Children's Cognitive Mapping: A Potential Tool for Neighbourhood Planning

We live in increasingly planned and controlled environments. The places we live, work, interact, visit, and travel through are the products of designers and planning regulations. The planners, designers, and others in the property development industry, employ a wide range of means by which to identify the needs and aspirations of the clients, the property owners, and the potential users of such spaces. But this paper is interested in a “single-user” group that has not often been routinely consulted as to its use of our everyday spaces. Children live and interact in neighbourhoods, and many of these spaces have been expressly designed as “child-centred” or “child-rearing” landscapes. Yet how can planners and designers learn more from children about their use of, and needs in, such neighbourhood spaces? Following a review of the literatures on cognitive mapping and some of the limitations and possibilities in using these types of techniques with young children, we recount here a project called KIDSMAP in which children draw mental or cognitive “maps”. Although there are limitations in the application of cognitive map work with children, we have found that they do work hard at representing places which are important to them. In this paper we review the children's maps against Lynch's well-known typology of urban design elements. Through this illustration, we hope to show how cognitive map techniques may provide one way to collect information on what is really of interest and importance to this often overlooked user “constituency”.