Maps from the inside
Subjective mapping: how to record the way people perceive, use, value and avoid places, and how to turn their maps into evidence
Every map is drawn from somewhere (Harley, 1989). An official map hides its point of view behind a neutral look. A subjective map shows its point of view openly and hands the pen to the people whose experience you need to understand. In Q3 you use it to find what statistics miss, and to test whose experience your problem statement rests on.
What it records ↓Invisible cities ↓Five forms ↓Run it ↓Pitfalls ↓Three things a map can hold
A subjective map records a place as someone experiences it. Geographers call the picture that people carry in their heads a cognitive map. It is partial, distorted and selective, and people still use it to decide where to go, what to avoid and what to defend (Kitchin, 1994). Drawing it out makes that picture available for research.
The landmarks they orient by, the boundaries they feel, the areas they leave blank. Blank areas are data too.
Daily routes, detours, waiting places, the shop that doubles as a meeting point. Use often differs from what the zoning plan intended.
Fear, attachment, memory, claims of ownership. These rarely appear in a dataset, and they often decide whether a plan is accepted.
Planning authorities already treat experience as evidence. Rotterdam’s neighbourhood monitor, the Wijkprofiel, scores every neighbourhood on a social, a physical and a safety index, and gives the experience of residents (beleving) the same weight as measured facts and figures: 50 per cent of the score (Gemeente Rotterdam, 2024). A monitor like this tells you how much residents feel safe or at home. Subjective mapping tells you where, and why.
Six decades of maps from below
Subjective mapping has several roots: radical walking, urban design, community geography, development practice, feminist geography and art. Each added a tool, and each carries a warning. Open them in order.
1958The dérive+
Guy Debord and the Situationists proposed the dérive: a drift through the city in which walkers let its changing atmospheres pull them along. The aim was to chart the city’s psychogeography, the zones that attract people and the zones that repel them (Debord, 1958/2006).
The tool it added. Walking as a way of knowing the city.
The warning it carries. A drift records the walker as much as the city.
1960The image of the city+
Kevin Lynch asked residents of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles to draw their city from memory and to describe trips through it. From what their maps had in common he derived five elements of the urban image: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks (Lynch, 1960). His samples were small and drawn mostly from professional groups, which he acknowledged.
The tool it added. Sketch maps that can be compared and coded.
The warning it carries. A shared ‘public image’ built from a few people is the image of some publics.
1969–71The Detroit Geographical Expedition+
Geographer William Bunge and community leader Gwendolyn Warren organised an expedition in which Black residents and students of Detroit researched and mapped their own neighbourhoods, from school districting to the streets where commuters’ cars killed children. Warren and colleagues have since revisited how the expedition’s history has been told, and by whom (Warren et al., 2019).
The tool it added. Residents as researchers, and the map as an argument.
The warning it carries. Who holds the pen, and who controls the project, is a political question.
1995Counter-mapping+
In Kalimantan, Indonesia, state forestry maps allocated land by forest type and economic goal and rarely acknowledged the territories that local people claimed and managed. Indigenous activists answered with sketch maps of their own territories (Peluso, 1995).
The tool it added. The map as a claim to rights.
The warning it carries. To be mapped, customary rights had to be redefined in terms the state could read.
2002Feminist visualisation+
Mei-Po Kwan argued that GIS is not bound to positivism. Used critically, it can represent everyday lives and experiences that feminist geographers study, provided the researcher stays in control of what the tool shows (Kwan, 2002).
The tool it added. Lived experience inside a GIS.
The warning it carries. The software does not do the critical work for you.
2004 onBio mapping+
Artist Christian Nold gave walkers a sensor that measured skin conductance together with a GPS logger, then asked them to narrate the peaks on their tracks in a group. The sensor data alone meant little. Meaning came from the walker’s account and the discussion (Nold, 2018).
The tool it added. Emotion mapped and discussed in a group.
The warning it carries. A device can make feelings look objective.
2013Collective mapping+
The Argentine collective Iconoclasistas published a manual for mapping workshops. Groups mark large printed maps with shared icons and pictograms, and can add timelines, body maps and walks (Iconoclasistas, 2013).
The tool it added. A workshop format that turns many experiences into one map a group can discuss.
The warning it carries. One shared map can hide disagreement.
2014Public participation GIS+
Online map surveys let hundreds of people place points and comments on a web map. Reviewing this research, Brown and Kyttä (2014) identify recurring issues, including who takes part, the quality of the mapped data and whether the results influence plans.
The tool it added. Scale.
The warning it carries. Reach is not depth.
