was not possible. I’ve come to know these streets on foot and by bike by following other people and often times by trial and error. Therefore, I can easily tell you how to get from place to place, but I had never studied a map closely enough to know where one thing is in relation to another. I also learned that I have a very linear perspective of the streets; I know intersections, but not much else. Unless a street is significantly curved, I think of it as straight and therefore, in my sketch, I attempted to make the streets into a grid that does not actually exist. Despite the shortcomings of my map, I was able to depict the direction cars move on each street and if they have bike lanes. This finding makes sense given my life depends on this knowledge on a daily basis. I could also list many of the stores/sites on each street (far more than 10, but I went that far to demonstrate my relative confidence in locating popular shops). Again, in hindsight, this finding makes sense since I’ve learned this area from getting from some Point A to some Point B successfully, without really looking how they are laid out spatially.