In my early days of living in Kyoto, I found myself repeating very small judgments every single day.

Before leaving the house, I would stare at a map for a while, turning the same questions over and over in my mind. Should I walk this stretch? It doesn’t look that far on the map, but if I actually walk it, won’t it take about thirty minutes? If I take the train, won’t the transfers end up being more troublesome? After getting off at the station, will I just end up walking quite a long way again? Will walking drain the energy I need for the next appointment? Or will I show up looking a little disheveled from exhaustion? These questions, in themselves, are not at all complicated. And yet, in everyday life, they kept appearing, over and over again.

At first, I assumed this was simply because I had not yet adjusted to a new environment. If I lived here a bit longer, I would naturally pick up the rhythm of the city. But even after some time, that sense of dissonance did not disappear. It simply persisted in a different form. Certain places felt, intuitively, to be “a little far,” yet when I actually walked there, the trip turned out not to be so demanding. Conversely, some places that seemed perfectly reasonable to reach by train felt, once I was on the move, as though my journey had been fragmented into tiny pieces.

Gradually, I began to realize: this was not a problem unique to Kyoto. Rather, it was the “sense of distance” I had brought with me that was not functioning well in this city.

After living in Taiwan for a long time, our understanding of distance becomes quite concrete. We know how many subway stops counts as “far,” which segments are walkable, and from where one ought to take some kind of transport. These judgments are made almost without thinking; the body simply takes care of them. This intuition is gradually cultivated through years of using the subway. The distances between stations are confirmed again and again, absorbed into the body, until they settle into a remarkably stable sense of scale.

But the moment I arrived in Kyoto, this system suddenly stopped working. I could read the map, and I knew where my destination was. Yet I found it difficult to judge what counted as a “reasonable distance” in my own mind. If I was overly cautious, my movements became fragmented and my schedule fell apart. If I pushed myself to walk, exhaustion lingered by the end of the day. That ambiguous, in-between feeling came from something quite fundamental. I had not yet found a “bodily measure” suited to this city.

This kind of “misaligned scale” does not immediately bring frustration. But, little by little, it begins to shape how one organizes daily life. You start leaving home earlier than necessary. You allow more travel time than the actual journey demands. You hesitate more before adding one more appointment to the day, because you don’t know whether the moving around alone might wear you out. These small adjustments were, in a sense, my own attempts to gradually recalibrate a sense of distance that had yet to stabilize.

And in the midst of this process, I began to notice something. To understand a city is not simply to know what landmarks it has, or what train lines run through it. It is, rather, to relearn with the body how one is supposed to move within its space.

Looking back later on those uncertain days, I now believe they were a necessary stage. Only when our original measure stops working can we begin to notice how we have been “using distance to live” up until then. And it was precisely that realization that became the starting point for my idea of overlaying subway maps on top of the map of Kyoto.

It wasn’t that I started making these maps because of a sudden flash of inspiration one day. Rather, it was because I had tried so many times to put Kyoto’s sense of distance into words, and never quite managed. When talking with friends in Taiwan, I would explain, “Actually, many places here are within walking distance.” They would usually ask back, “But how far is that, in the end?” I tried answering in terms of time too: “About twenty minutes of walking.” But to someone who has never lived here, that number remained quite abstract.

It was then that I thought: rather than searching for new adjectives, perhaps it would be better to use something everyone already knows as a kind of “translation.” For me, the most intuitive tool was the subway.

I wasn’t trying to use the subway to judge whether one city is better or worse, nor to compare which urban system is more advanced. What was clear to me was just one thing: I myself knew the scale of the subway extremely well. It is a kind of bodily sense, one I can understand almost without thinking. So I decided to place that familiar spatial structure directly onto the map of Kyoto.

When making the maps, I deliberately set a few constraints for myself. First, only the single most symbolic station would be used as the reference point for alignment, and no other positions would be adjusted. The same exact scale would be used for every city. And blank spaces would be left as they were, without being filled in or visually refined.

What I wanted to see was: under such conditions, what does the city itself begin to say?

The first one to be completed was the Taipei map.

The moment I placed the Taipei subway route map over the map of Kyoto, aligning Taipei Main Station exactly with Kyoto Station, I stood still for a while, looking at the screen. Something that had until then been somehow vague suddenly took on concrete form. It felt as though “my spatial intuition was being recalibrated once again.” For the first time, I came to understand the radius of my daily life in Kyoto in a distinctly Taipei-like way.

Since starting university, I have lived in the Taipei and New Taipei urban region. The Taipei subway system has been, for me, almost like a measuring tool embedded in the body. I know roughly how far “three stops” is, and I know what kind of time, mental, or physical cost a “single transfer” implies. When I applied this spatial sense, trained through daily life, directly to Kyoto, many of the dissonances I had previously struggled to articulate suddenly acquired a comparable language.

