Mapping Your Childhood Place

I've just picked up my copy of Life After Cars, written by the "War on Cars" podcast hosts. They were also just guests on both the Volts and Why Is This Happening? podcasts, talking about the book.

One of the topics in the book and during the podcast discussions is about how kids who grow up being driven everywhere have no ability to map the place where they live. Sarah Goodyear, one of the "War on Cars" folks, wrote an article about this back in 2012 for Bloomberg News, based on the research of Bruce Appleyard. Among other things, he found that:

Children who had a “windshield perspective” from being driven everywhere weren’t able to accurately draw how the streets in their community connected, whereas children who walked or biked to get around produced detailed and highly accurate maps of their neighborhood street network.

I grew up in the countryside, five miles outside the very small village where I went to school, and two-plus miles from another, even smaller village that was in a different school district. I took the school bus to school, but otherwise was dependent on my mother for car trips to anywhere (or my oldest sister, for one year before she left for college).

I have fine-grained knowledge of the acres around our house because we lived and played outside without supervision. And I have strong roadside-scale memories of my bus route, and the roads I was driven on by car.

But it's true that I never understood the geography of the area I grew up in at all until I started driving myself, and that driving was supervised until I was almost 18 because I waited a long time to get my license.

And even after I was driving on my own there — mostly when home for the summer or breaks during college, or visits later — I still didn't have a sense of east and west, or how my town related to the county, and barely how that related to the larger area of New York state. Honestly, it's only in the last two decades that I realized where my little home village is in relation to the places around it.

My awareness of the space in my home area is completely different from the way I learned the places I moved as an adult (Washington, D.C., the Twin Cities — or even the two smaller cities I lived in as a college student). The way "home" feels in my head is fuzzy and shapeless to this day, even though I've studied maps of it since then and tried to overlay them on my awareness.

Daughter Number Three-Point-One was driven to school (mostly in carpools) until she was in 9th grade. After that point, she made the transition to riding our local bus system, Metro Transit, to school and it was a big win for her both in terms of knowing her city and becoming an independent person. She also walked or rode her bike in our immediate neighborhood in earlier childhood, though she didn't have the all-day, free-ranging outside play that I did, living in the country.

Though I wasn't aware of any of this when she was a child, I hope her experience made a difference in how her place-awareness developed.