Book Review

Of

Guided By : Submitted by:

Ar. Mrudul Deshmukh
Ar. Tushar Paithankar F.Y. M.arch
Ar. Razi Khan M.I.T., Aurangabad.

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Summary:

Urban planner Kevin Lynch, in his seminal 1960 book The Image of the City, sets out to show
how people in urban settings orient themselves by the use of “mental maps.” The purpose,
ultimately, is to make practical contributions to his own field, still it is a worthwhile read even
for those with more abstract interests in cities. It identifies design problem of the city, existing
or a new. Perception and association trigger the visual form giving flexibility to the user to
identify and organize different element of his surrounding environment to develop mental
image of the city.

Basic parts:

The book basically can be divided into two part, one explains imageability as the theory of
visual form and other focuses on the validity of imageability in today’s environment.

The first part talks about the imageability as a visual aid to recognize and organize the
surrounding environment and perceiving the city as whole. It goes on explaining the elements
that support visual notions and give references towards certain directions. Thus, they become
very important. This way spatial organization with their surrounding will have overall and
generalized visual perception and ultimately will give the identity. It may be through streets,
roads, open spaces, landmarks, boundaries. All of these are the physical elements playing
important role in building the image of the city.

In the second part the approach seems more practical. The theory of visual perception is
then based on it. Also, the overall process has been analysed for the entire study which
suggests, a lot of other things are responsible in building image of the city. It can differ from
person to person but to identify generalized image, the study covers common views and
images gathered through a method of involving people to the city. So, from that it is clear that
the book is the perspective to the city from certain elements and parts of the whole city rather
than looking towards the functional parts, need, and social cultures etc. They play an
important role in building the mental image of the city as well. Also, he explains the method
of how this study has been done.

So, it is clearly defied that both the parts are covering a perspective towards a city through
visual form with supportive material of how it can be defined generally.

Brief description:

I. The image of the environment

In the book, Lynch concentrates on the “apparent clarity or legibility of the cityscape,” or the
way its parts can be recognized and organized into a coherent whole as a mental map. legible
city, writes Lynch, “would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily
identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern.” Everybody experiences cities
differently, but we all need to orientate ourselves and there are commonalities in how we do
this.

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 Environmental images can be broken down
into three (abstracted) components:
identity, structure and meaning. That is to
say, objects must be identifiable as distinct,
they must be put in spatial or pattern
relation to the observer and other objects,
and it must have some practical (a door as
means of egress) or emotional (the Statue
of Liberty as the symbol of welcoming
American freedom) meaning. An object’s
“imageability” – “that quality in a physical
object which gives it a high probability of
evoking a strong image in any given
observer” – helps bestow this identity and
structure.

II. Three cities

Although Image is interesting reading as historical documentation and an illustration of how

little some things change, chapter 2 – with its brief analyses of Boston, Jersey City, and Los
Angeles – is not the reason why it has remained a classic. Rather, what makes Lynch’s book
so compelling and useful is its identification of five elements that help constitute a city’s image
in the observers’ minds: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.

III. The city image and its element

Paths are the channels along which people move, be they streets, sidewalks, or transit lines .
They are, unsurprisingly, predominant elements of people’s city images, although how they
are perceived, used, and mentally structured differs depending on how they are laid out and
whether they have distinctive features. Edges are breaks in continuity, such as shores or
walls. They may be barriers or seams, marking the separation of different
regions. Districts are medium-to-large sections of the city conceived of as having a finite, two-
dimensional extent “into” which one can enter. As Lynch describes it, “the physical
characteristics that determine districts are thematic continuities which my consist of an
endless variety of components: texture, space, form, detail, symbol, building type, use,
activity, inhabitants, degree of maintenance, topography.”

Nodes are the strategic spots in a city, either serving as central junctions in transportation or
as points that gain their importance from being “the condensation of some use or physical
character, as a street-corner or an enclosed square.” Some concentration nodes are “the
focus and epitome” of a district, radiating their influence and standing as a symbol for it.
Finally, landmarks are reference points most commonly of a simply defined physical nature.
They may be anything from a building or a sign to a store or a mountain.

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IV. City form

Lynch primarily emphasizes the role of the visual sense and omits in his analysis, the role of
media in general and text in particular. Whether or not that is an omission is debatable, but
Lynch’s five elements of the image of the city – paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks
– are suitable for consideration of visual and textual urban representation. The elements can
be used effectively to structure analysis and abstract components that can then be scrutinized
textually and historically. If one is mindful of which parts of the city are put forward and which
ones are left aside by a given writer or artist, as well as how they are populated and described,
it is possible to discern the creation of a public, normative, city-image on the page. This
method is perhaps particularly suited for comparative analysis, where similarities and
differences in city-images can be elucidated by the identification of localities and landmarks,
paths walked in textual company or in solitude, or in the different meanings extracted from
the ostensibly “same” feature of a given city.

V. A new scale

Summarizing all the discussion which pointed towards the identity and structure of single
element and their pattern in small complex and directed towards the future city form as a
whole pattern. He identifies image as the fundamental requirements and its organization
involves wholly new design problem. Large-scale imageability are rare today so effort toward
enrich them (imageability) with surrounding environment can bring the power back and the
impact of visual qualities will referred toward making or reshaping our own city towards a
source of daily enjoyment.

And finally another purpose for reading Image, which the book can serve even for the reader
who is not interested in that type of analysis, is its potential to upset the taken-for-grandness
of the urban experience. It is difficult to read Lynch’s work without finding at least a few places
where the mind reacts and says: “Oh, so that’s why I do that!” or “Hey! I do that too!” Insights
of that kind are priceless.

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