How often do we navigate a new place without a map? These days I’d hazard to guess almost never. Even on the rare occasions we indulge ourselves in some aimless wandering around a foreign city, there’s almost always recourse to Google Maps sooner or later. Sometimes it’s to find a place but, more often than not, it’s just a pressing need to know where we are and where we’re headed.
So what happens when you lose the map? Moreover, what happens when you lose the map and pursue a geographical goal you’d ordinarily rely on it for?
This question has led me to a movement project which I’m calling No Map Completion (NMC).
Put simply, NMC is an attempt to walk/run every single street of a suburb without the use of a map. You can look at a map beforehand, but not during. Success hinges on covering every street without missing any – something which can only be confirmed by looking at a map of one’s route after the fact.
The origins
Some time ago, I read about Rickey Gates’ Every Single Street project. It’s a fantastic idea and one that has led people to tick off entire cities after meticulously running along every public roadway. Yet the scale of the project means it’s virtually impossible to complete without a map.
It got me wondering whether one could achieve completion of a smaller area totally map-free. This wouldn’t just be a test of navigational skill, but it would also offer – I believed – a way to get to know a contained, suburban environment more intimately than any other means of travel could offer. Not only would you see every part of it, but you’d do so without constantly checking your phone, looking for directions, or sticking to a route that’s optimised in advance. This in turn would mean becoming mentally attuned to the feel of the suburb, the flow of its streets, and its particular ‘aesthetic’ in order to understand where it begins and ends, and which way one should go.
The role of the map
The irony of NMC is that it does rely on a map to confirm whether or not you’ve covered every street after the fact. For this I’ve been using the kind of unreliable, but mostly satisfactory Nike Run Club app.
Maps are also vital before an attempt just to get to know the general bounds of the target area and key waypoints. That said, carefully studying the map in advance defeats the purpose. Cursory scanning is best.
Choosing a location
The other indispensable role of the map is to help in choosing a target suburb. Theoretically you could do NMC anywhere, but it’s unnecessarily difficult in farms of identical project homes that are virtually impossible to tell apart – which rules out a good chunk of modern Australian suburbia.
Instead, I like to find suburbs whose planning or geography has some point of difference when viewed on the map. It might stick out into bushland as an outlier of the main suburban sprawl, or be hemmed in by water on multiple sides (Sydney has many of these). These are likely to be much easier to navigate once the map disappears, because you’ve got natural boundaries to orient yourself.
Even better is a place that has some sort of aesthetic or cultural distinction. One that stands out from mass-produced subdivisions or jungles of sterile apartment blocks. Daceyville in Sydney is an example, being one of Australia’s first masterplanned public housing communities with a crumbling federation aesthetic to match. Same with Kurnell, whose company-town meets 70s holiday village feel exists in a completely different universe to the rest of Sydney.
More often than not, however, it’s a mental pull. I’m often drawn to these places because they promise to give me, somehow, a visual and experiential language for understanding the places in my own head. Previously I would just go for a walk in these places of psychological interest, and sometimes I still do, but being forced to experience and intuit them in this fashion without a map gives me a much greater sense of knowing; both of the place and of myself.
Jackson's Ephemera 
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