Kelly Zhang

Kelly Zhang

After comparing my sketch to the Google Maps representation of Harvard Square, I realized that my perception of urban spaces is shaped heavily by the amount of time I spend in certain places. As an upperclassman, I spend most of my time in the houses by the river, or in the shops in the square; as a result, I made the size of the houses and stores much larger than the size of Harvard Yard, where the freshmen live. However, in reality, the “width” of both those areas is about the same. I also ignored a lot of the residential areas in the square that I’ve never spent time in because they didn’t occur to me as I imagined the square in my head.

Another striking difference in my map was that I included many more right angles than the city has in reality. For example, because I’m accustomed to assuming ordinary geometric shapes in urban spaces, I drew Cambridge Common park as a rectangle, whereas the real park is a much more round-shaped triangle. I also drew Garden St., the street to the quad, at a right angle to the main street, while it is actually very diagonal in real life.