The Image of A Good City PDF

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Fabio Carrera
Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning Ph.D. Candidate

City Design & Development Group
MIT 11.947
Seminar
Imaging the City

The Place of Media in City Design and Development
Prof. Larry Vale & Prof. Sam Bass-Warner
The Image of a Good City.
Imaging and Good City Form
December 13, 1998

FINAL
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The Image of the Good City Fabio Carrera
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INDEX
1 PREMISE.............................................................................................................................................................................................4
2 THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF CITY FORM: STRUCTURE AND ACTIVITY........................................................................4

2.1 STRUCTURE ....................................................................................................................................................................................5
2.2 A CTIVITY ........................................................................................................................................................................................5
2.3 PLANNERS AS MANAGERS AND CREATORS OF STRUCT URES AND ACTIVITIES....................................................................6
3 FIT, IDENTITY AND SENSE...........................................................................................................................................................6
3.1 FIT ....................................................................................................................................................................................................6
3.2 IDENTITY AND SENSE ...................................................................................................................................................................6
4 THE MEANING OF “MEANING”...................................................................................................................................................7
4.1 M EANING AS “INTENTION ” .........................................................................................................................................................8
4.2 M EANING AS “UNDERSTANDING”...............................................................................................................................................8
4.3 M EANING AS “SIGNIFICANCE ” .....................................................................................................................................................9
5 “THE IMAGE” AND OTHER IMAGES .........................................................................................................................................9
5.1 “THE” IMAGE ................................................................................................................................................................................10
5.1.1 The Collective Image........................................................................................................................................................10
5.2 OTHER IMAGES.............................................................................................................................................................................11
5.3 IMAGE PRIMITIVES.......................................................................................................................................................................11
? View.......................................................................................................................................................................................11
? Viewpoint ..............................................................................................................................................................................12
? Spectacle................................................................................................................................................................................12
? Visual Impression..................................................................................................................................................................12
? Mental Map ..........................................................................................................................................................................13
? Freeze-Frame (or Snapshot)..................................................................................................................................................13
? Scene......................................................................................................................................................................................13
5.4 DEPICTIONS ..................................................................................................................................................................................13
? Picture....................................................................................................................................................................................13
? Advertisements......................................................................................................................................................................14
? Motion Picture ......................................................................................................................................................................14
? TV Program ...........................................................................................................................................................................14
? Documentary .........................................................................................................................................................................14
? Literary Prose........................................................................................................................................................................15
? Magazine Report ...................................................................................................................................................................15
? Newspaper Article ................................................................................................................................................................15
? Travel Guide..........................................................................................................................................................................15
5.5 ENVISIONINGS................................................................................................................................................................................15
? Visualization..........................................................................................................................................................................16
? Virtual Reality .......................................................................................................................................................................16
? Vision.....................................................................................................................................................................................16
? Revision.................................................................................................................................................................................16
5.6 A NALYTICAL SUMMARY OF IMAGE TERMINOLOGY .............................................................................................................16
6 IMAGE-BUILDING AND IMAGING.............................................................................................................................................17
6.1 EXPERIENTIAL IMAGES...............................................................................................................................................................18
6.1.1 Habitation ..........................................................................................................................................................................18
6.1.2 Visitation ............................................................................................................................................................................19
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6.1.3 Ephemera............................................................................................................................................................................20
6.2 M EDIATED IMAGES: IMAGING ...................................................................................................................................................21
6.2.1 Place Promotion ...............................................................................................................................................................22
6.2.2 Boosterism, Boasterism and Basherism ........................................................................................................................23
6.2.3 Media Portrayals..............................................................................................................................................................24
6.2.4 Informative Images............................................................................................................................................................24
6.2.5 Imaging in Education ......................................................................................................................................................25
7 RATING “PLACE” .........................................................................................................................................................................25
7.1 M EASURING THE CHANGE OF “PLACE ” OVER “TIME”..........................................................................................................26
8 DESIGNING GOOD CITY IDENTITIES: PLANNERS AND IMAGING...............................................................................27
9 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................................................................................................................28
APPENDICES .........................................................................................................................................................................................29

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1 Premise
This paper takes its cue from a paper by Prof. Julian Beinart and attempts to organize a
framework for the analysis of city imaging. In the chapters that follow, I will introduce some
theoretical principles that may aid in the organizations of the various contributions of the
Faculty Colloquium Imaging the City. The Place of Media in City Design and Development,
held at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in the Fall of 1998, under the guidance of Prof. Lawrence Vale and Prof. Sam Bass-
Warner.
After a long image-theoretical disquisition in which I try to make sense of all of the
various types of images that were discussed in the colloquium, I draw some conclusions of
special pertinence to planners and planning education and scholarship. Many insights were
gained by this first pass through such challenging subject matter and many research issues
were raised that should keep planning scholars busy for quite a while.
2 The Nuts and Bolts of City Form: Structure and Activity
The Beinart paper, together with the companion paper by Sennett, and many other writings
have confirmed to me the usefulness of starting from the very basic premise that a City is
nothing more than structure and activity.
At the cost of becoming another “master of the obvious”, I think this simple premise
represents a useful starting point for the image-theoretical framework that I feel is necessary
to make sense of all of the contributions to the Imaging the City seminar. This combined
nature of cities may be tautologically obvious to everyone, hence superfluous, but it helps me
in identifying the two major areas of potential intervention both for urban planners and for
imaging professionals. A city can be truly changed both by modifications to its structures
and/or to its activities. We can modify the “container” and/or the “contents” of the city. These
are the only changes possible in the real world of cities. A city may decline physically, but also
demographically/socio-economically, or both.
Frenchman defined “place” as “structure plus action”, as opposed to “space”, which is just
“structure”. Christian Norberg-Schulz says that “place is space with a distinct character”1.
Lynch curiously focused on a specific type of “activity” – travel – in The Image of the City, and
he concentrated on legible, structural features, useful for orientation when navigating through
urban environments. In View from the Road, Lynch et al. Had a very similar aim, albeit from
the viewpoint of a motorist. Later, Lynch made “activity” a fundamental leit-motif of
practically all of his “performance dimensions” in Good City Form, which are mostly related to
human existence and behavior within cities2.
Lynch did not think that this basic issue of structure and activity was banal. In chapter 2 of
Good City Form he states quite clearly that:
1 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, p. 5.

2 Lynch’s performance dimension of “vitality”, which at first sight may appear synonymous with “activity”, turns out to be
descriptive of life-sustaining parameters such as sustenance, safety and consonance, which are attributes related exclusively to
health and physiological or psychological well-being.

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The Fundamental problem is to decide what the form of a human

settlement consists of: solely the inert physical things? Or the living
organisms too? The actions people engage in? the social structure? The
economic system? The ecological system? The control of the space and its
meaning? The way it presents itself to the senses? Its daily and seasonal
rithms? Its secular changes? Like any important phenomenon, the city
extends out into every other phenomenon, and the choice of where to make the
cut is not an easy one3.
Lynch makes the cut more or less along the lines of “structures and activities” when he
says that “the chosen ground is the spatiotemporal distribution of human actions and the
physical things which are the context of those actions […]”4.
2.1 Structure
My definition of structure is very broad, since it includes all permanent or long-lasting
physical objects, both man-made and natural. Aldo Rossi made a big deal of the apparently
obvious “hypothesis of the city as a man-made object, as a work of architecture and engineering
that grows over time”. He said “this is one of the most substantial hypotheses from which to
work” 5. Curiously though, Lynch’s use of the term structure in The Image of the City is
different from my intended meaning. Norberg-Schulz uses structure in the same sense as
Lynch does. They both really refer to “organization” when they talk about “structure” whereas
I refer to physical objects and to their organization. My definition encompasses Lynch’s and
Norberg-Schulz’s in that I call structure both “the formal properties of a system of
relationships”6 and the physical objects that partake in such organizing relationships.
Landscape and streetscape are structural to me and they can therefore be changed by
structural interventions (like new plantings or new construction). Natural features of the
locale, like water edges, river courses, hills, valleys, ponds, lakes and other characteristics of
the environmental terrain are structures within which human activity takes place, as are
buildings, streets, sidewalks, squares, highways, intersections, churches, civic buildings and
public art. We can modify these features as planners and urban designers and, in fact, we do.
We also can and should provide adequate maintenance for our physical structures both in the
built and natural environment.
2.2 Activity
My definition of activity is equally broad, in that it includes all human-related social and
economic behavior, as well as mere presence and/or existence of human beings within the
urban environment. Sennett’s concept of habitation corresponds to my meaning of activity.
Government policies, the economy, social justice and many other factors affect our activities
within a city. Planners can and do affect activities, by promulgating regulations and codes, by
awarding licenses and by promoting community involvement in decisions affecting the urban
3 Lynch, Good City Fo rm, p. 48.

