Mapping the Development of Feelings about the City: A Longitudinal Study of New Residents' Affective Maps

Abstract

Although many geographers have argued that the individual's behaviour in the environment relates as much to his feelings about this environment as they do to his knowledge of it, most empirical studies of cognitive mapping have so far not attempted to encompass such affective factors. However, the nature and development of an individuals's affective image of the city-his feelings and impressions about places--can be mapped using Wood's experimental mapping language, Environmental A, in the same way as sketch maps have been used to study the individual's knowledge of places as a 'cognitive map'. As a sample of new residents of a city developed their 'affective maps' over a period of three months, there was evidence that the main character- ization of the city had already stabilized after three weeks. The first few hours' impressions may derive from the confirmation or disconfirmation of various expectations about the physical appearance of the city; these are quickly supplanted by a new or modified set of feelings as the individual increases not only his knowledge but his involvement with particular places within the city. Although considerable individual differences in style of affective mapping were found in this study, these did not relate to indices of environmental sensitivity, or to the sex or previous mobility of the subject; nor did such stylistic differences indicate that consensual images of places failed to emerge. Rather, Environmental A proved to be a mapping language sensitive enough to measure consensus feelings about the city's different sub-areas; and it is recommended that further use is made of the language in future empirical research in environmental perception.