Lynch, Kevin

Image Studies

In contrast to the prevalent Beaux-Arts and modernist traditions of city design, Lynch was committed to defining a new practice of design that would be informed by the human experiences of the built environment. By asking people to draw maps of their cities, and to tell what came to their mind first when they thought of their city, or to describe what the experience of the city meant to them and how that affected their sense of well-being, Lynch demonstrated how it is possible to construct a collective or consensus image of the city. This “public image”—as he preferred to call it—consists of a collection of the physical features of the city that consistently appear in individual mental maps of the city: certain streets, significant buildings, functional districts, important public spaces, concentration and intensity of activities, major streets and roads commonly traveled, natural elements like rivers and hills, and so on. He suggested that such frequently mentioned elements shown in individual maps or included in the aggregated public image can be categorized as districts, edges, landmarks, nodes, and paths, although the respondents may not consciously use such rubrics. These concepts, however, are now routinely used in the practice of urban design.

Lynch argued further that some cities are more “imageable” than others, and this depends on the legibility of the urban form. What makes a city more or less legible? It is a function of three things, he proposed: identity, structure, and meaning. Cities that have buildings and natural features with strong identities, street patterns that are easy to comprehend, and other form elements that have functional and symbolic meanings are likely to be more imageable than cities lacking such attributes.

Considered a seminal work, The Image of the City inspired both practice and pedagogy of city planning and design, on the one hand, and scholarly research on the other. Many urban design projects in U.S. cities to this day begin with an imageability study in an effort to understand how the form of a city is perceived by lay citizens and whether that conforms to the planners' own understanding and intuitions of the significant features of the city. But his theoretical insights about imageability—that is, identity, structure, and meaning, which would seem to have more relevance to city design policies—did not seem to take deep roots in the world of practice. Instead, the taxonomy he proposed for describing city image—districts, edges, landmarks, nodes, and paths—became a popular methodological tool for analyzing the visual form of cities.

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