How Well Do You Know Your City's Boundaries?

Tanvi Misra shares news of the new mapping project by Alasdair Rae, an urban scholar at the University of Sheffield, U.K., who is crowdsourcing maps of the mental boundaries of cities.

Rae's own words describe this project:

Sometimes official city boundaries extend far beyond the urban fabric, and sometimes they don't include very much of it at all. I want to see what people consider to be part of their city, or not. All the drawn boundaries on this site come from your contributions.

Yes, you can draw your own map, and, yes, you can view previous mapping attempts. 

Misra notes two takeaways. First, "[f]or many, the paths they take to move around the city become its de-facto borders. M25, the highway that circles London’s core, for example, is a popular option."

Second, the "map confirms what we’ve known for a while—that how our mind recalls the space around us depends heavily on the landmarks and routes that we know and take."