From Centre to Suburbs: Investigating How Transit Maps Streamline Residents’ Spatial Representations

Abstract

Representations we hold of our cities are acquired not just through direct spatial experience, but also through maps, potentially including schematic maps like transit maps. Following Beck's pioneering work, transit maps include practical schematic modifications, with scale changes that usually result in an expansion of central regions while compressing the peripheries. But it is not yet clear whether such a distortion exists in the minds of residents, and whether it could be due to cognitive biases, or to the transit maps' influence. Here, after showing that the centre–periphery segmentation is stronger in Parisians' minds than in Londoners', we investigated reference and segmentation effects in the way residents placed landmarks on a blank background. Those effects indeed explained part of centre–periphery distortions that were found, but some angular and scale changes could still only be explained by transit maps, confirming they indeed streamline residents' spatial representations.