4 Idem.
5 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, p. 34.
6 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, p. 166. Norberg-Schulz calls the physical objects that compose the structure of a city
simply “things”, based on Heidegger’s terminology.

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fabric and hence the life of the citizens. Certain activities that are generally favored within
the city (like recreation) are also frowned upon in some specific location (like recreational
rollerblading in City Hall plaza in Boston). Business activity can be promoted with incentives
or fostered by a booming consumer market, but it can also be discouraged by disincentives and
restricted by a “poor economic climate”.
2.3 Planners as managers and creators of structures and activities

Structure and activity – similarly to what Norberg-Schulz indicates in Genius Loci – are
both to be considered ‘concrete’ characteristics that are experienceable in the real world.
Physical things and human activities are amenable to modification over time, due to the
normal course of events or, more importantly, as a consequence of the intervention, policies
and programs designed by planners and other professionals. The only “real” changes to city
form will be changes to either its structure or its activities or both.
3 Fit, Identity and Sense
To me, the combination of structure and activity is what gives a city its unique identity.
This combination is precisely what Lynch calls Fit in Good City Form.
3.1 Fit
Fit is “the match between action and form”7. At any one time, only one single identity is
being expressed in a city by its current structural endowment, by its present variety of
activities and by the apparent fit between form and action. A good fit indicates that the city’s
activities are taking place in congruous “containers”. When only small adjustments to either
actions or to structures are necessary to improve the “ergonomics” of a place, the fit is
considered good. When major changes are necessary to improve the comfort and satisfaction
of a city’s inhabitants, the fit is not so good.
Unfortunately, this unique sensible (i.e. capable to be sensed) combination that is present
at any moment in any city keeps changing – ever so slightly – every minute and it is so widely
dispersed that nobody ever perceives the same exact mixture of the permanent backdrop and
of the ephemeral action taking place in it. We simply cannot take it all in, neither spatially
nor temporally, so despite the fact that only one identity is expressed by a city, many
interpretations of this identity are internalized by those who are exposed to such a city, either
directly or indirectly.
Fit seems to be a major performance indicator that planners and designer should pay
careful attention to, both in terms of major interventions and in terms of programmed upkeep.
3.2 Identity and Sense

Lynch considers identity as a fundamental component of an environmental image 8, and
also considers it “the simplest form of sense”9. However, his definition of identity is again
7 Lynch, Good City Form, p. 151.

8 Lynch, The Image of the City, p. 8.
9 Lynch, Good City Form, p. 131. The same concept appears in the posthumous City Sense and City Design, p. 295.

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different from mine. His identity is a simpler concept, purely physical, which can be
translated into “distinguishability” or “recognizability”, which are clearly operational
definitions, related to his interests in legibility and orientation. To Lynch, Identity is what
makes a place more easily “identifiable”. I take a broader view of identity, which is more
attuned to a concept of “unique character” as described by Norberg-Schulz10, although he too
restricts his definition to purely physical manifestations.
I go beyond the physical permanence to suggest that identity is produced by a combination
of concrete objects (and their relations) and dynamic human activity. Just like “all places have
character”11, all places have an identity. I can think of several places that are characterized
more by what “happens” there, by the vitality of city life, than by what the buildings and places
look like. New York city may be partially in this category, but even more so is Hollywood,
which has almost no physical image associated to it in my mind. Venice may be at the opposite
end of the spectrum, since it is becoming more and more of a Disney stage-set where the
physical aspects of the city overwhelmingly define the place, whereas human occupations are
completely secondary and are catering more and more to the touristic monoculture.
We only perceive snippets of identity, since the whole identity of a city is beyond the
grasp of our limited senses. We build up a “composite” interpretation of a city’s complex
identity by repeated exposure to sensate information about a city. This is how we create an
internal, mental “image of the city” just a Lynch defines it: “the observer – with great
adaptability and in the light of his own purposes – selects, organizes, and endows with meaning
what he sees”12.
4 The meaning of “Meaning”
Meaning, then, is what we each attach to our perception of a place’s identity, when we
internalize what we see (but also hear, smell and, to a lesser extent, taste and touch), which
may consist of human activity or physical elements of the built form, or both. Meaning guides
our mental selection and archival processes. Meaningless sensate experiences will be
discarded. More meaningful experiences will be retained and will be more easily retrievable
in the future depending on the “strength” of their meaning. Our internal definition of
meaning will itself be subject to change on the basis of the ad-hoc, cumulative revisions of our
selection and storage criteria, that are constantly being used to filter out the noise from the
truly useful and important information that our senses continuously and indefatigably collect
while we are alive and awake in the world.
Meaning is more or less sidestepped by Lynch in The Image of the City, although he does
say that an image of a place is “soaked in memories and meanings”13 and that “it appears
possible to separate meaning from form”14. He does discuss meaning in A Process of Community
Visual Survey15 and one may equate his definition of Sense in Good City Form to
meaningfulness. A city “makes sense” to us if we can “read” it and attach values to its image.
10 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, pp. 13-14.

11 Ibid., p.14.
13 Ibid., p. 1.
14 Ibid., p.9.
15 Unpublished paper, contained in the collection City Sense and City Design, p. 296.

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Lynch understood that “meaning” is a broad concept that embraces several cognitive processes
when he said that “people will ‘read’ a city landscape; they are looking for practical information;
they are curious; they are moved by what they see”16.
Norberg-Schulz focused almost exclusively on “the psychic implications of architecture
rather than its practical side” although he certainly admits “that there exists an
interrelationship between the two aspects”17. Both in Genius Loci and in many other of his
writings (Meaning in Western Architecture, The Concept of Dwelling, Architecture: Meaning
and Place), Norberg-Schulz addresses specifically the issue of meaning and other related
psychic dimensions, although his definition of meaning is fuzzy at best. According to Norberg-
Schulz, there are multiple meanings “inherent in the world” and they have deep roots. “In
general they are covered by [his] four categories of “thing”, “order”, “character” and “light”.18
Beinart, in his paper, reports the descriptions of meaning in architecture offered by
William Porter embodied meaning, designative meaning and shared meaning. To me, these are
useful categories with which to understand the meaning-production process, but do not
address the more fundamental essence of meaning. Porter is looking at the “means” of
meaning19, whereas I look at the “meaning” of meaning.
4.1 Meaning as “intention”

When we say: “I didn’t mean to offend you” or “he/she means well, but …”, we are
speaking of “intent”. This use of “meaning” may not seem to apply very well to our perception
of cities, but it probably plays an important role in the composition of what Beinart (or Porter)
called “embodied meaning”, the meaning that the builders of the city have imbued the stones
with.
This seems to be the “spirit” that Norberg-Schulz speaks of when he says “the meanings
which are gathered by a place constitute its genius loci”20. The original “intent” of shapers of
urban space resides in the structures of the city and gives them “character”, moreover the
structures also reflect some pre-existing meanings that are exuded by the natural setting in
which building takes place. “Through building man gives meanings concrete presence, and he
gathers buildings to visualize and symbolize his form of life as a totality”.
Ruskin was adamant in his view that no architecture will ever succeed and please our
senses unless it embodies the labor and intention of humble and skilled artisans. He said that
first of all, “we should in everything do our best; and, secondly, that we should consider increase
of apparent labour as an increase of beauty in the building”.21
4.2 Meaning as “understanding”

Only when we have a grasp of the meaning of a word or an image, can we really say we
understand that word or that image. Without understanding the meaning of a concept, we
cannot really say we understand the concept. Thus meaning seems to be a conditio sine qua
non for the understanding of the city. Lynch says that “the visual environment should be
16 Idem.
18 Ibid., p. 170
19 I refer to the “means” of endowing, conveying, transferring and distributing meaning.
21 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, pp. 20-21.

