The Image of the City

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.

Lynch’s most famous text is undoubtedly The Image of the City. Published in 1960, it predates by one year significant works within the urban design cannon from the likes of Jane Jacobs and Gordon Cullen. On the dust jacket a reviewer from the Architectural Forum anticipated that this ‘tautly organised, authoritative volume’ may well prove as important to city building as Camillo Sitte’s The Art of Building Cities. Indeed my 1998 edition is a 26th edition, and half-a-century after its publication the book remains a core text in urban design and architecture courses throughout the world, including in Warsaw where I first encountered it as a student.

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.

Starting with two key questions – ‘What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there?’ and ‘What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller?’ - the city is not merely considered as a thing in itself, but rather Lynch explores how the city is perceived by its inhabitants in ways that amount to the creation of a mental map. The findings are developed into a theory of imageability - or, alternatively, legibility or visibility - with elements rendered measurable and therefore comparable, and formulated as new criterion for city design useful to city designers faced with building and rebuilding cities.

The legibility of place is explored through the use of questionnaire surveys and interviews with inhabitants, conducted in three different types of city in the United States. Boston was selected for its diversity with its multiple elements; Jersey City was chosen for its lack of distinctiveness; and finally, Los Angeles was included as a new typology of city. The office-based interviews that accompanied the survey included requests for descriptions of the city, along with sketch maps (a drawing of their mental map), and a description of an imaginary trip through the city. Lynch’s simplified plans allied to fragments of the interviews help bring the subject matter to life.

The results, highlighting mental representations of memorable features of the city and how they fit together, helped Lynch to isolate a small number of generic categories. These are his famous elements, often beautifully illustrated through simple, reductive graphics in the page margin; paths (the channel of the observer, which people move along on their travels); edges (breaks in continuity with the surrounding areas, for example, walls or riversides); districts (substantial two-dimensional elements with a common character); nodes (strategic points where a concentration of city features occurs); and finally, landmarks (external references points such as a significant building, monument or object that helps orientation). The five components are mixed and connected with one another, and the same features can reappear with different meanings, for example, a motorway will be experienced by a driver as a path but by a pedestrian as an edge.

For Lynch, the benefit of using such elements in design was to create a more coherent spatial organisation at large scale, so that new types of city could also have ‘sensuous form’. This hints at an interesting aspect of the book. While Lynch’s research was conducted at a time when specialist, scientific methods were becoming increasingly familiar on both sides of the Atlantic, and city planning and design was becoming more technocratic, Lynch retained an interest in people - the city user as he called them - and the reader can still see a poetic and romantic point of view. Lynch retained a belief in urbanism as art, and accords importance to the emotions of individuals and city users.

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.

However, even in the immediate years that followed The Image of the City, confidence started to dissipate, both in Lynch himself and in society at large. Sadly, Lynch ended his career amidst the heightened fears of the 1980s Cold War, fretting over ‘waste cacotopias’ and ‘the urban environment after nuclear war’. Given that these early insights have remained largely under-developed at a regional scale, today we could do far worse than re-engage with this project.