You are here: wayfinding maps in the city

Debbie Kent

I have an obsession with those maps that are displayed in cities and at tourist spots, on walls or notice boards or their own free-standing supports, the ones that have the words “you are here” somewhere on them with an arrow leading to a point on the map. London has a network of them – a “wayfinding” system called Legible London, run by the official transport service, TfL [1] – while there is a similar style of standardised design in many other cities, from Bristol, Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent to Stockholm, Paris, Toronto, New York and Dublin.

At first glance these maps look like the most official kind of cartography, formal and state-approved, and designed to meet tourist board or local government-approved aims and design standards. Legible London’s design has won awards from the British Cartographic Society and the Design Business Association. Many older and more varied styles of such maps may be found, for instance, in shopping centres, big hospitals and universities, at the entrance to parkland or on the edge of a social housing estate: presumably to help visitors find their way across a landscape with the secondary aim of reassuring them that this vast and confusing space is controlled by the authorities; showing the world that this is not a wilderness or an unruly, unmappable favela with its own internal logic, but a consciously designed and orderly place where rules apply.

More recent designs may promote a specific agenda, such as the currently popular idea of the walkable city – and indeed the Legible London style of map is partly shaped by the idea of an urban space within easy reach for the walker. In a pair of circles, it shows everything within a five-minute and fifteen-minute walking distance, the so-called “pedestrian shed”. Transport for London spells out its mission, talking about its maps “bringing a new way of walking to the capital” and saying: “The planner, or 15-minute, map … helps give the user the confidence to try longer walking journeys.” In the case of Bristol, a pioneer of this style of “legible” mapping, the initiative was begun by the city council in 1996 “to deliver an information and wayfinding strategy that matched its ambition to be a leading cultural and commercial destination.”[2]

Yet I find something gently subversive about these maps – or at least, their existence as part of the street furniture. The idea of inserting a map into the very urban environment which it shows creates a paradox of sorts given the map itself is depicted somewhere within its own boundaries. To accept this means accepting the implication of an ever-shrinking progression of maps within maps within maps, the unimaginably infinite mise en abyme. The location of the board is indicated on the map, of course, by an arrow accompanied by the simple descriptive phrase: you are here. This statement is not primarily intended to locate the map within itself, however. Its aim is to co-locate the “you” in question – not a specific actual person but a placeholder for an ever-changing series of past and future map-readers, of real and hypothetical ones. Nevertheless, it includes the concrete and present “you”, who is/are inscribed into the map at the instant they (you, I) read it.

The map can become out of date and thus incorrect – in a new development, for instance, there may be buildings that now exist in reality, but are shown on the map as blank outlines described as “under construction”. But there is one statement on any such map that must remain logically true, by necessity: the point labelled “you are here”. If you were anywhere else, you could not be standing here, reading this map. So this mapped you (the tourist, the passerby, the lost person looking for guidance) are nailed to the spot as effectively as if you were caught in the crossfires of a drone. (In fact it is more accurate than the representation of “you” on Google Maps or its digital rivals, which place the map reader somewhere within a circle of probability triangulated by satellites.) Whether the lines and markings that surround the mapped you are accurate or not, you are very definitely here. The map and by implication the landscape it represents become oriented around you – literally, in the case of the Legible London displays, which use ‘heads-up’ mapping orientated in the direction the user is facing to read them.

While one would expect the buildings and roads to be more stable and less transient than a random human being, it is the map reader that is successfully located with more authority. If, in centuries to come, an archaeologist of the future were to find among the ruins of a drowned city the remnants of a Legible London map, they would automatically take on the role of the map reader and “you are here” would become the map’s only remaining true statement.

The act of placing the map in the landscape gives it another distinctive feature: it becomes subject to the same forces of weather, dirt and decay as the city around it, as well as being vulnerable to deliberate human interventions, such as graffiti, stickers, billposting, “gum residue” or cracks and ruptures in the map’s surface. Such adaptations can be seen as an unorthodox and informal response by the community to the existence of the map, whether because it has become so familiar that it is just another part of the cityscape to be decorated or abused, or because they are resisting its insistent presence (a “monolith” unit can be over 2 metres high and 40cm wide) or have embraced a strange conspiracy theory around the idea of the 15-minute city. A 2022 audit by TfL found sites for more than 3,000 signs recorded across London, but more than 500 of the signs themselves were missing.

A few years ago digital mapping and wayfinding promised to take over from the fixed maps on display boards, making some of these issue irrelevant – a company such as Living Map (no relation),[3] talks about how its maps can be tailored, personalised, updated and linked from mobile apps and websites to “large format kiosks in public spaces” – “offering endless possibilities for innovation”. This is fine in a hospital or public building – and the familiar “You are here” label is present and correct on Living Map boards – but its limitations in a well-used outdoor public space may be why non-digital wayfinding displays have endured.

Swedish company T-Kartor, which produces City Wayfinding systems for cities (its clients include London Transport), claims its inspiration lies in the work of Kevin Lynch, who researched how people make sense of a place and codified its elements as paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.[4] In Lynch’s 1960 book, The Image of the City, which came out of a study of three US cities, he is less interested in the design of physical maps and more in the design of the city itself – how the pattern of organisation of public spaces, pathways and buildings is interpreted by the people there.[5] A well-designed place is one that is easy to interpret – “legible” or imageable.

Somehow in the translation of Lynch’s mid 20th-century legible city into early 21st-century urban planning, the word legible has floated from territory to map. Says Lynch: “By the legibility of the cityscape, we mean the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern.” (Lynch 1960, 2)

This move from the physical environment to the system of symbols and signs that are used to represent it allows the city to be described as legible not because – Lynch’s goal – the differences between nodes and landmarks or paths and edges is plain to see, but because these elements have been labelled and represented. This instability between real and symbolic reintroduces the strange loop of a map display board that maps itself into the physical environment – that represents both itself and its viewer and labels this temporary pairing with the three words “you are here”.

Perhaps, though, the presence of wayfinding maps really does change the way people read the city. Discovering that a local landmark is only five minutes’ walk away, or seeing on a map that a public square is connected to a row of shops by an alleyway, can make the city easier to understand or more legible. As Lynch suggests, the image of the city can be strengthened by supplying a map: “You can provide the viewer with a symbolic diagram of how the world fits together: a map or a set of written instructions. As long as he can fit reality to the diagram, he has a clue to the relatedness of things.” (Lynch 1960, 11) By existing in physical form, the map also becomes a landmark in miniature – a potential meeting spot, say, or a turning point on a route.

In an age when everyone seems to have a phone with a map app in their pocket, these low-tech physical displays seem defiant. They serve the digitally excluded (a quarter of the UK’s population fumble with going online while 4% have no access to the internet, according to a report last year by a House of Lords committee) but also those with low phone batteries, no signal or who fear phone theft.[7] They persist and they are here, where you are, however fleetingly you pause beside them – whether you find that thought reassuring or existentially disturbing.

Notes

1. Transport for London https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/boroughs-and-communities/maps-and-sign

2. Bristol Legible City https://www.bristollegiblecity.info/

3. Living Map https://www.livingmap.com/living-map/what-is-living-map

4. T-Kartor City Wayfinding https://www.citywayfinding.com/services/

5. Lynch, Kevin. 1960.The Image of the City. The MIT Press

6. Digital exclusion report https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/digital-exclusion-in-the-uk-communications-and-digital-committee-report/