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meaningful; that is, its visible character should relate to other aspects of life […]”22 The more
knowledge one has about a city, in all its facets, the more meaningful the city becomes.
Lynch’s legibility and orientation are vehicles through which we can begin to understand a city,
by reading it and knowing it better. Thus one could say that the Image of the City is really all
about a specific route to one type of meaning, which is quite a departure from the usual
contention that Lynch ignored meaning in his seminal book. One of the ways in which a city
acquires meaning is when we begin to understand the lay of the land and we are able to
navigate it. We always “are looking for practical information” that will help us “make sense”
of the place.
4.3 Meaning as “significance”

Another use of “meaning” is found in common phrases like “this means a lot to me”,
where the verb is synonymous with “signifies”. This, to me, is the most value-laden of the
three meanings of meaning. The significance of any encounter, with a city’s physical
constructs or with a city’s inhabitants, depends not only on the innate significance of those
structures and activities, but, to a large degree, also to our own internal state at the moment
of the encounter. When we are happiest or saddest, the same street scene may acquire vastly
different meaning to us. We evaluate the situation and assign a “weight” to our internal
memory of it, based on the intrinsic qualities of the experienced objects and events, as well as
on our internal “weighing mechanism” at that moment.
The experience of architectural beauty or of urban pleasantness certainly makes a place
more significant or more important in our mind. We are pleasure-seeking creatures and I am
sure we attach more meaning to what we like, although we should probably talk about positive
meaning in this case. It is entirely possible, in fact, that we may attach strong significance to
truly distasteful spatial experiences, which would represent negative meaning. Regardless of
the sign, a composite meaning will probably have a “strength” which is the sum of all the
strengths of its constituent parts. The strength of the Image of a city depends on the strength
of its overall meaning.
A good image of a city is made up of a lot of positive meanings found in both physical
objects and in human activities. A bad image is mostly negative. It is the balance of meaning
that counts in the final Image since every city will probably manifest both positive and
negative meanings.
5 “The Image” and other images
I think it is important to make a clear differentiation between the two main meanings that
the word “image” can acquire with respect to City Design and Development.
On the one hand, there is the singular: the Image (capitalized to distinguish it). This
refers to an internalized, digested, mental distillation of the “essence” of a city “soaked in
meaning”. Each individual will construct his or her internal Image of a City.
On the other hand, there are the innumerable, distinct optical “images” of a city that we
are constantly exposed to, some of which we somehow retain in our memory. Optical images

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depict different viewpoints of the complex metropolis, as captured in photos, movies, TV

programs, ads, print media, online media, etc.
5.1 “The” Image

The quintessential mental Image (capitalized) is made up of a layering of all sensate
inputs, above and beyond just the visual inputs that belong to the second class of images
(lower-case, generic), discussed below. Visual impressions (also discussed below) are purely
visual mental images, whereas The Image is metaphysical and not simply visual, but much
more complex and multi-sensorial.
The nature of “The Image” of a City is essentially abstract although it is based on very
concrete foundations. We are all exposed to continuous environmental experiences, either
directly or through some indirect medium. Somehow, we internalize a “synthesis” of this
bombardment of sensate inputs and organize our own internal mental Image of a City in the
process. This synthetic Image is not purely based on visual fragments, but it encapsulates all
of our other knowledge and opinions about the place.
This mental Image is constantly revised as new information comes in. “The image so
developed now limits and emphasizes what is seen, while the image itself is being tested against
the filtered perceptual input in a constant interacting process. Thus the image of a given reality
may vary significantly between observers.”23 And, I would add, it may vary significantly within
the same observer over time.
In the formation of a cumulative Image, “nearly every sense is in operation, and the image
is the composite of them all.”24, but the Seminar concentrated almost exclusively on the visual
component of the composite mental Image, with only some audio accompaniment in the movie
clips presented by Jenkins (besides the oral presentations made by the authors). An Image is
made up of stored-up bits of experience, primarily visual and audio, which have an attached
significance or weight. When we recall the Image of a city, we unroll our mental
concatenation of impressions and we are able to synthesize our overall feeling for that city
into very succinct evaluations such as “lovely city”, “awful place” and the like. At the visual
level of our internal Image, I suspect that everyone produces “hybrid” mental images that are
perhaps composites or blends of “real” images, metaphysical encapsulations of reality,
compressed into a synthetic, virtual mental picture (see below).
5.1.1 The Collective Image

Not only will different mental filtering mechanisms create different Images in different
people that happen to be exposed to the same locality at the same time, but most people will
be exposed to different city experiences at different times and from different spatial
viewpoints. Given such disparate Image-construction paths, it is remarkable that we
nonetheless seem to be able to identify “public Images” that somehow emerge as common
denominators in the individual Images that different people have of the same city.
“It is these group images, exhibiting consensus among significant numbers, that interest
city planners who aspire to model an environment that will be used by many people.”25 But
perhaps such uniformity of Images is not so surprising when we consider that the city’s
23 Idem.
24 Ibid., p. 2.
25 Ibid., p. 7.
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buildings, roads, natural features and general patterns of activities are rather permanent and
are experienced by all who inhabit the city or visit it in person. Thus a common Image is much
more likely if the place has a “special identity” whereby structure, activity and fit stand out
and assume special relevance. Porter’s “shared meaning” is associated with the Collective
Image of a place.
5.2 Other images

In my framework, the generic term image (with a small “i”), refers both to optical
sensations of “physical likeness” as well as to individually stored, visual mental impressions of
physical objects and activities. Both immediate, real-time, visual perception, and the later
recall of what’s retained of these environmental perceptions are in reality “mental” processes,
as physiology teaches us26.
These basic fundamental images come in many varieties, which I have roughly organized
in an informal taxonomy, to make my later comments a little clearer:
?? Image Primitives, which include all basic forms of visual perception, storage and
subsequent recall of real images
?? Depictions, which are mediated descriptions or representations of reality
?? Envisionings, which are fabricated similes of reality
The following is a first cut at a glossary of the numerous types of images that make up the
visual experience of us all. These are not meant to be final, cast-in-stone classifications, but
rather “working definitions” useful as a tool for organizing many of the Seminar’s
contributions along some cognitive dimensions that might facilitate their analysis. In the
definitions that follow, I will try to be general, but I will also refer to Urban Design and
Planning concepts where appropriate.
In common parlance, many of the terms introduced below are used interchangeably, but
here I attempt to assign a specific meaning to each to make the overarching framework as
clear as possible.
5.3 Image Primitives