Invisible cities
In 1972 Italo Calvino published Le città invisibili; William Weaver’s English translation, Invisible Cities, followed in 1974. Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities to the emperor Kublai Khan, who cannot see the far reaches of his own empire. The cities are arranged in nine chapters and eleven series of five, from Cities & memory to Hidden cities, and every chapter is framed by a conversation between the two men (Calvino, 1972/1974).
None of these cities can be found on any map, and that is why they belong on this page. Each one isolates a single way in which people perceive, remember, desire or misread a city: exactly what a subjective map tries to catch. Calvino later described the book as a dream born in cities that were becoming hard to live in, and said it was built like a polyhedron, with conclusions along all its edges (Calvino, 1983; see also Moure Pazos, 2013). When Kublai asks why Polo never speaks of Venice, Polo answers that every city he describes says something about Venice. Every subjective map, yours included, also describes the place its maker comes from (compare Harley, 1989).
Below is one city from each series, read as a proposition about urban experience and turned into a mapping prompt. The summaries are ours; read the book for Calvino’s own words.
Cities & memory 3ZairaA city holds its past in its details.Open +
In the book. Polo tells Kublai that listing Zaira’s measurements would tell him nothing. The city consists of relations between its spaces and the events of its past, which it keeps in its details, as a hand keeps its lines: the height of a lamppost, a gutter a cat walks along.
Map it. Ask long-standing residents to mark where things happened: a demolition, a fight, a celebration, a first job. Lay this map of events over the map of measures and look for the places where they diverge.
Cities & desire 3DespinaA city looks different depending on where you arrive from.Open +
In the book. Despina stands on the border between two deserts. The camel driver arriving overland sees its skyline as a ship that will take him away from the sand. The sailor arriving by sea sees a camel that will lead him to oases.
Map it. Ask people who arrive by different routes, in different ways or from different lives (commuters, newcomers, children, carers) to draw the same place. Each map shows what that group lacks and longs for.
Cities & signs 1TamaraThe city tells you what to see.Open +
In the book. In Tamara the eye meets signs rather than things: signboards, emblems, statues, each standing for something else. The visitor leaves having recorded only the names the city gives itself, without finding what lies beneath them.
Map it. In a public space, map what the signs, rules and branding say you may do there, then map what people actually do. The gap between the two maps is your finding. Combine with the Observation sheet.
Thin cities 5OctaviaEvery city hangs on something.Open +
In the book. Octavia is suspended over a chasm between two mountains, on a net of ropes, chains and catwalks. Everything else hangs below the net, and the inhabitants know the net will not last forever.
Map it. Ask people to draw the threads their daily life hangs on: a bus line, a clinic, a neighbour, a cheap rent. Then ask which threads they expect to break first. You get a map of precarity drawn by the people who live with it.
Trading cities 4ErsiliaRelations make the city, and they outlast it.Open +
In the book. In Ersilia the inhabitants stretch strings between the corners of their houses: white, black, grey or black-and-white, for relations of blood, trade, authority and agency. When the strings are too dense to pass, they leave and rebuild elsewhere, and only the web remains.
Map it. Draw relations instead of objects: who depends on whom, and where they live. The care-chain map on the Feminist planning page is a version of Ersilia.
Cities & eyes 1ValdradaA city that is watched behaves differently.Open +
In the book. Valdrada stands on a lake that reflects every house and every act. Its inhabitants always know that what they do is also an image in the mirror, and the two cities, Polo says, do not love each other.
Map it. Compare the place as it is shown (renderings, promotional images, social media, camera surveillance) with the place as people draw it. Then ask where people feel watched, and how that changes what they do.
Cities & names 5IreneThe city seen from outside is not the city lived inside.Open +
In the book. Irene is a city seen from the edge of a plateau, from where one can only guess at what happens below. Polo has never entered it. If he did, he says, it would be a different city and deserve another name.
Map it. The maps your group draws in Try it are views from the plateau. Set them beside residents’ maps, and name the differences in your positionality statement.
Cities & the dead 3EusapiaThe past governs the present.Open +
In the book. The living of Eusapia built an underground copy of their city, where the dead carry on with their trades. A hooded confraternity moves between the two, and the living increasingly copy the changes the dead make below.
Map it. Map what the past decides today: listed buildings, memorials, protected views, inherited street patterns, old property lines. Then ask residents which of these they value and which they experience as a constraint.
Cities & the sky 1EudoxiaA map shows an order that nobody experiences.Open +
In the book. Eudoxia keeps a carpet whose symmetrical pattern is said to show the city’s true form, though walking the city you would never guess it. An oracle declares that one of the two, carpet or city, has the form of the starry sky; which one is left open.
