The Image of the City

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The American urban planner Kevin Lynch (1918 - 1984) was one of the most significant contributors to 20th century advances in city planning and city design. Having studied at Yale University, and Taliesin under Frank Lloyd Wright, Lynch received a Bachelor's degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where in 1948 he began lecturing and went on to become a professor. In his career Lynch wrote or co-wrote seven books, and the posthumously published collection of writing and projects City Sense and City Design offers a fascinating insight into his life’s work, and more broadly, to his shifting concerns about planning and urban design. These five elements of the mental image – paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks – are, as Lynch puts it, merely the “raw materials” involved in shaping the image. The next and most important step is, therefore, to refine these into “complexes” – the overarching system produced through harmony among the elements. The true culmination of the mental image is born from how these five elements interrelate to create a unified urban experience. This series of refinements is an ever-moving process to optimize the harmony between the city, its elements, and its inhabitants. This process has wide implications both in our roles as inhabitants and as city planners: Lynch’s hypotheses today could be modeled, for example, by artificial intelligence systems trained with data collected in real time that would warn us of areas of the city that work and those that don’t work. This would allow us, for example, to make better-informed decisions about potential interventions in public space, and to measure their effect in near real time.

For citizens residing in the cities discussed, there may be instilled a sense of belonging and better associations with the study and its findings. However, it does not stop the avid reader from other parts of the world to compare it to cities of their own and develop hypotheses for future improvement.Reconsidering the Image of the City". In Banerjee, Tridib; Southworth, Michael (eds.). Cities of the Mind: Environment, Development, and Public Policy. Springer. pp.151–161. For now, we are left with Kevin Lynch’s own argument: it is at the nodes or intersections where we make decisions, that is, where we apply “intelligence.” We stop, we think, we cross paths with other people, perhaps we meet someone we know who has come on another subway line. All this invites us to make the nodes better places: determining their limits, placing a reference point, making the node transmit the identity of the place, or designing its appearance to indicate the directions to take (avoiding, for example, the feeling of disorientation that we have when leaving certain subway stations to the surface). Designing the paths That top-down approach to urban planning found fertile ground during the dark age of totalitarism governments in the first decades of the 20th century. It worked for a clear purpose: making urban life a miserable and monotonous succession of metro-boulot-dodo. A third way a b "Preliminary Inventory to the Papers of Kevin Lynch". MIT Libraries. Archived from the original on August 21, 2008 . Retrieved May 17, 2015.

April 1954). "The Form of Cities". Scientific American. 190 (4): 54–63. Bibcode: 1954SciAm.190d..54L. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0454-54. Lynch argues that for any given city, a corresponding set of mental images exist in the minds of the people who experience that city. Contributing to those images are five qualities which Lynch identifies as Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks. [1] The Image of the City had set out to become the American urban planner , Kevin Lynch’s, most influential works in the twentieth century. A product of five endeavouring years of research and extensive study based at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A. Kevin Lynch’s “The Image of the City” is a seminal work in urban design that founded in practice a new field of work and study such as the geography of perception -or behavioural geography-. In his work, Kevin Lynch tries to comprehend and design the visible layer of the city through the image it projects in our brain. Lynch’s approach, method and results turned “The Image of The City” into one of the most influential texts in the discipline of urban design published to date. Unlike the situationists, who tried to draw the sentimental map of the city according to their own interpretation, Lynch tries to draw the mental map of the average citizen. Getting that image from the brains of those citizens onto paper, Lynch reasons, is the first step in measuring the success or failure of the landscape designer, the urban planner, and the architect. Because Lynch argues that, just as orientation (in the jungle, in the desert, in the sea) is one of the basic skills of survival, an urban landscape that offers adequate spatial orientation will favor the vitality of public space. Qualities of urban imageWe are also interested in street design because good streets mean lively neighborhoods. According to Kevin Lynch, a street becomes a real path if it is suitable for pedestrians to walk along at ease, if it has a clear sense of direction, or if it is endowed with character; for example, by the concentration of a distinctive type of commercial activity, or a special type of paving or facade.

Lynch’s psychological focus opened up a new perspective in urban planning: that of designing the city through the psychology of its inhabitants, as opposed to the idea that the city could rather be the product of a top-down process. a b c "Anne B. Lynch Loved Her Summers in Aquinnah". Vineyard Gazette. March 17, 2011 . Retrieved May 20, 2015.

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September 1965). "The City as Environment". Scientific American. 213 (3): 209–219. Bibcode: 1965SciAm.213c.209L. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0965-209. After graduation, Lynch began work in Greensboro, North Carolina as an urban planner but was soon recruited to teach at MIT by Lloyd Rodwin. He began lecturing at MIT the following year, becoming an assistant professor in 1949, a tenured associate professor in 1955, and a full professor in 1963. [8] Half-a-century on from The Image of the City, we can see this book as a fine example of how Lynch’s early work encapsulated the relatively confident outlook of the post-war era, one in which designers and planners retained faith that the new forms of city could not only be understood but also comprehensively designed: ‘only powerful civilisations can begin to act on their total environment at a significant scale’ he said. He understood his work as part of the initial attempt to provide imageability for the new functional unit of the age, the metropolitan region, and suggested that further development and testing was required, not least given his view that urbanism is in constant process of change. At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.”

be safe, something that obviously leads us to consider Tonucci’s “The city of children”: a safe city is one in which we see children playing in the street. We have many more elements of the city in our heads than we remember, so that map we draw about what we remember will always be a small subset of the many things we know about the city.Michael Batty, from his vision of the “syntax of space” argues that, if the city is a superposition of networks (transport, sanitation, social, etc.), it is at the points of exchange (nodes) that architecture is produced. Thus, the construction of a market would be the architectural consequence of the existence of a place suitable for commercial exchange. Lynch frames this complex relationship through his idea of the mental image, or how a place is perceived, experienced, and remembered. In his research, he detailed three key characteristics of a place that inform its perceived mental image. And finally, Lynch points to a fourth problem. In his view, the method fails to capture well the interrelationships between elements of the city, nor the changes in the image of the city over time (the maps produced are static). Future lines of work