#1 What is this map for?

"By rearranging numeric data, reinterpreting qualitative information, coating information geographically, and building visual taxonomies, we can develop a diagrammatic visualization—a sort of graphic shortcut—to describe and unveil the hidden connections of complex systems."

--DensityDesign

Understanding urban patterns and foot traffic in one neighborhood is not difficult…
Researching the demographic characters in one neighborhood is not difficult…
Analyzing the streets physical conditions and environments is not difficult…
But do you really know the community on the street?

How to reflect people’s real life on the street? How to make the complex and invisible social and cultural networks more accessible? When we talk about the topic on walking, there is no way to avoid looking at the spatial elements of the neighborhood. However, when talking about walking and mapping, it is easy to forget “human” as the protagonist of street lives. Experts translate human beings into dots and people’s routes into lines without carefully considerations such as who the pedestrians are, why they choose certain routes, and what the experience on the street.

Based on the previous research outcomes of my thesis project, my insights on walking issue in Chinatown is that it's crucial to understand pedestrians relations with Chinatown. For example, beforehand, I assumed the primary target of my research survey would be the residents of Chinatown. However, after asking 28 people for participating the survey, there were only four people actually live in Chinatown, and there were another three respondents live nearby Chinatown. I was surprised by this result. This point also unfolds the importance of visualizing the pedestrians purpose on the streets since we cannot understand their relations to Chinatown communities, and what attract them on the street by directly observe where they stand or walk as outsiders without any interaction with people.

To engage the spatial contexts and provide more humanistic aspects of the spatially-embedded argument, this project used the idea of deep mapping. Deep maps are finely detailed, multimethod depictions of a place and the people, objects, and emotions that exist within it and which are inseparable from the activities of everyday life. These depictions may encompass the beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears of residents and help show what ties one place to another. Deep mapping, as a geographical express of neighborhoods’ value, is related to communities’ daily places, such as the streets they walk on every day, the grocery stores or bakeries they frequent most. Those points and routes make up our neighborhoods and our complex societies. Audiences of this map will feel more specific and will engage more into the discussion.