MENTAL MAPS AND GEOGRAPHIC SPACE IN NAGOYA

Abstract

There seem to be two approaches to the study of intra-urban mental maps, spatial and behavioral. Both approaches are common to considering the continuity of spatial image of the city which is assumed to be composed of elements suggested by Lynch (1960), but there are differences between them. The spatial approach explains the mental map by means of spatial attributes such as distance, direction and location. The behavioral approach at first defines the mental map as an operational concept, and then explains the map in the context of spatial extent determined by the conceptual homogeneity in the geographic (real) space. Thus, one of the important differences between them is the notion of the continuity in mental maps. In this paper, using these approaches, the author examined mental maps of high school students in Nagoya. (Concepts) The author used Adams' hypothesis for the spatial approach. Adams assumed that a typical resident's mental map of the city normally should be the shape of a wedge pointed at the central business district (Adams, 1969, p. 307). As behavioral concepts, action space and others were adopted. Action space is the collection of all urban locations about which the individual has information and the subjective utility or preference he associates with these locations (Horton & Reynolds, 1971, p. 37). (Methodology) The study area Nagoya was divided into 128 cells as shown in Fig. 2. As the name of each cell, a bus stop was selected from each cell, and the high school students were asked whether they “knew” or they did “not know” the name of the bus stop. Freshmen at twelve high schools were asked to complete the questionnaires for this investigation, and 1, 050 students responded. In order to examine the wedge shaped mental maps, the study area was divided into five sectors (Fig. 2), and the respondents were also classified into five groups on the basis of their residences. Trend surface analysis was employed to analyze the spatial aspect of the mental maps, and Hayashi's Suryoka 3 rui* to analyze the behavioral aspect. The analyses proceeded in the following order: (1) simple ratio analysis, (2) trend surface analysis, and (3) Hayashi's Suryoka 3 rui. (Results) (1) Simple ratio analysis It was revealed that respondents recognized well the cells in their home sectors (Table 2, Fig. 3). (2) Trend surface analysis As a whole, the high school students recognized very well the city center cells, but they did not recognize the surrounding cells so well (Fig. 4-a). The trend surface of the entire city shows a concentric structure. The results of the analyses of individual sectors (Fig. 4-b_??_f) demonstrate that the respondents knew well the cells in their home sectors. The sector analyses support the hypothesis of wedge shaped mental maps. (3) Suryoka 3 rui This analysis indicated that the intra-urban mental map did not have a spatially concentric structure. Rather, the map was affected by the objective spatial structure of the city. The scattergram of Suryoka 3 rui (Fig. 6) shows that the distribution of cells are almost identical to the geographic space in terms of direction, but the distribution is not coincident with the geographic space in terms of distance from the city center. (Discussion) In the results of the trend surface analyses, there are two phenomena which deviates from Adams' hypothesis. They are that (1) in home sector, there are many cells of which the observed values are considerably lower than the theoretical values (Fig. 5), i.e., their residuals are smaller than -10%, and (2) there are many well-known cells outside of the home sector, where the residuals are greater than 10% (Fig. 5). The author reexamined these points in the scattergram.