Lynch, Kevin A.

Kevin A. Lynch (1918–84), a U.S. architect and planner, is best known for his practical and theoretical contributions to the psychology of place. His keystone concept of place legibility refers essentially to the ease with which people understand the layout of a place. According to Lynch, the city can be considered text to be read by every individual. The particular organization of place components determines how easy it is to read the urban configuration in order to create an adequate mental map to navigate the city. For Ethan Sundilson, “mental maps of a city are mental representations of what the city contains, and its layout according to the individual.”

Along with his studies on perception of city form, Lynch inquired about the different meanings given [Page 488]to waste. In his posthumous book Wasting Away, he went beyond the material definition of waste as “a deteriorated collection of things,” exploring the more symbolical side of wasting that includes temporal and spatial dimensions of the process of consumption. Besides being “all a nasty business,” Lynch described waste and loss as the dark side of change, a repressed and emotional subject to be redefined. Every human being regards death and most change as tragic and confusing, fearing the sense of loss. Following the same logic, Lynch described waste as a signal of loss, of growing old. Waste is both a result and the process of loss. The common words for filth are generally tense with emotion. They are not neutral. Waste is an impurity to avoid or to wash off.

Though the process of waste production was conceptualized by Lynch as a continuum with very diffuse limits, he contended that wasting is, for the sake of simplicity, normally described in polarized ways. Going back to his concept of legibility, Lynch explained that, where customary boundaries are lacking, people lose their grip on things. That is the very reason to dichotomize the idea of waste: useful or useless, front or back of buildings, efficient or wasteful, saving or spending, growth or decline, produce or consume, succeed or fail, alive or dead. Nevertheless, those dichotomies sometimes lead to absurd behavior. Cultural, economical, and ideological reasons sustain the oversimplification of terms like waste and garbage. For example, some chicken farmers complain that they cannot feed unsold market produce to their birds because it is legally defined as garbage. Dirt is an idea bound to context and culture. It is matter out of place, particularly, matter that is unpleasant, dangerous, and difficult to remove. One's style of handling dirt is a way of establishing one's character and social position. Both the pathologist and the butcher work with “living matter in fresh decay,” but the social meaning of their jobs defines a very different status and recognition.

For Lynch, defining waste as something that is out of place immediately posed a question on the definition of place as a culturally defined term. As stated by Lynch, “… in our urgent need for order and clarity, we find change and gradation hard to bear….” Waste is omnipresent, but the need for order and simplicity decrees that “… People, things, and places must be one or the other (waste–not waste), there to remain not shifting, not in-between, not partly so and partly not. …” Accordingly, Lynch also saw a dilemma: permanence, as opposed to declination, is stagnation and illness. The production of waste is a synonym of change and growth. Waste was visualized by Lynch as a necessary part of the continuum of life and death, a prime process in the spiral of change of things, living creatures, and systems. Lynch situated waste in a new, honest dimension. It is conceptualized as a normal process of the cycle of life, neither something obscure nor abject. In fact, Lynch criticized that most definitions of waste in the English language are negative. He also discussed the Latin vastus, which means “unoccupied” or “desolate.” Lynch asked if something without human presence deserves to be treated as trash, since life normally thrives in those spaces. They were not considered waste at all by Lynch.

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