Social Space, Mental Images of the City of Sherbrooke: Progress of a Neophyte
In this article the author presents a variety of the projects he conducted in the Geography Department at the University of Sherbrooke during the 1970s. He then retraces the English influences that marked his empirical investigations into the concepts of social space, mental maps and image of the city. In the first part, the author describes Sherbrooke’s social space as he saw it, at the same time highlighting his own application of factorial analysis to geography. In the second part, he characterizes the mental map of the city, as revealed by his research, and the links between mental structures and the urban forms they evoke. In the third part, the author presents the results of the semiotic analysis of public buildings identified in the mental map. In the last part, he explains the advantages and drawbacks of these approaches in relation to the evolution of social geography in Quebec.