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Towards cartography of the urban: Totally urbanized spaces of mental images
An intervention of Lefebvrian concept of urban revolution & “double illusion” towards human
geography turns a cultural landscape into totally urbanized & differentiated real-and-imagined place.
A city is seen as a totality of physical (perceived), mental (conceived) and social (lived) spaces.
The concept of planetary urbanization elaborated by Christian Schmid uses this Lefebvrian
intervention to change the notion and the understanding of the urban. The urban is no longer seen as
an empirical object (e.g. a settlement type), but a theoretical category, a multidimensional process of
concentration, extension and differentiation. The urban thus embrace the entire World around under
the condition of Lefebvrian total urbanization, namely the ocean, the space and whatsoever. Posturbanity
as a term is also used to describe the post-modern condition of what was previously argued
to be urban spaces.
This paper aims at the research of the cartography as a means of envisioning of this urban
change. We analyze the databases and the cartography of geographical imaginative spaces. Those are
the spaces of our mental images, or the spatial representations of the urban.
A review of new and old cartographic means and approaches towards mapping the spatial
representations is at the core of our research.
Mental maps and the traditional cartographic products together with GIS are used to reflect
the perception and imagination of urban space. However, those representations may be only studied
through the medium of various data and sources reflecting our spatial imageries. GIS models are used
to visualize those geographical imaginative spaces.
Funding. The study was funded by the Russian Foundation of Basic Research, project no. 18–
35–00160.