In this general category I have included terms that denote what – to me – are fundamental
image-related linguistic constructs that are used to label the inputs to our optical and
cognitive visual processes. Although most of these terms are often used in their metaphorical
sense, in the paragraphs that follows, all definitions are restricted to the literal, visual
meaning of the words, unless otherwise noted.
?? View
I define a “view” as the actual, real-time, continuous optical sensation that one can take in
from any vantage point in the physical world. The view of the world that all seeing people are
exposed to each and every day is composed of a dynamic series of images collected
automatically by our eyes as they rove the territory around us. Even when we are fixing an
26 See for example, Solso (1996), p. 4: “seeing is accomplished through both the visual stimulation of eye and the interpretation
of sensory signals by the brain”.
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object, our eyes’ saccadic movements still produce a continuous stream of single frames of very
narrow detail.
?? Viewpoint
The specific visual angle from which one views reality. This relates primarily to the
observer’s location with respect to the physical object being viewed. Hayden and MacLean
showed us how interesting and potentially useful aerial views can be in helping us grasp the
physical implications of urban sprawl. Martin and Warner, on the other hand, introduced an
automobile-based way of looking at typical urban travel paths, which may yield further
insights to planners and designers.
?? Spectacle
A special subset of views, which are particularly vivid. A spectacle may be an awesome
architectural space, like a great square, or it may be an enchanting natural vista, like the
Grand Canyon, of it may refer to ephemera, such as festivals or other celebratory group
activities, where the spectacle is more in the action and less in the scenography. Mark
Schuster eloquently reminded us of the power of ephemeral events in the shaping of an urban
image and viceversa.
?? Visual Impression
The distilled mental image of a physical encounter with a specific physical object or event.
This is a more fundamental and basic mental image than the one discussed above in reference
to The Image. Our brain fortunately retains only a fraction of the countless trillions of images
that are impressed upon our retinas every day. What we are left with are “mental snapshots”
of the real world that are somehow retained, more or less faithfully, in our long term memory.
People with photographic memory may have more faithful internal images of external reality.
Familiarity will produce more detailed and frequent visual impressions about the places
we habitually traverse. Movie-like sequences of visual impressions may be retained in our
long-term memory, as well as single snapshots. Sound-bites and conversations are also
retained as are other sensory inputs like smell, touch and taste. All of our senses pitch in and
help construct the mental record of place experiences, but here we are concerned exclusively
with the mental retention of visual inputs. The smallest visual unit that we retain in our long
term storage is what I call a visual impression. Each visual impression may have meaning
attached to it, as well as a mental narrative that complements the meaning27.
The faithfulness of our internalized visual impressions to the reality which they portend to
encapsulate seems to fluctuate from the “vivid” photographic memory to the “fuzzy” mental
fabrication of verisimilar, but fundamentally un-real – and to a large extent symbolic – mental
“artist’s renderings” of our visual experience. There seems to be a hierarchy of levels of
abstraction at play in the production of fuzzy symbolic mental collages from vivid and accurate
mental snapshots of reality.
27 This issue of a “mental narrative” that accompanies stored visual impressions is worthy of further attention, despite its cursory
treatment herein.
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?? Mental Map
A mental layout of a place, used to navigate the urban space in everyday life. This is what
Lynch was grappling with in The Image of the City. It may be a plan-view image or more likely
a concatenation of eye-level clues (for a pedestrian), or a sequence of indicators used by a
motorist, like in View from the Road and in the seminar contribution by Martin and Bass-
Warner. The nature of a mental map is prevalently structural, based more on notable features
of the physical environment and less on activities experienced along the way. Inasmuch as
Mental Maps help us understand a city, they can be said to be contributors to meaning.
?? Freeze -Frame (or Snapshot)

A view-bite that isolates and circumscribes a specific view and captures and reproduces it
for viewing post facto (not in real time). Frames are the physical equivalent of mental visual
impressions in that they “freeze” specific views out of a multitude of potential candidates.
Freeze-frames are “external” impressions, sharable with other people, whereas visual
impressions are not.
All photographic snapshots are frozen frames, according to this definition, since they are
selective, isolated images of reality. By their very nature, snapshots are subjected to a
selection process, be it internal to our brain (visual impressions) or carried out by an external
agent, like a photographer. Due to this subjective selectivity, snapshots are highly vulnerable
to mystification. Briavel Holcomb, showed us just how selective snapshots can be in
representing an a-contextual reality, which is so narrowly focused as to become nearly
fraudulent. Yet snapshots, just like visual impressions, always (try to) represent the true
physical reality, albeit selected according to some overt or covert guiding principle.
?? Scene
A scene, as I define it here, is a frame that contains activity. The key here is the action,
which represents the “figure” that sets itself apart against the “ground” of the physical
landscape.
5.4 Depictions
The second broad category of images includes all of the terms that refer to visual
depictions or reproductions of real experiences in space and time.
?? Picture
A form of freeze-frame, but more fictionalized, hence less real. Pictures can represent
active scenes or inert structures. The main feature of pictures is their departure from the
realistic nature of snapshots and frames. Pictures are fictionalized visual snippets of reality.
Many place-promoting ads, as Holcomb showed us, when they don’t use selectively cropped
snapshots, often use pictures that fictionalize reality in order to attract the attention of the
target audience. Painters often produce pictures that go beyond a photographically faithful
reproduction of reality.
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?? Advertisements
A highly fictionalized conflation of visual images and subtending text used to promote a
place or a product to an audience. Holcomb’s contribution focused on place-promotion ads and
John DeMonchaux informed us of Boston’s Mayor Menino’s efforts to show the world just how
well-reputed Boston is in the world of place-ratings. Cities are the subject of tourist ads,
aimed at attracting visitors and their money. But cities are also used as “props” or
“backdrops” in a myriad of ads for a plethora of consumer products, as Tom Campanella
showed us, often appearing in stereotypical and symbolic roles, laden with innuendoes and
clichés that reveal a lot about commonly held Images of cities.
?? Motion Picture
A fictionalized sequence of scenes. Movies about cities, as Jenkins showed us, are selective
representations of human activities taking place against a backdrop made up of city
structures. The screenplays are fictionalized (even if based on true stories), and they often
represent metaphors of stereotypical activities taking place in the city. Occasionally, the
relationship between the action and the city is explored, but more often the focus is
exclusively on the narrative and its message. Movies partially capture the multifaceted
complexity of cities, but do so in a selective manner nonetheless.
Movies are an imitation of the “views” that we all experience in everyday life in that they
have the characteristic of being a continuous stream of images and sounds. Meaning is
injected into these pseudo-views, both through the visual choices and through the action and
storyline.
?? TV Program
Another fictionalized sequence of scenes, focused more on activity. TV shows treat city
images much like movies do, but there seems to be much more emphasis on the activity than
on the structure of cities. Most of the action takes place indoors. Sitcoms that are specifically
set in a certain city occasionally show the type of urban activity that somehow reflects
common stereotypes about people who inhabit such a city. Seinfeld is an example of
stereotypically quirky New York city living.
Magazine-like TV shows (like 60 Minutes, 20/20 and the like), as well as News programs
are powerful vehicles for the creation of Images of cities in broad audiences. Generally
speaking, it is easier to create negative TV Images than positive ones.
TV Ads are perhaps the most powerful, because most widely viewed, of all place ads.
?? Documentary
A non-fictional sequence of scenes. Documentaries about cities attempt to show an
objective depiction of “real life” in the city. The nature of a documentary makes it the closest
external reproduction of our world view, but it too is very selective about the reality it
represents so faithfully. Documentaries have messages encoded in them, even though the
visual sequence of scenes is taken directly from real events. The “montage” of the various
snippets of reality, as well as the narrative that accompanies them, makes documentaries less
real than they purport to be. The Birch presentation had a lot of the traits of a documentary
about the development of the Bronx.
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?? Literary Prose
A fictional sequence of scenes, expressed in textual narrative. As Beinart pointed out in
his contribution to the seminar, literary works with no accompanying pictures were the
primary mode of communication of urban characteristics in Medieval times. Often, city stories
are more vividly portrayed with literary narration than by visual means. The bookshelves of
any library contain plenty of examples of urban literature that is capable of stirring up strong
mental pictures with the sole power of the written text.
?? Magazine Report
A mostly non-fictional sequence of scenes, expressed in narrative and pictures. Magazines
are powerful conveyors of images in pre-digested form, composed of both textual narrative and
visual snapshots. Generally speaking, nationally circulated weekly magazines report non-
fictional stories about cities, although strong opinions often permeate the articles and affect
the narrative as well as the visual choices of the authors and editors.
The famous Fortune article that trumpeted the success of Cleveland’s Development Model
is but one of the many examples of the power of such popular vehicles of information.
?? Newspaper Article
A non-fictional sequence of scenes, expressed in narrative. Similar to Magazine Reports,
but more nuts and bolts and with no fancy visuals, except an occasional black and white
picture. Recently, the proliferation of color inserts (appropriately called “magazines” or
“journals”) sold with newspapers, particularly with the Sunday editions, have allowed more
expressive abilities to newspapers, thus narrowing the gap with weekly magazines. The main
difference between newspapers and magazines, insofar as the creation of Image, is the fact
that most newspapers, except for the New York Times, have a circulation that is limited to a
local metropolitan area. Despite their lack of national readership, newspapers remain
perhaps the most important and powerful shapers of urban sentiments since they reach local
audiences – where most place-decisions are made – on a daily basis.
?? Travel Guide
A non-fictional book containing organized information intended for visitors of a place.
Beinart led us along the Medieval pilgrimage routes that were advertised with guide books,
praise books, as well as through oral communications among travelers. To some extent, travel
guides mediate the experience of a visitor by selecting “places of interest” or “must see”
architectural features that may affect the Image a visitor will come away with after visiting a
place.
5.5 Envisionings
The third category of images includes all mental images produced by the imagination and
based only partially – or not at all – on real images. I coined this term because I found
alternatives such as “fabrications” and “concoctions” unsatisfactory due to the negative
connotations they carry with them. Envisionings on the other hand is a value-neutral term
that allows the possibility that such flights of fancy may in fact constitute positive
contributions to the planning profession, as they often do.
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?? Visualization
A technical aid used to represent how a place looks or to imagine how a place could look.
Visualizations may consist of drawings reproducing fragments of the current world, but more
often they foretell the way the world may look in the future, based on programmatic
principles. Planners constantly use visualizations in their professional roles as creators of
alternative futures. Visualizations are exclusively concerned with changes to the physical
structure of the environment.
?? Virtual Reality
An interactively experienceable recreation of a place that never existed and may never
exist. It differs from visualization in that it is dynamic and interactive and not directly
concerned with changes to the real world. Its purpose is less obviously practical than that of
visualizations. Virtual worlds encapsulate both structure and activity, plus they contain us as
actors, thus they are the closest surrogates of reality in this list. Movies are similar, but we
are not invited to be interactive participants in them… However, as Beamish eloquently
showed us, despite the great computer advances of the last decade, the Images projected by
virtual worlds, and their meanings, while intriguing, seem to remain elusively disconnected
from the more practical concerns of the planner or urban designer at this time.
?? Vision
A forward-looking abstraction embodying dreams about a place. Visions are made up both
of visualizations as well as of an accompanying narrative. The role of the narrative is that of
giving body to the changes in activity that a vision portends. Thus, visions foretell changes
both in structure and in activity, unlike visualizations that are restricted, in my definition,
just to the material world of structures. So it is common to find sentences such as “the new
convention center will rejuvenate the economy of our downtown” in the narrative that
accompanies visions. Visionary illustrations in such plans as the Cleveland 2000 often depict a
happy, racially uniform (Caucasian), population engaged in fun “activities” that are part and
parcel with the proposed construction of new structures, in a unified “vision” of progress and
prosperity.
?? Revision
A Revision is a backward-looking abstraction embodying modern interpretations about a
place as it once was (or might have been). I decided to use this term to contrast it with
“vision” because of its retrograde, “revisionistic” connotations. Historical or heritage re-
visitations, as discussed by Lowenthal and Frenchman, may result in reconstructions,
reenactments, or interpretive programs that re-envision the past in a more or less accurate
fashion, based on more or less solid historical research.
5.6 Analytical summary of image terminology