Map it. Your conceptual framework and your GIS layers are carpets. Put them next to residents’ sketch maps and ask which order each one sees. Read with the Conceptual framework page.
Continuous cities 1LeoniaWhat a city throws away belongs on its map.Open +
In the book. Leonia remakes itself every day: everything is new each morning, and yesterday’s things are carried beyond the walls. The mountains of refuse grow, press on the city and meet the refuse of its neighbours.
Map it. Map where waste, noise and nuisance end up, and who lives next to them. Ask residents to mark what arrives in their street from elsewhere. Link the result to the Circular economy page.
Hidden cities 5BereniceThe just city hides inside the unjust one, and the reverse.Open +
In the book. Polo describes the unjust Berenice, then the just city hidden within it, in the networks of people who recognise one another. That just city already carries the seed of a new injustice, and so on: all the future Berenices are present at once, folded into each other.
Map it. In the areas your statistics mark as deprived, ask people to map places and practices of care, solidarity and resistance. In the areas marked as successful, ask whom they exclude. Read with the Spatial justice page.
In the final chapter Kublai leafs through his atlas. It holds every city, including cities not yet founded, promised lands and nightmare cities, and he concludes that all of them drift towards the infernal city. Polo replies that the inferno, if there is one, is already here: the city we live in every day and make together. One way to stop suffering it is to blend in until it can no longer be seen. The other is harder and needs constant attention: learning to recognise the people and things within the inferno that are not inferno, then helping them last and giving them room (Calvino, 1972/1974).
Read as method, this is the strongest case for subjective mapping. Statistics are good at measuring the inferno. Maps drawn by the people who live there can show what in it is not inferno, and a plan can then give it space.
Five forms, five kinds of evidence
Each form produces a different kind of evidence. Choose the one your research question needs, not the one that will look best in the report. Decide first, then open.
01Mental sketch mapOn a blank sheet, from memoryOpen +
What you do. Ask a person to draw an area from memory on a blank sheet, and to talk you through it while drawing.
What you get. The structure of their image: what is large, central, connected or missing.
Good for. Perception and meaning; comparing how different groups see the same place.
Watch out. Analysis of such maps is often improvised (Gieseking, 2013). Decide in advance how you will read them: see Reading the maps. Keep each drawing with the conversation that produced it.
02Sketch map on a base mapMarks on a printed mapOpen +
What you do. Give people a printed map and ask them to mark routes, places and feelings on it.
What you get. Points and lines you can locate, digitise and overlay. Boschmann and Cubbon (2014) distinguish this from the free-form mental map: the base map adds accuracy and comparability.
Good for. Use, avoided places and destinations; combining with GIS.
Watch out. The base map’s extent, scale and labels tell people what counts. Choose them deliberately and report them.
03Walking interviewTalk on the moveOpen +
What you do. Walk a route with a person, talk about what you pass, and record the route.
What you get. Talk tied to specific places. Kusenbach (2003) calls this the go-along. Evans and Jones (2011) found that walking interviews produced more talk about place, more closely tied to the study area, than sit-down interviews.
Good for. Everyday routes, sensory detail, safety.
Watch out. Who can walk the route, at what hour, in what weather. Offer another form to people who cannot.
04Collective mappingA workshop around one large mapOpen +
What you do. A group marks a large map with agreed icons and notes, then discusses what it shows.
What you get. Shared concerns, claims and conflicts in one picture (Iconoclasistas, 2013).
Good for. Community knowledge and early problem framing.
Watch out. Confident voices dominate. Facilitate actively, and record disagreements instead of smoothing them out.
05Online map surveyPublic participation GISOpen +
What you do. Respondents place points and comments on a web map.
What you get. Many responses you can count and overlay.
Good for. Patterns across a city or region.
Watch out. Digital divides and self-selection shape who answers, and comments are short (Brown & Kyttä, 2014).
Companion methods: photovoice, in which participants photograph their surroundings and discuss the images (Wang & Burris, 1997); the exploratory walk, care-trip map and care-chain map on the Feminist planning page; and the Observation and Interviewing sheets in the Toolkit.
Eight steps from prompt to evidence
Steps 1 to 3 are design decisions. Write them down: they belong in the methodology chapter of your report.
1Start from your question+
Subjective mapping answers questions about how a place is perceived, used or valued, and by whom. It cannot tell you how much or how many. If your question is about quantities, use another method or combine methods. Check the fit between question and method on the Research questions page.
