Prepared By:-Shifa Goyal B.Arch 2016-21 Roll No. 22 Faculty of Architeture Urban Planner and Author

URBAN PLANNER AND AUTHOR
Prepared by:- Shifa Goyal

B.Arch 2016-21
Roll No. 22
Faculty of Architeture
 Kevin Andrew Lynch (January 7, 1918 – April 25, 1984) was an American urban planner and
author.
 He is known for his work on the perceptual form of urban environments and was an early
proponent of mental mapping.
 His most influential books include The Image of the City (1960), a seminal work on the perceptual
form of urban environments, and What Time is This Place? (1972), which theorizes how the
physical environment captures and refigures temporal processes.
 A student of architect Frank Lloyd Wright before training in city planning, Lynch spent his
academic career at the Massachusetts, teaching there from 1948 to 1978.
 He practiced site planning and urban design professionally with Carr/Lynch Associates.
 Lynch's most famous work, The Image of the City, is the result of a five-
year study on how observers take in information of the city. Using three
American cities as examples (Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles), Lynch
reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and
predictable ways, forming mental maps with five elements:
 paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people
travel;
 edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
 districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some
identity or character;
 nodes, focal points, intersections or loci;
 landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as external reference
points.
 In the same book, Lynch also coined the words “imageability" and
“wayfinding". Image of the City has had important and durable influence
in the fields of urban planning and environmental planning.
1. LEGIBILITY
 It means the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent
pattern, so a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily
identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern.
 An urban system has to be held legible, through definite sensory cues
its image has to be perceived by the observer, arbitrarily selected by the community and
finally manipulated by city planners.
 Then he explains the terms wayfinding and navigation and the principles of wayfinding in the
modern city.
 In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized
mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the
product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to
interpret information and to guide action.
Principles for effective wayfinding include:
 Create an identity at each location, different from all others.
 Use landmarks to provide orientation cues and memorable locations.
 Create well-structured paths.
 Create regions of differing visual character.
 Don't give the user too many choices in navigation.
 Use survey views (give navigators a vista or map).
 Provide signs at decision points to help wayfinding decisions.
 Use sight lines to show what's ahead.
2. BUILDING THE IMAGE
 Environmental images are the result of a two-way process between the observer and his
environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer with
great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes selects, organizes, and endows with
meaning what he sees.
 There may be little in the real object that is ordered or remarkable, and yet its mental picture
has gained identity and organization through long familiarity. One man may find objects easily
on what seems to anyone else to be a totally disordered work table.
 As manipulators of the physical environment, city planners are primarily interested in the
external agent in the interaction which produces the environmental image. Different
environments resist or facilitate the process of image-making.
 So the planners try to create an image to which the majority of people agree on.
3. STRUCTURE AND IDENTITY
 An environmental image may be analyzed into three components: identity, structure, and
meaning.
 A workable image requires first the identification of an object, which implies its distinction
from other things, its recognition as a separable entity. This is called identity.
 Second, the image must include the spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer
and to other objects i.e. the structure.
 Finally, this object must have some meaning for the observer, whether practical or
emotional.
 Thus an image useful for making an exit requires the recognition of a door as a distinct entity,
of its spatial relation to the observer, and its meaning as a hole for getting out. These are not
truly separable. The visual recognition of a door is matted together with its meaning as a
door.
 If it is our purpose to build cities for the enjoyment of vast numbers of people of widely
diverse background—and cities which will also be adaptable to future purposes—we may
even be wise to concentrate on the physical clarity of the image and to allow meaning to
develop without our direct guidance.
4. IMAGEABILITY
 That quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in
any given observer.
 It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified,
powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment.
 A highly imageable city in this peculiar sense would seem well formed , distinct , remarkable ;
it would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention and participation .
 In the United States , one is tempted to cite parts of Manhattan , San Francisco , Boston , or
perhaps the lake front of Chicago.
 Since image development is a two-way process between observer and observed , it is possible
to strengthen the image either by symbolic devices , by the retraining o f the perceiver , or by
reshaping one' s surroundings . You ca n provide the viewer with a symbolic diagram o f how
the world fit s together : a map or a set of written instructions.
Kevin Lynch found that there are five basic elements which people use to construct
their mental image of a city:
1. Pathways
2. Edges
3. Districts
4. Nodes, and
5. Landmarks
1. PATHS
• Paths are the channels along which the

observer moves.
• They may be streets, walkways, transit lines,
canals, railroads.
• People observe the city while moving through
it , and along these paths the other
environmental elements are arranged and
related.
2. EDGES
 Edges are the linear elements not used as paths by the
observer.
 They are the boundaries and linear breaks in continuity:
shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls.
 These edge elements , although probably not as dominant
as paths , are for many people important organizing
features , particularly in the role of holding together
generalized areas , as in the outline of a city by water or
wall.
3. DISTRICTS
• Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city
which the observer mentally enters "inside of," and which
are recognizable as having some common, identifying
character
• Always identifiable from the inside , they are also used
for exterior reference if visibe from the outside
4. NODES
 Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which
an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to
and from which he is traveling.
 They may be primarily junctions or concentrations which
gain their importance from being the condensation of
some use or physical character, as a street-corner
hangout or an enclosed square.
 Some of these concentration nodes are the focus and
epitome of a district , over which their influence radiates
and of which they stand as a symbol . They may be called
cores.
5. LANDMARKS
 Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in
this case the observer does not enter within them, they
are external.
 They are usually a rather simply defined physical object:
building, sign, store, or mountain.
 They are frequently used clues of identity and even of
structure, and seem to be increasingly relied upon as a
journey becomes more and more familiar.
VISUAL ELEMENTS OF BOSTON
VISUAL ELEMENTS OF NEW YORK CITY
 https://www.slideshare.net/rajapukai/image-of-the-city-kevin-lynch-case-study
 http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/1960_Kevin_Lynch_The_Image_of_
The_City_book.pdf
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_A._Lynch
 http://architectureandurbanism.blogspot.com/2010/09/kevin-lynch-image-of-city-
1960.html

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URBAN PLANNER AND AUTHOR

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• Paths are the channels along which the

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