Table 1 summarizes the contents of the paragraphs so far. It shows all of the various
types of images discussed and qualifies them according to the dimensions defined as:
external/internal referring to the locus of the image, whether it is stored in the mind or out in
physical reality; temporality refers to whether the image depicts something that exists at the
present moment (sometimes frozen for future consumption, indicated as “Present -> Future”),
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or that existed in the Past or will/may exist in the Future; dynamics distinguishes between
single still images or moving sequences of images; structure/activity indicates whether this
image captures physical objects, human activity or both and to what degree (> Structure
means both structure and activity are captured, but with a prevalence of Structure);
Fiction/Non-Fiction reveals whether the image is to be consider a faithful reproduction of
reality or if it is a fictionalized portrayal of the real world.
External Temporality Dynamics Structure Fiction

/Internal Activity Non-
View External Present Moving Both Non
Spectacle External Present Moving > Activity Non
Scene External Present Moving > Activity Non
Visual Impression Internal Present->Future Both Both Both?
Frame/Snapshot External Present->Future Still > Structure Non
Mental Map Internal Present Both Structure Non
Movie External Past/Present/Future Moving > Activity Fiction
TV Show External Past/Present/Future Moving >> Activity Fiction
Documentary External Present Moving Both Non
Visualization External Past/Present/Future Both Structure Both
Virtual Reality External Future? Moving Both Fiction
(interactive)
Vision External Future Still Both Fiction
Revision External Past Still Both Both
Table 1. A summary of some key characteristics of city images.
This table should be a useful starting point to see where a planner may be able to have
an impact. For instance, if we take the typical role of a planner as a professional who deals
only with “real” stuff, in the present or for the future, and is primarily interested in the
transformation of the built environment, then the types of images he/she will probably have to
deal with are Frames, Mental Maps, Documentaries and Visualizations. If he/she is not so
keen on using moving images, he/she may drop the use of documentaries.
To become really useful, though, this table will need to be expanded and refined to
include also the concepts that will be introduced in the following sections of this paper.
6 Image-Building and Imaging
It may have become fairly clear from the above discussions that the construction of an
internal Image of a city and the convergence of individual mental Images toward a common
“public Image” of a place are complex processes affected by a number of factors. The two main
modes of image-building that emerge from the above discussion are:
?? Un-mediated, experiential exposure to real place

?? Mediated exposure to surrogates of place
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I agree with Norberg-Schulz, and I am personally convinced that, the true essence of the
“spirit” of a place can only be acquired through repeated and intimate exposure to the real
place in question. This process will lead to a more “true” Image since the only mediation
would come from our own internal biases and states of mind. As planners, we can affect this
path to the true Image by making the structures and activities of a city more “meaningful”,
that is more legible, more memorable and more significant. If we are able to embed the
“spirit” of the place in the physical structures, this embodied meaning should somehow be
perceived by future citizens as well, thus giving the place a “strong identity”. The activities
that we are capable of promoting or discouraging with our policies, incentives and regulations
and the fit between form and actions will also contribute to such a “strong identity” that will
gather meaning around it.
But whereas many of us have accumulated a rough Image of many cities we have never
visited, based exclusively on “depictions” (“reproductions” or “characterizations”) of those
places, it is almost impossible for us to have a purely experiential Image of a city, in this age of
information overload. Some exposure to mediated imaging is probably inevitable nowadays
and this may affect even the purer and more direct experiential path toward the grasping of a
city’s essential character, spirit, identity and meaning.
6.1 Experiential Images

