2.Edges — boundaries of lines that help to organize cognitive maps (e.g., rivers, railroads);

3.Districts — subareas with recognizable unifying characteristics, possessing well-established cores but fuzzy borders (e.g., financial districts, skid roads);

4.Nodes — intense foci of activity (e.g., major intersections, railroad stations, corner stores); and

5.Landmarks — symbols used for orientation but which typically are not physically entered (e.g., signs, tall buildings, trees).

6.3Awareness and Activity Spaces

Mental maps are developed from individuals’ experiences within their awareness space. An awareness space is defined as:

all the locations about which a person has knowledge above a minimum level even without visiting some of them ... Awareness space includes activity space (the area within which most of a person’s activities are carried out, within which the individual comes most frequently into contact with others and with the features of the environment), and its area enlarges as new locations are discovered and/or new information is gathered. (Clark, 1990, pp. 24–25)

An activity space33 contains those areas that comprise a person’s habitual geography, made up of routinely (daily or weekly) visited places and their connecting routes (Jakle, Brunn, & Roseman, 1976). Activity space plays a central role in the Brantingham and Brantingham model of crime site selection, and therefore is an integral part of the theory underlying geographic profiling. “Where we go depends upon what we know ... What we know depends on where we go” (Canter, 1994, p. 111).

Mental maps provide the outer limits of potential action space, which may be defined as the area containing the majority of destinations of a particular individual. It is a subspace within the mental map and frequently tends to be discontinuous in the sense that stretches of unknown, possibly undesirable, territory lie between preferred areas. The configuration of action space is frequently linear, especially in automobile-oriented societies. Moreover, movement patterns defining action space may have well-marked directional biases from an individual’s home base, so elongation in one direction is offset by attenuation in other directions. (Lowe & Moryadas, 1975, p. 139)

33Some writers use the term action space for both activity space and awareness space.

©2000 by CRC Press LLC