Urban alienation grows with the mental unmappability of city space

Evidence

His problematic, to be sure, remains locked within the limits of phenomenology, and his book can no doubt be subjected to many criticisms on its own terms (not the least of which is the absence of any conception of political agency or historical process). My use of the book will be emblematic or allegorical, since the mental map of city space explored by Lynch can be extrapolated to that mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms. Drawing on the downtowns of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, and by means of interviews and questionnaires in which subjects were asked to draw their city context from memory, Lynch suggests that urban alienation is directly proportional to the mental unmappability of local cityscapes. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 889

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines cognitive mapping as the synthesis of Althusser and Lynch — mental map of global totality extrapolated from city maps.
• QUESTION: Core falsifiability test for the reader: can we actually measure ‘mental unmappability’ of global social totality, or is the extrapolation purely allegorical?
• XREF: The claim that urban alienation tracks unmappability is testable and echoes legibility debates (Jacobs vs. plan-based urbanism). — connects to: Space homogenization clashes with place-based identity, fueling political antagonism — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1628; Psychic well-being fundamentally depends on the existence of public space — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1503; Loss of connected public space sustains the feeling that no alternative exists — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2107