Die Welt in unseren Köpfen

摘要

Ever since the publication of the book "Image of the City" by Kevin Lynch, the term "cognitive mapping" has become familiar as a means of evaluating the spatial environment. As such, it is part and parcel of daily life and helps us solve spatial problems. As Lucius Burckhardt queried in 1980, what do we remember of our physical world and what do we forget? How do we orient ourselves? Which elements do we assign importance to and which, ones do we see as typical? On returning as a 31-year-old planner to the path taken to school as an eleven-year-old boy in the Graca district of Bahia, Brazil, the author notices that he orients himself with the help of characteristics that his memory has stored - old palaces, elaborate paving, mango trees, an old church -while wondering why it is that he remembers these characteristics and no others. In their book "Cognitive Mapping: The World in Our Heads", the geographer Roger Downs and the psychologist David Stea provide an answer by stating that cognitive mapping is a means of coping with the sheer mass of spatial information converging in on us. At the same time, the brain also tends to exaggerate some details, overlook others and change scale and dimension. In the meantime, the familiar school of old has been replaced. The palaces have disappeared, their place is symbolically taken by the modern high-rises of today, thus wiping out many of the landmarks of the author's particular cognitive map.%Täuschen die Sinne, wenn ich jetzt durch dieses moderne, kaum wiederzuerkennende Viertel namens Graca spaziere? Was ist aus meinen Erinnerungen, aus meiner Kindheit geworden? Der Begriff „kognitive Karten" ist in der psychologischen Literatur fest verankert und seit der Arbeit „Image of the City" von Kevin Lynch ein Mittel zur Bewertung unserer räumlichen Umwelt geworden. Was bleibt im Gedächtnis, was nicht? Woran orientieren sich die Leute? Was erachten sie als wichtig, als typisch, was nicht?" fragte 1980 Lucius Burckhardt. Kognitives Kartieren gehört zu unserem Alltag, macht unser Leben beim Lösen räum- licher Probleme leichter.