Sketch maps, despite their intuitive, informal appearance and seemingly naïve use, are intellectual devices and efficient tools that shape the geographical imagination, regardless of the drawing skills of their makers. By delineating the silhouettes of nations, we express territorial knowledge and geopolitical stereotypes that, although shaped at school from an early age, organized the way we interact with the world. why do we still need to draw maps? What is behind our common and naturalized practice of sketching maps? This innovative book deciphers why and how the intuitive mechanisms behind sketch mapping activate multiple conscious and unconscious knowledges about place and space.