As Beinart put it: “A city is its own best advertisement”. Experiencing a city without
interposed filters will reveal to us its true nature in due time. A city’s identity will eventually
emerge through the crusts of superimposed images. While no two people will have the same
exact experiences in a complex place, the meaning of a city’s structural make-up and of its web
of human actions will produce some sort of a “common Image” of the place that will be shared
by a majority of long term residents. To put it in Jenkins’ terms, a gemeinschaft will emerge.
This “public Image” will carry negative or positive meaning and it will be subject to revision as
the city’s structures and activities change, making the fit between the two more or less
broadly acceptable.
Familiarity will make the gaps between “individual city Images” less and less pronounced,
as each of us files away more and more meaningful information about the visual cityscapes we
encounter in our habitation.
Visitors will not have the benefit of the long exposure that local citizens have, but they will
still have an opportunity to experience a city’s real identity first hand.
Both the lives of citizens and the visits of tourists will be enhanced by ephemeral
expressions of community values, such as festivals, celebrations and other such cyclical and
non-cyclical events.
In all of these experiential Image-building situations the planner can play a very important
and perhaps primary role, with image-savvy professionals relegated to a secondary and less
influential role. It is at this level that a city’s true essence is revealed in spite of any attempt
to alter the meanings through various media.
6.1.1 Habitation
As explained by Sennett, habitation is a fundamental image-building activity. To
summarize my take on Sennett’s contribution to the Seminar, I would argue that all activity
that is not “rooted” in the locale, either because it does not cater directly to local citizens, or
because it does not create local wealth and well-being that is reinvested in the city’s structure
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and services, will do nothing to improve the city’s identity and it will not therefore create or
sustain an “embodied” meaning to its citizens.
The image and meaning perceived by outsiders may not be affected directly by this, due
to the interference of professional public relations and image-building experts.
Habitation is indeed central to good city form, but more so is the continued habitation
of the city on the part of those who actually carry out the urban and architectural design and
the building of the city structures. In other words, it would be great if planners and architects
were to dwell28 in the places for which they designed urban spaces. Citizens groups, like Nos
Quedamos in Birch’s account the development of the Bronx, have an important role to play in
planning the future of structures and activities in their neighborhoods because they are the
ones who hold the strongest Images of the place as a consequence of their habitation of the
place.
The Books of Praise introduced by Beinart are attempts, on the part of rooted
inhabitants, to convey the meaning of places to outsiders. He says that “what distinguishes the
experience of a city’s own inhabitants from those of outsiders is the access that citizens have to
‘embodied’ meaning”. Such a meaning, he argues, needs to be made known to citizens through
the work of planners and designers, who “are the true craftsmen of the city’s form”.
Martin and Bass-Warner, on the other hand, seem to find very little differentiation in
the visual landscape viewed by motorists moving around different Minneapolis/St.Paul
districts. Here habitation, as experienced from the automobile, seems to take place in an
“identityless” landscape of unremarkable visual stimuli. The public Images of the
communities of Seward, Roseville and Eden Prairie would seem to thus be more or less
homogeneous from the point of view of the car-driving citizens. This “downward equalization”
of the Image of suburban and urban America may not be limited to the auto-scape, and it
would seem important for planners to explore other dimensions of the overall composite
Image of each neighborhood.
6.1.2 Visitation
Another form of experiential image-building is that of visitation. It differs from
habitation in its ephemeral nature and hence produces shallower Images. Structure and
activity will engender visual impressions of varying intensity in the mind of the tourist. The
filter in their mind will be probably quite different from that used by those steeped in the local
culture. Thus the meaning of the composite Image may be quite different in visitors as
opposed to inhabitants.
Only a small sliver of a city’s identity is revealed in the short span of a visit. Large
numbers of visitors alter the “activity” of a city and hence, in the long run, will alter the city’s
identity. Structural changes may be brought about to cater to visitors as well, further
changing the nature of the city. The identity of the city may eventually be affected to such an
extent that the shallow Images of the tourists, due to the sheer number of them, may
progressively overwhelm and slowly obliterate the richer and deeper Image of the inhabitants,
creating another opportunity for “downward equalization” similar to that noted by Martin and
Bass-Warner. In both cases, it seems that a mono-culture (the automobile culture or the
tourist culture) is at the root of the problem. Planners should play an active role in
preventing such monothematic assaults on the diversity and rootedness of our cities.
28 As Norberg-Schulz intends the term “dwelling”: “the total man-place relationship”, in Genius Loci, p. 19.
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The ideal of “visitation”, for the more sophisticated travelers, is that of blending in with
the locals and being largely inconspicuous. This allows one to experience the city for what it
really is and to take in all of its meanings in as unadulterated a form as possible.
Lynch’s Travel Journals show his analytical mind at work in the way he tried to
organize his personal Image of the cities he visited in 1952-53 according to the following
“characteristic elements” of the cities’ identities: spaces (“including light and atmosphere”),
orientation, middle distance picture (“the characteristic views seen in one fixing of eye, ahead
and slightly above horizon, most often obliquely across the space, characteristically of street
facades and 2nd and 3rd story one or two blocks down the street”), eye level detail (“just ahead
or abreast of walker, seen in interrupted snatches”), floor (“visual texture and form and color,
extension and levels as a place, feel to feet”), human activity, traffic, noise and smells.29 These
elements are probably useful in the Image construction of both inhabitants and visitors and
they obviously include both structure and activity.
6.1.3 Ephemera
Ephemera are the ultimate experienceable phenomena. It seems to me that public
events are made to be lived out and cannot be really mediated in any meaningful way. The
Image of the city, being composed of fragments of cognition about structure and action in a
city, will definitely be strengthened by epehemera that express the spirit of a place and are
not mere make-believe ploys to attract visitors. The active participation of locals to ephemera
lends them credibility. Well-attended festivals are truer reflections of a local culture than
made-for-tourists costumed parades.
Festivals, parades, carnivals and other festive human activities can be aimed at
reclaiming public space to make it “safe” and civilized (as Bonnemaison suggests), or they can
be means for local citizens to reaffirm their “nativeness” (as MacCannell purports). They may
indeed represent one of the final aims for our human toiling (as Harvey Cox proposes). There
is truth in all of these statements. The main message in Schuster’s contribution to the
Seminar, though, seems to arc back to a notion of “spontaneous emergence”.
The parallel is obvious to me: both permanent structures and ephemeral festivals are
more successful if they truly embody the spirit of a place and are products of a collective
identity in action. The erection of temporary structures seems to accompany the more
successful ephemera, but the truly significant and cyclical temporary urbanism seems to be a
consequence of the success of the ephemeral and not vice versa.
In my hometown of Venice, temporary bridges are constructed and dismantled on two
occasions during the year: one for the Festival of the Redentore (celebrating the end of the
plague of 1575) and one for the Salute fest (celebrating the end of the next big plague in 1639).
Not surprisingly, “natural” catastrophes seem to truly bring people together. These two
religious festivities continue to reassert the true “Venetianity” to this day and are most
beloved by the natives.
Temporary architecture is also involved in the Regata Storica when profusely
decorated floating barges are lined up along the Grand Canal for the boat parade and for the
boat races. Venetians reclaim their nativeness on this occasion too, but tourist involvement is
more massive. Venetians set themselves apart from visitors by being on boats whereas
tourists are stuck on the ground. The boat races are also a purely internal affair embodying
29 Banjeree and Southworth, ed., City Sense and City Design, p. 118.
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competition between local rowing clubs, like in the Head of the Charles. Carnival, on the
other hand, despite the fact that its recent revival originated from a spontaneous synergy
among young people (including me) in the late 70’s, who reclaimed the city and brought fun
back to the then-stale celebrations, is not viewed by Venetians with the same fondness as
some of the other festivals.
The feeling is that Carnevale is now controlled by outsiders (marketers, politicians, the
media) and hence not a genuinely Venetian affair. It is important for ephemera to be “real”
local events for them to be truly successful with the citizenry.
Lynch placed ephemera in the same basket of Identity in his Good City Form, under the
performance dimension of Sense, where he equated the “sense of place” provided by a clear
spatial identity with the “sense of occasion” of events with a clear social identity.30 Here,
lynch obviously confirms the inextricable dichotomy between structure and activity that gives
rise to place identity.
6.2 Mediated Images: Imaging

