We see maps on a daily basis — phones, stations, guidebooks, textbooks — and we tend to think that these maps are objective and natural depictions of the world. That’s not true, though! Every map is a socially constructed image that influences the way we view and understand the world, and creates and maintains particular discourses about our reality. Maps are necessarily different based on the creator’s worldview, and we should pay more attention to whose worldview and whose perception is being prioritized on the maps we use, and whose perspective has been left out.

What if we each had our OWN map, one that didn’t get filtered by Google Maps, or some third party’s worldview? What if we had maps that talked about the small, local details that are otherwise left out by mainstream mapmaking?

With this motivation, some of my colleagues and I hosted a subjective map workshop in Shibuya, Tokyo in 2017. We improved our methodology based on feedback and outputs, and hosted another workshop, this time in Puebla, Mexico in 2019. Each participant wandered through a specific neighborhood, taking notes of their feeling and opinions, anything and everything that mattered to them. One participant took this chance to explore her secret obsession with trash cans in Shibuya; another noted the effects of ambient sound on the atmosphere of the neighborhood. From there, each participant created prototypes of their own subjective map that could later be printed and shared with others. As I’ve watched people create subjective maps, I’ve noticed that it’s also great practice in fostering our critical eye, in challenging geographical conventions and stigma that are attached to certain places, and in proposing alternative spatial representations that tell different stories.

We don’t understand a city rationally as a journey from point A to point B. We understand and make sense of a city not only with our knowledge of the place, but also with our emotions, experiences, memories, and perceptions. In this “human geography,” each person has a unique mental map based on their own perception of the city. American urban thinker Kevin Lynch, in his famous book “The Image of the City”, posed this description of mental mapping — he says: “Most often our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all.” (Lynch, 1960, p 2.)

These mental images, these countless, layered subjective realities will, if not recorded or shared, melt away into the air. That’s the reason why personal maps like Nancy Chandler’s map of Bangkok fascinate me. These maps tell human stories, of small things that you never find on the sterilized canvas of Google Maps. They have the power to draw our attention to the unexplainable things — feelings, memories, hints of histories, and, as I needed in Bangkok, the local culture and daily life that is being lived and constantly updated by the people who live there.

I traveled to Bangkok in early 2018 for a holiday with friends. It was my first time in Thailand, and I didn’t have any prior knowledge about the city — where to go, what to do, etc. For the first few days, we visited the major famous temples and markets, all the touristic spots that are easily found on Google and in guidebooks. However, I knew something was missing.

What I was really looking for was the local culture and the daily life that is being lived and constantly updated by the people of Bangkok. For me. it’s far more meaningful to visit a local community center than to overspend at an expensive restaurant in a touristic city center. After a few days of feeling adrift in a sea of packaged experiences, I had a stroke of luck that changed the whole trip: I encountered a beautiful hand-drawn map of Bangkok by the designer Nancy Chandler at The Jam Factory, a local creative bookstore. Her map is very personal — the margins are crammed full of notes and messages to the reader. Walking Bangkok with this map, for me, was a continuous conversation with the mapmaker, who had obviously spent years flaneuring her way through every corner of the city. In other words, this map helped me to have a sense of “being there”.