2Decide whose maps+
Name the groups whose experience your question needs, and look for difference: age, gender, income, ability, origin, how people travel. Write down whom you could not reach. A short list of who is missing is more honest than a long list of who took part. The Stakeholder analysis sheet helps you find the groups.
3Choose the form and the base+
Use the five forms above. For a blank sheet, decide which area you name in the prompt: a neighbourhood, a town, a region. For a base map, decide its scale, extent and labels. At the regional scale of Q3, one useful prompt is to ask people to draw ‘the region’ itself. Where they place its edges may differ from the administrative boundary, and the difference is a finding.
4Write the prompt+
“Draw your neighbourhood.”
Too open. People produce a tourist map of what they think you want.
“Draw the places you go to in an ordinary week, and the routes between them. Mark the places you like, the places you avoid, and one place you would change.”
Concrete, tied to a period, and asks about both use and feeling.
Test the prompt on one person before you use it. Then keep it the same for everyone, so that the maps can be compared.
5Map and talk+
Ask people to explain while they draw, and record the conversation with their consent. Note the order in which things appear, what is redrawn and what is left out. File each map with its transcript and a short note: who drew it, when, where and with which prompt. Gieseking (2013) and Boschmann and Cubbon (2014) both pair maps with interviews; a map separated from its story loses most of its meaning.
6Protect people+
Maps locate people: their homes, their routes and the places where they feel unsafe. Obtain informed consent, anonymise, and never publish points that identify a home or a vulnerable person. Check whether you need ethics approval before you go into the field: see the Ethics page.
7Read the maps+
Use the four lenses in Reading the maps. Define your codes before you start, adjust them after the first few maps, and then code every map the same way.
8Report and triangulate+
Show selected maps as figures with full captions: who drew it, when, and with which prompt. Present patterns rather than single anecdotes, and set them against other evidence such as statistics, observation and policy documents. Where experience and data disagree, explain the disagreement instead of choosing a winner.
Reading the maps
A pile of drawings is not yet a finding. Working from 32 sketch maps and the interviews in which they were drawn, Gieseking (2013) identified 57 analytic components in four groups, which shows how much can be read systematically. Start with four lenses.
What is on the map? Code the elements. Lynch’s five (paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks) are a good start. Add codes for uses and feelings.
How is the map organised? What sits at the centre, what is drawn large, what is connected, where are the edges? Distortion signals importance.
What is missing? A district left blank, a park nobody draws, a route nobody takes. Ask about absences in the interview.
How do the maps of different groups differ? Digitise and overlay them to find shared corridors, avoided zones and favourite places. Keep each quote linked to its point (Kwan, 2002).
From maps to visions
Subjective maps record the present, and they can record hopes too. A vision drawn without them risks becoming Calvino’s Zobeide: a city built to the dream of its founders, whose form makes little sense to the people who arrive later (Calvino, 1972/1974). Three moves connect your maps to your vision.
Add a question about the future to your prompt: the place people would change, what they would put there, the route they wish existed. Hopes have a location too.
Where the wishes of different groups coincide, your vision has common ground. Where they collide, the vision has to choose and say why. The planner’s triangle helps you name the conflict.
Show the draft vision map to the people who drew the maps. Do they recognise their places in it? What is missing? Their answers test the vision, and they belong in your report.
Next: run the visioning workshop in Session 04 · I Have a Dream, use the Vision making sheet in the Toolkit, and see where the vision sits in a plan on the Regional strategy page.
Six pitfalls
Most problems with subjective mapping come from treating the maps as innocent pictures. Open each pitfall for a remedy.
The frame decides the answer+
Maps carry the values of those who make them (Harley, 1989). That includes your base map, your prompt and the language you use.
Remedy. Report the base map and the prompt with every figure, and pilot both before fieldwork.
Drawing is a skill+
People who draw less are not people who know less. Age, schooling and familiarity with maps all affect how confident people feel with a pen.
Remedy. Offer alternatives: you draw while they direct, stickers on a base map, or a walk instead of a sheet.
Five maps become ‘the community’+
A handful of maps presented as the voice of a place is the classic trap of constructivist research, as the Research questions page warns.
Remedy. Say whose maps they are, how many, and who is missing.
Visibility cuts both ways+
Making local knowledge visible can serve the people who hold it, or the people who want to control their land. Chambers (2006) asks four questions of every participatory map: whose map, who is empowered and who disempowered, who gains and who loses. Peluso (1995) shows rights being redefined in the act of mapping them. The Decolonial approaches page works through a case in which residents’ mapped knowledge ended up in a developer’s file.