The main subject of the Seminar was “the role of media in city design and development”,
hence this section finally addresses the more specific issues of “Imaging the City”. Imaging
occurs for a variety of reasons and attempts to affect the Image of a City, through a variety of
channels. Frequently, imaging efforts are concerned with fabricating an Image of a place
within a specific dimension. Place promotion ads, as found in trade magazines such as
Expansion Management, “seek to change [people’s mental images] and, in doing so, to change
behavior”, Holcomb states in her contribution to the Seminar. The Image being manipulated
here is the city’s Business Image, which is more specific than a city’s overall Image. The latter
can also be the target of manipulation – for instance through such media as the P.R. pamphlet
by Mayor Menino, bragging about the ratings Boston received in many national rankings, as
illustrated by John DeMonchaux during his presentation – but more frequently the imaging
efforts are much more focused on specific aspects of a city’s operation, such as its housing
market, its cultural vitality, its educational prowess and so on.
I suggest there are several ways for non-experiential images to be propounded to target
audiences, through the tweaking of the multisensory inputs that reach each of us through all
the media:
?? Orchestrated display of selective snippets of Identity, through:

?? Selective structural features of a city
?? Selective activities in the city, or both
?? Manipulation of Identity through visualizations, visions or revisions of structure
and activity
?? Manipulation of meanings through narrative
?? Manipulation of meanings through associations
Moreover, one needs to be clear about who is controlling the imaging, to whom the
mediated images are directed and for what purpose imaging is being used. So we have, for
example:
30 Lynch, Good City Form, p. 131-132.
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?? An Outsider’s Image of a City (like that of a visitor or an urban critic)

?? An Insider’s Image (prettied up to attract outsider’s)
?? Political Images for local consumption (negative ads and boasting ads)
?? Informative Images to aid in decisions (planners’ visualizations)
?? Heritage Images to evoke links to the past (preservationists’ revisions)
?? Guided Visits (mediated experiences)
In the following sections I will look at some of the main types of mediated images that
emerged from the Seminar.
6.2.1 Place Promotion

First of all, I would clearly differentiate between messages intended for tourists and for
business. While the former may add some value to the latter, an ad would generally be
directed towards one or the other of these major target audiences. I think the marketing of
places to either tourists or businesses provide a very intriguing venue of research to someone
who’s interested, as I am, in discovering what it really is that people like or dislike about
cities.
I would then divide the “claims to fame” that appear in place-ads into two fundamental
classes: functional claims and quality claims. Functional claims are (more) factual,
quantitatively measurable (to some extent) and – I would argue – almost necessary to provide
a “real” basis for an ad campaign. Quality claims reach into the intangible (and perhaps
ephemeral) and are best related with photographs and evocative prose than with numbers and
facts.
Functional claims include: infrastructural assets (highways, harbor, rail connections,
etc.), inexpensive labor, cheap land/office space, tax incentives and “centrality” claims among
others. I cannot see how an ad campaign could successfully attract new business to an area
without significant functional benefits being put on the table. At a more personal level, the
decision on the part of employees as to where exactly to relocate to, once the company has
decided to move to a new place, is also often based on very functional criteria such as: quality
of education, cost of houses, distance from work. Function is much less of a factor in tourism,
although gateway cities prosper with visitors simply because of their position.
Quality claims reach deeper into the subconscious and try to “strike a cord” with some
of our most intimate feelings. This is where the concept of beauty resides, as well as serene
concepts such as community, tranquillity, safety and pleasure. More dynamic characteristics
are also associated with quality-places, for instance: arts, music, lively street life both day and
night, a variety of entertainment possibilities, great culinary experiences, and other “cultural”
aspects. Both structure and activity are what create positive or negative images. Quality
claims must therefore select the “most attractive” urban streetscapes coupled with the most
appropriate activities, based on the target audiences. The really interesting question is: are
there certain stereotypical “positive” images that are commonly peddled as high quality?
What do the “good” buildings and streetscapes look like? What are the people doing? What
are the activities?
As Beinart shows us, outsiders were attracted to ancient cities because of their
“contents” or “activities”, and only in part because of their “container”, i.e. the structure itself.
The lack of pictorial representations in the travel books and books of praise testifies to the
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difficulty in giving meaning to a city’s identity through such an experiential medium as its
structure. All of the Campaigns and Initiatives, as well as the Oral Histories and the Travel
Books focused primarily on the “content” of a city. Campostela, Rome, Jerusalem and other
holy cities were targeted by religious tourists because of their Saints, Churches, Mosques and
Synagogues.
The structure of the city did not figure prominently in the traveler’s mind. The
communion with holiness and all of its beneficial consequences (indulgences, cures, miracles,
etc.) was the primary motivator there. Olympic cities and World Fair cities are boosted by the
events they “host”. The structural aspects are secondary and if anything they are meant to be
improved in the course of these “image” events. Another example in which structure supports
and is a consequence of activity.
So, Beinart is right when he concludes that “a well-formed city is its own best
advertisment”. What I would add is a city’s “activity” is the best “engine” for the development
of its form. Whether the city becomes well-formed as a consequence of this activity is another
story, one that Ruskin has written very insightfully about. This is where “meaning” becomes
important. The making of good city form to me is a meaningful synthesis of activity and
structure, in which the identity of a place emerges almost spontaneously from the milieu of
forces that operate within and around it.
Good City Form carries meaning with it automatically – gratis – and is a result of a
deep identity rooted in the labor of the people who lived in it and who constructed their
places of work, their churches, their civic buildings and their dwellings in it. When
architecture and urban design are not the product of this rootedness, the resulting identity
will not be as strong and the need to “crystallize meanings into recognizable and transferable
packages of identity” will emerge.
In the end, however, image building for cities of today and of the past probably attests
to a widespread yearning for “better” cities. Why would we advertise our town, if everything
was already great and everyone was well-off? Who needs tourists anyway?
6.2.2 Boosterism, Boasterism and Basherism

Boosterism is very akin to place promotion, but it is always generated by insiders and it
is not necessarily meant to attract outside visitors or businesses. Very often, boosterism has
very local political aims. It’s an insider-to-insiders deal. Cleveland’s Vision 2000, as well as
many other such initiatives around the world, are visions used to boost a sagging local
economy or a decaying downtown.
Praise Books fall in this general category, but are of a very different nature. They boast
about a city out of civic pride and seem to be exempt from ulterior motives. There’s no
boosting necessary for the towns depicted in the Praise Books. They’re doing just fine, thank
you.
Many of the PR campaigns by city halls around the country combine a good dose of
boasting about the idyllic qualities of the place with a modicum of bragging about the great
business base and infrastructure, all for the sake of boosting the image of the current mayor.
If the promotional materials attract some additional business to town, great! But as long as all
the local voters receive the brochure, the mayor will be guaranteed reelection.
The opposite of boasterism is basherism, of course, so as soon as the mayor releases the
PR materials, an opposition group puts out its own pamphlet pointing out all of the failures of
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the current administration. Intense imaging techniques are employed in bashing efforts.
Pictures of urban squalor are often used to bring the point home.
Planners should pay attention to the type of images that are used to represent success
as well as failure. We should strive to produce successes and obliterate images of failure from
the real world. We should however be careful about such Imaging efforts, since they have the
potential of altering our meaning of successful places. Perhaps the new buildings that look so
good on a brochure and are touted as great achievements are not after all such great
contributions to habitation. We should always find out what the local inhabitants think of the
“trophy building”. This is one of the areas where imaging has the greatest potential for
causing real damage to urban fabric.
Trophy architecture, like the massive skyscrapers of Asia that Larry Ford presented to
us, generally looks good only at the scale of a skyline view, thus making it excellent for
iconographic branding and inciting boosterism through massive changes in the structure of the
city. Meanwhile these “totemic buildings” are usually miserable failures at the street-level,
where they generally negate human habitation and discourage communal activity. It is this
negative feedback loop that needs to be broken to prevent more and more “signature
skyscrapers” from going up simply to become the new “symbol” of a city, while the livability of
the sidewalks is gradually destroyed by massive cementification (usually to provide parking
for the patrons of the signature building), and by the proliferation of bland and boring façades
wherever these concrete giants meet the earth within the urban fabric.
Planners would do well to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of identity (structures and
activities) and let “facts boast for themselves”.
6.2.3 Media Portrayals

