The Prospects and Problems of Integrating Sketch Maps with Geographic Information Systems to Understand Environmental Perception: A Case Study of Mapping Youth Fear in Los Angeles Gang Neighborhoods

TLDR

People’s feelings about places influence health, child well‑being, social cohesion, and resource use, and recent research across public health, planning, psychology, and sociology has adopted sketch maps combined with GIS to map the emotional dimension of urban environments, offering new insights but also raising methodological concerns. This paper reviews the literature on integrating sketch maps with GIS and uses a case study of youth fear mapping in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods to illustrate the method’s prospects and problems. The authors conduct a literature review and then apply the integrated sketch‑map/GIS approach to spatially analyze youth fear data in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods, focusing on representation and spatial analysis issues.

Abstract

How people feel about places matters, especially in their neighborhood. It matters for their health, the health of their children, and their social cohesion and use of local resources. A growing body of research in public health, planning, psychology, and sociology bears out this point. Recently, a new methodological tack has been taken to find out how people feel about places. The sketch map, a once popular tool of behavioral geographers and environmental psychologists to understand how people perceive the structural aspects of places, is now being used in concert with geographic information systems (GIS) to capture and spatially analyze the emotional side of urban environmental perception. This confluence is generating exciting prospects for what we can learn about the characteristics of the urban environment that elicit emotion. However, due to the uncritical way this approach has been employed to date, excitement about the prospects must be tempered by the acknowledgement of its potential problems. In this paper we review the extant research on integrating sketch maps with GIS and then employ a case study of mapping youth fear in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods to demonstrate these prospects and the problems, particularly in the areas of (1) representation of environmental perception in GIS and (2) spatial analysis of these data.