Remedy. Agree with participants who will see the map and what will happen to it.
Maps expose people+
Points on a map can identify homes, hiding places and informal activities.
Remedy. Aggregate, blur or leave out sensitive points, and follow the Ethics page.
The story gets lost in the GIS+
Digitising turns a narrative into a point. Evans and Jones (2011) warn that location-led, technology-driven analysis can push human experience aside, and Nold (2018) found sensor data meaningless to others until the walker explained it.
Remedy. Keep the transcript linked to every point, and quote it in the report.
Draw the region before you research it
Your own maps are outsiders’ maps. Drawing them first shows you what you assume about the region, and gives you a baseline to compare with what residents draw later.
1Draw from memory · 15 min+
Each member works alone, without a phone: draw the Q3 region on a blank A3 sheet. Include places, routes, edges, and where you think its problems are.
2Compare · 20 min+
Lay the maps side by side. What does everyone draw? What does only one person draw? Where do you put the region’s edges, and how do they compare with the official boundary? Use the four lenses above.
3Name your position · 10 min+
Write three sentences on what your group can and cannot see from where it stands. The positionality statement on the Feminist planning page shows how.
4Design for residents · 30 min+
Choose one research question that needs lived experience. Write the prompt, choose the form and the base map, name the groups you need and those you may miss, and note the ethics steps.
5Pilot · 15 min+
Test the prompt on someone outside your group. Rewrite whatever confused them.
Go deeper on this site
Maps show who experiences the problem, and where.
Whose experience counts as evidence.
Exploratory walks, care-trip and care-chain maps.
Which ways of knowing count, and on whose terms.
The session in which subjective mapping is introduced.
The texts behind this page
Boschmann, E. E., & Cubbon, E. (2014). Sketch maps and qualitative GIS: Using cartographies of individual spatial narratives in geographic research. The Professional Geographer, 66(2), 236–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2013.781490
Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied Geography, 46, 122–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.11.004
Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible cities (W. Weaver, Trans.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (Original work published 1972)
Calvino, I. (1983). Italo Calvino on Invisible cities. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, (8), 37–42.
Chambers, R. (2006). Participatory mapping and geographic information systems: Whose map? Who is empowered and who disempowered? Who gains and who loses? The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, 25(2), 1–11. https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/84 Accessed on: 7 November 2026.
Debord, G. (2006). Theory of the dérive (K. Knabb, Trans.). In K. Knabb (Ed.), Situationist International anthology (Rev. ed.). Bureau of Public Secrets. (Original work published 1958). https://bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm Accessed on: 7 November 2026.
Evans, J., & Jones, P. (2011). The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place. Applied Geography, 31(2), 849–858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2010.09.005
Gemeente Rotterdam. (2024). Wijkprofiel Rotterdam. https://wijkprofiel.rotterdam.nl/ Accessed on: 7 November 2026.
Gieseking, J. J. (2013). Where we go from here: The mental sketch mapping method and its analytic components. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(9), 712–724. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800413500926
Harley, J. B. (1989). Deconstructing the map. Cartographica, 26(2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3138/E635-7827-1757-9T53
Iconoclasistas. (2013). Manual de mapeo colectivo: Recursos cartográficos críticos para procesos territoriales de creación colaborativa. Tinta Limón. English edition: Manual of collective mapping: Critical cartographic resources for territorial processes of collaborative creation (M. B. Riveiro, Trans.). https://iconoclasistas.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Manual_Ingl%C3%A9s.pdf Accessed on: 7 November 2026.
Kitchin, R. (1994). Cognitive maps: What are they and why study them? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 14(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(05)80150-1
Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455–485. https://doi.org/10.1177/146613810343007
Kwan, M.-P. (2002). Feminist visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4), 645–661. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00309
Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. MIT Press.
Moure Pazos, I. (2013). Arquitectura escrita: Lecturas y relecturas sobre Le città invisibili de Italo Calvino. Arbor, 189(761), Article a043. https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2013.761n3011
Nold, C. (2018). Bio mapping: How can we use emotion to articulate cities? Livingmaps Review, (4). https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10045820/ Accessed on: 7 November 2026.
Peluso, N. L. (1995). Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(4), 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1995.tb00286.x
Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309
Warren, G. C., Katz, C., & Heynen, N. (2019). Myths, cults, memories, and revisions in radical geographic history: Revisiting the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute. In T. J. Barnes & E. Sheppard (Eds.), Spatial histories of radical geography: North America and beyond (pp. 59–86). Wiley.