A People’s Atlas of Boston

(Note: most links in this post have since gone dark, but you can still download the maps here.)

We Bostonographers are very interested in people’s personal maps, particularly Kevin Lynch style cognitive mapping, about which Tim has written a Boston-centric primer. So when one of us learns about an event about something called Notes for a People’s Atlas of Greater Boston, it is filed under “wish I’d known about it ahead of time.”

This People’s Atlas turns out to be less of a true geographic mental mapping endeavor and more of an ostensibly edgy, artistic, “maptivist” project. Still, it’s fun to see what people chose to indicate on a blank map of Boston. The template map is a (very deliberately, I’m sure) simplified map of the central Boston area, and participants were encouraged to map anything at all of personal importance or interest, albeit with many suggestions that we suspect spoil totally free thinking. The fourteen resultant maps are available for download and exhibit a variety of topics.

Browse through the PDF to see them all, but let me conclude here with the most smile-inducing map of the bunch, and possibly ever: PLACES I LIKE TO BE.

If any of the mapmakers happens by here, we’d love to hear from you!