ABSTRACT
The problem of understanding how individuals and groups make sense of their environments has been a theme that has surfaced in a range of social and urban geographical contexts. Studies of the urban mental maps of city residents reveal how limited and selective such cognitive images are, and how they diverge from the city’s objective geographical reality. This disjunction between environments as they are, and as they are taken to be, was of course at the heart of William Kirk’s behavioural environment model. Here, he isolated the perceived world as a distinct entity crucial for understanding both decisionmaking processes and the spatial behaviour of individuals and groups alike. Kirk’s schema proved to be widely applicable not only to historical geography, for which it was originally conceived, but also to the elucidation of the role of perception as a factor in contemporary social-geographic behaviour.
