The Image of the City

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Kevin Lynch, an urban planner and writer from the US, describes his theory on legibility of cities in his 1960 text ‘The Image of the City’. He explores the idea of “imagibility” in cities — the notion that the urban fabric is well formed and distinct. He proposes that the more legible a city (ie, the higher its imagibility), the more the city has ‘good city form.’

Parallel to his academic work, Lynch practiced planning and urban design in partnership with Stephen Carr, with whom he founded Carr/Lynch Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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. Lynch provided seminal contributions to the field of City Planning through empirical research on how individuals perceive and navigate the urban landscape. [12] His books explore the presence of time and history in the urban environment, how urban environments affect children, and how to harness human perception of the physical form of cities and regions as the conceptual basis for good urban design.

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transmit a certain sense of imperfection, of being unfinished, so that we feel we can still have an active or constructive role in it Henceforth, the author formulates five elements that help constitute an observer’s mental map- paths, edges, districts, nodes and edges. While the importance of each element and their roles are defined with examples from the three cities in focus, their interrelations and design ideas to create whole images based on their characteristic parts are also discussed.

However, the use of all these technologies and techniques in pursuit of better urban design is still in its infancy. Technologists (who know how to collect data) are not connected to urban planners (who are responsible for changing the shape of our city). And urban planners work with models and are just beginning to practice data science. Where Jacobs and Cullen viewed their works as a means to react against suburbanisation and the more expansive forms of city that emerged in the post-war era, Lynch was more prepared to grapple with how to make sense of new, more dispersed and complex metropolitan and regional patterns of living, and also the emergence of mass automobility, later made explicit in The View from the Road, co-written with Donald Appleyard and John R. Meyer. a b c "Anne B. Lynch Loved Her Summers in Aquinnah". Vineyard Gazette. March 17, 2011 . Retrieved May 20, 2015.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:

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. 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. Of these 5 elements, nodes and paths are particularly interesting in our research journey, during which we have set out to discover how urban data can help us to design higher quality and more sustainable public spaces and services. Nodes as generators of architecture Paris, Hong Kong, New York, and…where??? What makes one city very obvious and recognisable, and another nondescript and difficult to navigate?Andrade, Leonardo M.V. (2005). "Lynch, Kevin". In Caves, Roger W. (ed.). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. pp.297–298. ISBN 9780415252256 . Retrieved May 18, 2015. 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. 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. a b c Severo, Richard (May 3, 1984). "Kevin A. Lynch, Pioneer Urban Theorist". New York Times . Retrieved May 20, 2015.

There are so many possibilities that technology opens up that we think it is time to recover Kevin Lynch and remember the ultimate goal of “The Image of the City”: to contribute to making the city make us feel at home. Comfortable, safe, and important. Why is ‘good city form’ important? Because cities have the ability to provide the biological, psychological, social and cultural needs of its citizens. The efficacy of the city’s performance can be measured through its imagibility, so says the theory. We 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. Taking a walk through this type of open-air shopping mall, we can see how they fulfill the qualities that Kevin Lynch establishes for a quality public space. We know at all times where we are, where we are going, we are at ease and the place transmits a totally legible narrative. The situationists themselves could not have done better. Quoting them, how bitter their victory when the psychogeographic techniques they advocated in the 1950s for the liberation of man are used today to promote consumerism. Critique of the method 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.

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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.