ABSTRACT
This selection from The Image of the City (1960) by MIT urban studies and planning professor Kevin Lynch (1918-1984) advances Lynch’s theory of how people perceive cities and an approach to urban design that has had an enormous impact on urban planning and design worldwide. The Image of the City has been reprinted more than 300 times in fifteen languages.
Lynch was a humanist who drew on history, literature, anthropology, art, psychology, and other academic disciplines and professional fields to understand how people perceive urban environments and how design professionals can respond to the deepest human needs.
Lynch argues that people construct individual composite images of a city based on five urban form elements: “paths” (along which people and goods flow), “edges” (which differentiate one part of the urban fabric from another), “landmarks” (which stand out and help orient people), “districts” (perceived as physically or culturally distinct places even if their boundaries are fuzzy), and “nodes” where activities are clustered – and often where paths meet. Lynch was convinced that humans have an innate desire to understand their surroundings and do this best if a clear city image is discernible from these five elements. Accordingly, Lynch argues that if urban designers understand how people perceive these elements and use them to good advantage urban environments will be more psychologically satisfying as well as more aesthetically appealing and efficient. Lynch pioneered the research technique of having people draw “mental maps” and analyzing them to understand how people perceived their surroundings.
