Kevin Lynch (1918-1984) was a significant contributor to twentieth-century city planning and

city design. He was educated at Yale University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and most
notably, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a professor at MIT in 1963, and
eventually earned professor emeritus status. Aside from research and teaching, Lynch was
consultant to the state of Rhode Island, New England Medical Center, Boston Redevelopment
Authority, Puerto Rico Industrial Development Corp., M.I.T. Planning Office, and other
organizations.
Lynch produced seven books during his outstanding career. In his most famous work, Image of
the City (1960), he described a five-year study that used Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City
as case studies. His research revealed which elements in the built structure of a city are
important in the popular perception of the city.

KEVIN LYNCH: THE IMAGE OF THE CITY

NOVEMBER 1, 2016 ANDREA GIBBONS 5 COMMENTS

Kevin Lynch — he’s been on my list of folks to read forever on

architecture and cities and space, and with reason as The Image of the City is rather brilliant. He
writes:
Looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the sight
may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one
of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time. City
design is therefore a temporal art… 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 surrounding, the
sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. (1)
I love this nod to the overwhelming — and mostly pleasurable — nature of the city, the ways it
works in both space and time, and like Lofland, Whyte, Cullen, Gehl and others, he is clearly
writing as someone with an appreciation for city life. It is a life that is in many ways collectively
constructed:
Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by
millions of people of widely diverse class and character, but it is the product of
many builders who are consonantly modifying the structure for reasons of their
own… No wonder, then, that the art of shaping cities is an art quite separate
from architecture or music or literature. (2)
In The Image of the City, Lynch’s focus is primarily looking at what he calls the ‘legibility’ of the
cityscape — how we read cities and how understanding that can help us (re)build better cities.
Why is legibility key?
A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of
emotional security. He can establish an harmonious relationships between
himself and the outside world…(4)
I love this quote even more…

a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens
the potential depth and intensity of human experience. Although life is far from
impossible in the visual chaos of the modern city, the same daily action could
take on new meaning if carried out in a more vivid setting. (5)
This is not to go against the many authors who write about the unknown, Lynch emphasises that
this not to deny the value of labyrinth or surprise, but under two larger conditions — where there
is no danger of losing basic

orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an over-all

framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole…. Complete
chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable. (6)
Another important qualification, the power of human beings to shape the urban environment:

The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and have
a creative part in developing his image. He should have the power to change
that image to fit changing needs… what we seek is not a final but an open-
ended order, capable of continuous further development. (6)
So to understand how this all works, he book tries to get at the ways people understand and read
cities, the

‘public images,’ the common mental pictures carried around by large numbers
of a city’s inhabitants… (7)
I love maps, and so found this a fascinating way to examine people’s relationships to the urban
form, splitting it into useful divisions to be examined:

The mental maps that are shared of streets and landmarks. These are analyzed
in terms of identity (its recognition as a separable entity), structure (the spatial
or pattern relation of the object to the observer and other objects) and meaning
(for the observer, whether practical or emotional). (8)
Above all in understanding legibility is this:
imageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of
evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or
arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully
structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. (9)
A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city in this peculiar sense
would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite the eye and the
ear to greater attention and participation. The sensuous grasp upon such
surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also extended and deepened.
Such a city would be one that could be apprehended over time as a pattern of
high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected. The
perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without
disruption in his basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many
previous elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move easily. He
would be highly aware of his environment. The city of Venice might be an
example of such a highly imageable environment. (10)
Venice again, but I think this is definitely how a city works best, and this imageablity is the center
of his study of Boston, LA and Jersey City. What follows is a really interesting way of mapping out
perceptions of the city through surveys and interviews. The maps are brilliant:

Particularly interesting is the look at problems, as in the ‘Problems of the Boston image’ (p 24 —
though you won’t be surprised to find that Boston has fewer problems than the other two):
This marks what Kevin Lynch describes as the

confusions, floating points, weak boundaries, isolations, breaks in continuity,

ambiguities, branchings, lacks of character or differentiation. (25)
Of course it beats both Jersey City and Los Angeles hands down as a memorable, enjoyably
walkable and legible city. I do myself have a great soft spot for Boston. I thought I’d go into more
detail on LA in a second post, as it is my own city after all. It also highlights Lynch’s limitations,
but there is much to be mined from the book.

First, what development has done to the US city centre:

There is the same piling-up of blank office structures, the same ubiquity of
traffic ways and parking lots (34).
This has made them almost indistinguishable from one another, Lynch notes Jersey City as the
least distinguishable of all — funny that what people most loved about it was the view of New
York’s skyline on their horizon.

Common themes between the cities:

…people adjust to their surroundings and extract structure and identity out of
the material at hand. The types of elements used in the city image, and the
qualities that make them strong or weak, seem quite comparable between the
three…
In terms of broad themes, the key favourite aspects of all cities were space and views:

Among other things, the tests made clear the significance of space and breadth
of view (43) … there was an emotional delight arising from a broad view, which
was referred to many times. …
Natural landscapes:
The landscape features of the city: the vegetation or the water, were often
noted with care and pleasure. (44)
Also a deep sense of the spatialities of class (race is not discussed at all, except in an oblique
way, a truly blindingly un-scholarly way which the post on LA will deal with more)

Quite as apparent is the constant reference to socio-economic class: the

avoidance of “lower class” Broadway in Los Angeles, the recognition of the
“upper class” Bergen Section in Jersey City, or the unmistakable division of
Boston’s Beacon Hill into two distinct sides.
Space and time:

… the way in which the physical scene symbolizes the passage of time… (45)
So in broad strokes, there is a lot to think about here… the next post gets into the nitty gritty of
design elements and physical space.

[Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]