For instance, by Taipei’s standards, I realized that the active range of central Kyoto is, in fact, like a highly compressed inner-city subway zone. The difference is that this core zone is not connected by subway. Its role is delegated to walking, cycling, and the dense, precise bus network. The distances themselves haven’t changed. What has changed is what people are expected to “digest” within those distances. Kyoto is not a city of unusually long distances. It is simply a city that does not rush to compress them.

In Taipei, the subway is infrastructure that actively intervenes in daily life. In an environment where roads can be unfriendly to pedestrians, the subway has become the primary choice for urban living. It does not just shorten commute times; it has redefined what counts as a “daily commuting circle.” Many regional movements we take for granted are, in fact, made possible only because the subway has absorbed the cost of distance in advance.

By contrast, Kyoto is a city that leaves distance on the surface. People walk on their own feet, wait for buses, and sometimes take detours to face that distance. This is not so much a matter of efficiency as a difference in how life is organized. Once I read Kyoto through the Taipei route map, I no longer rushed to ask, “Why isn’t there a subway here?” Instead, I began to ask: in a city that does not rush to compress distance, how is daily life put together?

The answer is not at all abstract. It shows up directly in everyday choices. Do you change your destination just to shave off ten minutes of walking? Do you wrap up the day a bit earlier because the way home is far? Or do you redefine, within “walking distance,” what kinds of functions your life really needs? In Taipei, such questions rarely come to the foreground, because the subway has already resolved them. But in Kyoto, they are asked again and again, day after day.

This is exactly why placing the Taipei route map within Kyoto makes the choices each city has made far clearer. Taipei is a city that has won freedom of movement through speed, while Kyoto is a city that tries to keep the boundaries of life through distance.

And this understanding did not come from some official urban planning document. It emerged from a few “life maps” born of forcibly overlaying two cities. It reminded me that the scale of a city is not merely the outcome of spatial design, but the accumulation of how, over a long time, people have learned to move, organized time, and come to imagine what life is.

When that scale is laid out before you, many judgments suddenly become clear. Which segments are reasonable to walk, and from where it is more natural to take transport. These decisions are no longer left to feeling alone. And it was around that time that I realized: these maps might be useful not only to me.

After releasing the Taipei map, I actually had no immediate plans to make another. But messages started coming in, one after another.

One person bluntly asked, “What about Kaohsiung?” Another said, “I don’t really know the Taipei subway, but could you do other cities too?” As I watched these responses come in, I began to notice something important. We so easily treat the “Taipei spatial sense” as a default standard, but for many Taiwanese, it is by no means an everyday reference. A Taipei-centric way of understanding space may have been quietly covering over the lived experience of most people.

So I decided to make the Kaohsiung version.

This time, I chose Formosa Boulevard Station as the central reference point, aligning it with Kyoto Station, and overlaid Kaohsiung’s metro and light rail on the same map. This choice in itself reflects how I understand Kaohsiung. That is, Kaohsiung is less a city that radiates from a single center than a city formed by multiple intersecting axes.

In the process of drafting, one detail made me pause. After the overlay was complete, the northern lines of Kaohsiung’s subway were slightly clipped at the edge of the map. Meanwhile, a large blank area appeared in the lower-left corner.

That blank area carries no annotation. But it is honest. It reminds you that Kaohsiung is a city that has developed along the coast. A subway route map does not extend into the sea. The boundary of the city is, by its very nature, already drawn there.

And after seeing this structure, when I looked again at Kyoto, its concentration became all the more apparent. Over a long time, the activity of Kyoto has been contained within a relatively compact range. Its living functions, schools, shrines and temples, and commercial districts are arranged without extreme separation from one another.

For me, this Kaohsiung overlay was not simply about meeting the expectations of many. Rather, it was the first map that showed, in a relatively honest form, what different cities have each chosen on the surface of space.

If Taipei was born from intuition, and Kaohsiung was created in response to people’s reactions, Taichung was the map I only finally drew after thinking it over again and again. What truly stalled me was a question that, at first glance, seemed very simple, but was in fact crucial. That is: where exactly should the “center of Taichung” be placed?

From the perspective of transport infrastructure, Taichung HSR Station is a very persuasive candidate. It is also the terminus of the metro’s Green Line, and for many people, the first place they enter or leave Taichung. Yet whenever I placed the cursor there, something didn’t quite sit right. The street structure of Taichung has not expanded around the subway. The central district, the old town, the main arteries, and the heart of commercial activity have grown outward slowly over a long time, with Taichung Station as the core.

When you look at the map, Taichung’s road network shows a clear shape: radial lines and grid patterns intersecting. There is an urban rhythm in which “the streets came first, and then transport followed.” The arrival of the Green Line plays more the role of connecting nodes that developed later, rather than rewriting the original center of life.

Based on this understanding, I ultimately chose Taichung Station as the reference point. It is not because it is romantic, nor because it is old. It is because aligning here pulls out the sense of time from within the city.

When I overlaid Taichung Station onto Kyoto Station, placing them on a single map at the same scale, what I was looking at was no longer just the position of subway lines. The traces of how the city had been organized rose to the surface.

And along that axis of contrast, the spatial logic of Kyoto came into still sharper view.