Kevin Lynch's "The Image of the City"

In the interest of professional aesthetics, and so that I may copy and paste them into future footnotes and bibliographies, I am including more formal citations in this and subsequent posts.  Perhaps I will modify my previous posts as well.  But for now here is:

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1960).

           

Kevin Lynch’s 1960 volume The Image of the City had been popping up in my Amazon.com reccomendations for some time.  This past Christmas I put it on my wish list and now, in the midst of the inter-semester lull I sat down to read it.  Lynch’s book is widely cited by authors on urban topics and is one of those books that is so thoroughly influential that much of its content seemed quite familiar to me despite my lack of direct contact with it.  The Image of the City explores how people perceive cities.  Rather than focus on professionally produced images Lynch attempts to gain access to the mental images which people use to navigate the urban environment.  Lynch’s fieldwork led him to develop the concept of imageability, which he defines as, “that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer.” (Lynch, 9)  For Lynch imageability is a quality that can be maximized through urban planning and design, yielding a sense of “a distinct, unforgettable place, not to be confused with any other.” (Lynch, 102)

           

Lynch approached the problem of how people “image” the city using a novel method of interviewing inhabitants of three very different American cities (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles) regarding what they found memorable about their cities and their “imaginary trips” to various locations in them.  Lynch and his team then scoured the interviews for trends and commonalities in how interviewees perceived the city.  From the data Lynch identified five “elements” that contributed to the imageability of a place: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks (all are neatly defined in Lynch, 47-8).

           

For Lynch attending to inhabitants’ perception of the urban environment as they move through may lead to the creation of cities that are more sensuously fulfilling to live in.  A city environment with intuitive paths, well-defined landmarks, and clearly demarcated neighborhoods may even contribute to a more democratic society by providing a “guide and a stimulus for new exploration,” and “strategic links in communication.” (Lynch, 110)

           

Lynch’s method of asking city residents how they got to various destinations and what they recalled encountering along the way is particularly interesting.  As a historian, I would be tempted to read such responses for the artifacts of power which they contained.  After all, individuals’ perception of the world around them is historically conditioned and constrained.   Lynch only hints at the potential perceptual differences between city dwellers of different social classes or races, but one can imagine how fruitful using such an approach might be in the context of an oral history interview.  Indeed, it might even be possible to examine Lynch’s own work from “The Perceptual Form of the City,” the project that culminated in The Image of the City. Some of Lynch’s papers appear to be available here: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc208.html.

Happy New Year!  I hope to write a great deal more here in the upcoming months.  I took a few days off from writing to recharge my batteries, but I am paranoid that I will lose my touch if I don't commence cranking out words.  I may even jazz up the site a bit.  Maybe I will create a new site altogether, one with a more creative name!

Best,

J