GOOD CITY FORM

BY

KEVIN LYNCH

KEVIN LYNCH Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner & author.
His most influential book include :The image of the city (1960).
What time is this place? (1972).
Good city form (1981).
Lynch studied at yale university, Taliesin (studio) under Frank Lloyd Wright.
He worked in Greensboro, NC as an urban planner but was recruited to teach at
MIT by Lloyd Rodwin.
He began lecturing at MIT the following year, became an assistant professor in
1949, was tenured as an associate professor in 1955, and became a full
professor in 1963.
Lynch provided seminal contributions to the field of city planning through
empirical research on how individuals perceive and navigate the urban
landscape.
Parallel to his academic work, Lynch practiced planning and urban design in
partnership with Stephen Carr.
Lynch died at his summer home in Martha's Vineyard in 1984.

INTRODUCTION
Kevin Lynch sets out to answer the question of what makes a good city, and
in the process provides a comprehensive discussion of urban theory.
Lynch proposes that the answer to his question lies in the development of a
general normative theory which relates the value of a city to its spatial
characteristics.
Lynch provides five criteria, plus two "meta-criteria": vitality, sense, fit,
access, control, plus efficiency and justice.
Lynch tests out his approach on city size, growth and conservation, utopian
models and planning practices.

Objectives
1) To provide readers with a more integrated and holistic approach to thinking
about and analyzing cities. In the longer run this will change the way decisionmakers consider the assets and potential of cities might be organized and
managed.
2) To offer a mental toolkit that provides readers with the cornerstones of a new
mindset and so stimulate readers own ideas to solutions for their cities.
3) To engender a critical debate amongst decision makers at different levels
and to influence the policy, strategies and actions undertaken in cities.

VALUES & CITIES

> HISTORY
Impersonal forces do not transform human settlements.
The independent and relatively sudden jump to civilization has occurred some six
or seven times in world history.
In every case, the first cities emerged only after a preceding agricultural
revolution.
New skills develop to serve the new elite.
The physical environment plays a key role in this unfolding.
The city is a "great place," a release, a new world, and also a new oppression.

Its layout is therefore carefully planned to reinforce the sense of awe, and to form
a magnificent background for religious ceremony.

Many young upper-class men, the future leaders, had been killed in the Civil War.
The motives of the transformation are clearbetter access and space for
production, an opportunity for profit in real estate development, and the control of
space in order to control the productive process and its participants.

* A THEORY OF GOOD CITY FORM 1) VITALITY

Vitality comes as close to being a pure public good as any on our list, since health and survival
are values very widely held, and threats to health are often indiscriminate in their incidence.

Like most public goods, however, vitality tends to be honored in the breach, since the cost to
anyone to increase it (or to refrain from decreasing it) may have little connection with his own
benefits.

2) SENSE
Sense depends on spatial form and quality, but also on the culture, temperament, status, experi
ence, and current purpose of the observer.
Thus the sense of a particular place will vary for different observers.
3) FIT
The fit of a settlement refers to how well its spatial and temporal pattern matches the customary
behavior of its inhabitants.
It is the match between action and form in its behavior settings and behavior circuits.
Two kinds of fit are there:1. good fit.
2. bad fit.

4) ACCESS
Cities may have first been built for symbolic reasons and later for defense, but it soon
appeared that one of their special advantages was the improved access they afforded.
Modem theorists have seen transportation and communication as the central asset of an
urban area, and most theories of city genesis and function take this for granted.

5) CONTROL
Spatial controls have strong psychological consequences: feelings of anxiety, satisfaction,
pride, or submission.
Author speak here of the control of human space.
Control may be explicit and codified, or implicit, informal, and even illegitimate, as when an
adolescent gang controls its turf.

6) EFFICIENCY & JUSTICE

Efficiency is the balancing criterion: it relates the level of achievement in some performance
to a loss m some other.
Efficiencies of settlements can be compared only by seeing which achieves the best level in
some one dimension, given a fixed amount of other values expended or achieved.
Since the values which enter the calculation are not objectively commensurate with each
other (dollars versus a clear environmental image, for example), "objective" comparisons of
efficiency can be made only when all types of costs and benefits but one are held constant.