Following the spatial turn of the 1980s, more and more social scientists began to use mental maps in their research. Lynch, who pioneered the use of mental maps for the wider public, was not so happy about it: he would have preferred that planners used them rather than social scientists. (Downs & Stea, 1977, p. 241). In spite of the disapproval of the founding father, mental maps are extensively used in social science research. Almost never are they being used as the sole source of information. In most cases, mental maps are collected together with interviews. We could therefore speak of mental maps as a widespread choice for a multiple- methods approach. However, this seemingly natural relegation of mental maps to a secondary method has led, I would argue, to a methodological neglect of mental maps in the first place. Beatrice Ploch has criticised the “poor interpretation” of mental maps in social sciences. She notably criticises (1) that mental maps are merely being used as illustrations; (2) that they are expected to stand as examples for general phenomena; and (3) that there is no widespread methodological discussion on this topic (Ploch, 1995, pp. 23–24). Scientists, she says, are being caught in a kind of aesthetic trap when dealing with mental maps. Instead she calls for working interpretative structures for mental maps which would enable comparisons of the findings with those gained through other methods (Ploch, 1995, pp. 23–24).
Still, there is a wide array of different forms of mental maps being used in social sciences today, which contribute to the confusion about what is actually understood as mental maps in the academic production of knowledge. We can roughly distinguish between three methods, which relate to three different kinds of interaction between speech act and cartography:
(1) In the first case, the author of the study conducts interviews and then personally locates the information thus gained on an available map. There is no interaction between the interviewees and the final outcome of the study; the spatial localisation is in the hands of the author. This possibility is the one used by Kevin Lynch. He conducted several dozens interviews with 'users' of Boston's cityscape, inquiring into the 'readability' of the city. He asked his informants about their daily commuting routines and was particularly interested in incidents where his informants
lost their orientation. He then analysed the interviews according to a row of pre-established categories (Lynch, Korssakoff-Schröder & Michael, 2001, pp. aa), namely landmarks, districts, nodes, paths and edges. In a second step, Kevin Lynch proceeded to draw schematic maps of Boston and marked the specific features according to the mentioned categories, producing a synthetic mental map of the city. With this plan in hand he identifies places which lacked 'readability', where inhabitants usually lost orientation and were overwhelmed by negative emotions. He concluded that these were the places where urban planners had work to do in order to improve the situation – for instance, providing a road with rhythmic continuity along its path, or setting up landmark buildings for an easier orientation15.
Kevin Lynch's approach responds above all to the needs of town planners. Yet also looking at the field of Central Asian studies, an example of this method can be found in Wilde's work on spatial perceptions of inhabitants of Herat in north-western Afghanistan (Wilde, 2007, pp. 119– 134). He conducted several interviews with the city's inhabitants and transposed significant locations mentioned by the interviewees, and the emotions they tied to these locations, on a map of Afghanistan and its neighbouring countries.
(2) In the second case of mental maps' use in social science, the author confronts the interviewees with a copy of a map and asks them to mark particular elements on it. Here, for instance, we can mention Brown's inquiry into queer spatial perceptions of London's East End. His method – which he described as part of an oral history project – is centred on the perception of particular sites and spaces, explicitly positioning the result as distinct from orientation- themed mental maps (Brown, 2001, p. 51), that is, from Lynch's methodology. His approach consisted in providing the interviewees, alongside with a questionnaire survey, with a black and white map of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and asked them to inscribe sites and spaces they personally perceived as “particularly 'gay'” and areas they thought of as “particularly unsafe or dangerous for gay men” (Brown, 2001, p. 50). Follow-up interviews were conducted to discuss why particular places and spaces had been identified as such. Didelon et al. propose to frame this kind of inquiry as interpretative maps, a term which does not seem appropriate to me, since other kinds of mental maps are interpretations, too. For the
15 Although Kevin Lynch argued to arrange cities in such ways, as to ensure their 'readability' by the 'users', he insisted that a “highly visible environment may have its disadvantages”. A cityscape overloaded with meanings hampers the necessary progress: “[e]ven conservative use of resources may be impaired where habitual orientation does not allow easy adaptation to new techniques and needs (Lynch, 1973, p. 314). In this light he saw, for instance, the Chinese preoccupation with geomancy as a means to overcome excessive visibility, which would help in constructing an "imageable environment that is not at the same time stifling and oppressive" (Lynch, 1973, pp. 314–315).
authors, the advantage of this method consists in an easy distinction between “the 'real' and the 'interpreted' spaces”, alongside an elimination of a bias due to individual drawing abilities (Didelon, Ruffray, Boquet, & Lambert, 2011, p. 101).
(3) As for the third kind of mental maps, the interviewees are meant to draw a map by themselves. The researcher provides a sheet of paper and a set of pencils and asks to sketch, free-hand, a map of a house, a city, a country or the whole world. In contrast to both methods described above, this method leaves the highest degree of liberty to the informants. Neither are their confronted with pre-formed spaces or pre-set frames, as with annotated maps; nor is their role reduced to a repetition of learned spatial features as in Lynch's studies. I would argue that self-drawn maps are the most participatory and empowering way to use mental maps. They allow for a self-determined spatial expression. On this footing, mental maps can be used for interpretation on par with other texts and interviews. In the following section, I will expand on how mental maps are being used in my inquiry into space production in Khujand.