Mind the map

Critical Geography is a field of study dedicated to the analysis of the unequal relationships reflected in our use and understanding of geographic spaces. ACME is an electronic journal that features writing on this subject. I'm not sure if it is still publishing, but there are many articles from back issues archived on the site.


Psychogeography is another really interesting tool for thinking about how we interpret the world around us. A product of the Lettrist and Situationist Movements, psychogeography is a subjective, non-scientific examination of our relationship to space, often through a technique called mental mapping. Mental mapping depicts the way we relate one location to another and combine this ego-centred understanding with our "objective" knowledge of geography.

This type of mental mapping is analogous to (and might even be seen as an extension of) the brainstorming technique that is also sometimes also called mental, cognitive or concept mapping, in which concepts and questions are explored through the creation of diagrams that describe the relationships between related ideas. This background image for the Institute for Lateral Research is an example of this, and the site itself is based on the same principle.

Maps may seem inherently visual, but an interesting paper by a psychologist at the University of Surrey on creating practical maps for the blind explores the non-visual aspects of both cognitive and "real" maps.

Looking around the world

Theme parks, food courts, fashion and film are just a few of the ways we demonstrate our understanding of the world and other people in it. They are, in a sense, maps of what we think our culture means, and what we find most interesting, desirable or confusing about the cultures of others.

This is the idea at the heart of postcolonial and postructualist social critique: that the ways in which we pursue, organize and put to use our knowledge about the world and the other people in it really says more about us than it does about the apparent objects of that knowledge.

Here is a short and lively paper along these lines by critical theorist Louis Marin, with the compelling title "Disneyland as Degenerate Utopia".

Here, on the other hand, is a lesson plan from National Geographic that demonstrates how one culture's ideas of what other cultures are "made of" are passed along. This is how ideas become ideology.


Dan Graham's rooftop installation for the DIA Chelsea in New York, Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube functions as an elequent illustration of the problem of "objective" perception. As you look through its reflective glass panels, your view of the world around you is filtered through your own reflection, which varies in its intensity as the light changes.