The media plays a semi-impartial role in the mediation of images, but its power to
persuade is far greater than self-promotion or marketing, as Birch, Jenkins and the Cleveland
case showed us. When national media gives a city a boost, the effects are powerful, as in the
case of the Fortune magazine for Cleveland. Movies, documentaries, TV programs and TV ads
reach broad audiences and can feed large amounts of image-building materials to viewers.
It would seem to me that the strength of the Images produced by popular media is in
some ways proportional to the number of people exposed to them as well as to the strength of
the message. Movies and TV sitcoms may send out subliminal clues, but many successive coats
of such clues will paint permanent stereotypes in the minds of regular viewers.
Planners should be aware of these stereotypes and work toward eliminating negative
ones by acting on the real world of structure and activity, in concert with other public and
private agencies. All of the news media are concerned with facts and planners should make
sure that “good facts” are produced in the urban realm, by designing good plans and producing
good habitable places. Planners should also make sure that success stories are reported in the
news media to produce honest boosting and boasting materials that will benefit the citizens.
6.2.4 Informative Images

This category of mediated images brings us to planners territory, where informative
images are produced, based on solid research and careful planning. Visualizations, drawings,
plans, graphs, tables, navigation maps, GIS electronic maps, aerial views and analytical maps
all fall within this category and they all have an effect on decisions about the urban
environment.
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Hayden and MacLean showed us the potential usefulness of aerial views which could aid
our understanding of edge sprawl. Martin and Bass-Warner showed us a collection of images
and descriptions of travel routes within urban and suburban landscapes.
Many of us have had personal experiences with drawings, plans, spatial analyses on GIS,
photographic documentation, census data and many other useful tools to convey information
to decision makers and to the public.
The images used by planners and architects can be both objective, i.e. based on facts, or
they can be speculative, based on hypotheses and opinions. It is important that both of these
types are handled with care so that our work is accurate and rational, since planners’ images
are in the end the ones that really make change happen in the “real” city, modifying structure
and consequentially activity, thus re-imaging the essential identity of a place.
6.2.5 Imaging in Education

Although no presenter really touched upon this topic, I wanted to add one more important
source of images that shape the construction of the Image of a City. To me, architecture and
planning education is a major source of mediated images that have affected, consciously or not,
the minds of generations of planners and architects who then went out into the real world to
produce places with more or less imageable identities.
It is hard to build a Good City if we cannot agree on what it is or what it looks like.
Trophy architecture may have originated in the halls of academia, more so than in some
Madison Avenue office. Many of the ills of our cities may be traceable to our great institutions
of learning. It would be appropriate for some of us to have the courage to rummage through
our own closets to see what skeletons may be hidden there.
Scholastic imaging is an area that deserves serious and unbiased scholarly attention.
7 Rating “Place”
The rating of places is probably an old habit, as de Monchaux points out, and I agree that
this habit seems to have turned into “a national pastime” lately. It is clear, as both John de
Monchaux and Terry Szold emphasized, that the role of a planner/designer is to make places
better and that striving to be the “best” is a distortion of the planner’s credo. In fact, place
ratings differ rather substantially from the planner’s mission of “improving” the quality of
place and hence the quality of life of a place since they extend the “relative” concept of
improvement of a place from its former state to a new – presumably better – condition. Place
ratings compare different places on a fictional “absolute” scale in a specific instant in time. It
is hard to argue therefore that place-ratings are a natural extension of the urge to improve
one’s lot.
It is also hard to imagine who might really put these place-ratings to good use. I can
hardly imagine a family deciding where to move to based on the Places Rated Almanac,
although some companies might consult it as one of the many factors influencing a corporate
relocation, but probably a very minor factor indeed. There are many other, vastly more
important reasons that force such choices, such as fiscal policies, proximity to natural
resources or to major communication hubs, etc. An amalgamated index might include some of
these factors, but the real decisions are made on much more place-specific and company-
specific parameters.
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Macro-migrations, such as those between the major metropolitan areas rated in the
Almanac completely miss the point as far as individuals or families are concerned. A specific
job offer from a specific company located in a certain metropolitan area will induce a family to
look for a house in such area. The main decision is made by “higher” authorities. Once the
relocation has been so decided, a family would search for a home, based on town-specific
factors (such as the quality of the schools, the tax rate, etc.), but also based on available
housing stock, preferences for “country” rather than for “urban” settings, and many other
personal tastes and needs that are too fine-grained to be captured by aggregate indexes such
as those in the Almanac or other similar publications.
I think the main use of these ratings is political. As Mayor Menino’s brochure on Boston’s
ratings clearly indicates, the rating business provides ammunition for “boosterism” and
“boasterism” when the ratings are positive. When they are negative, they may become
instruments for “basherism” by opposition parties who will campaign on such negative factors.
The fact is that there are so many ratings going around that every political faction, depending
on whether it is in power or on the sidelines, will probably be able to selectively pick and
choose from the list of plusses and minuses. Occasionally, a negative rating in one category
may actually spark remedial action, which may be one of the more positive effects of the
ratings, but overall it seems that the real power of these ratings is not much different from
that of the plethora of opinion polls that are conducted daily on every possible topic.
7.1 Measuring the change of “Place” over “Time”

There is one thing that emerges from this discussion that reconciles the apparent rift
between place-raters and planners/designers. It is the urge to measure change and evaluate
it. We may not agree with the methods used to arrive at these ratings, but we all feel that
some means for evaluating “before-and-after” a planning intervention would certainly be
useful, especially if comparable across different interventions on different places. Such
measures may not be possible at all, but, as John De Monchaux suggests, they should certainly
be explored by researchers in the planning profession. Kevin Lynch certainly tried to point
the way in Good City Form and the “Dimensions of Performance” that he presented were
aimed at this worthy goal: vitality, sense, fit, access, and control plus the “meta-criteria” of
efficiency and justice. Most of these measures are what I would call “functional”, pertaining to
infrastructure for activity or to other measurable aspects of “life” instead of aspects of “place”.
Quality of Place, which De Monchaux and Landis and Sawicki find to be missing from
these ratings, is so elusive that even Lynch couldn’t quite nail it down. He did a better job
than most, in that he identified performance dimensions that “reflected” quality of place, but
these dimensions were really still activity dimensions reflecting structural dimensions, but
they did not tackle structure per se.
I think, in keeping with Lynch’s indications in What Time is This Place?, we should strive
to come up with measurable performance indicators to evaluate “the change of place over
time”.
But if place is space with an identity and identity is made up of structure plus activity,
then what we need in order to measure the qualities of place is to come up with some
potentially useful performance indicators for measuring performance both in the physical
world of structure and in the social world of human activity. Many of these measurable
dimensions can be gleaned from Lynch’s Good City Form, but many others may need to be
developed, especially to measure visual preferences for certain streetscapes and buildings in
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order to arrive at measures of “pleasantness” or “visual satisfaction” and other such fuzzy
concepts31, that are usually avoided, but are essential, in my view, in the assignment of
meaning to place experiences.
8 Designing Good City Identities: Planners and Imaging
The lengthy discussion above may prove to be too cumbersome a framework in which to
analyze the contributions to the Imaging the City seminar, but it has helped me identify major
themes within this broad field and to determine the possible roles of planners in this milieu.
The bottom line is that the true Image of a City, the collective Image that will emerge
spontaneously from a process of habitation is built upon successive exposures to the physical
environment of the city and to the variety of activities that take place in this environment on a
daily basis. The planner and architect still continue to play a major role in the shaping of the
two basic constituents of place: structure and activity. I am not too sure that we have done an
adequate job at that.
Unfortunately, imaging seems to have the power to substantially modify and somehow
alter our perception of Identity and even to reshape our concept of meaning in such a way as
to make even the direct experience of place no longer purely unmediated. Preconceived
notions about certain places predate our visitation of such places and guide our image-
building even in the immediacy of the real world. Although habitation will generally allow us
to tap into the embodied meanings of place, breaking through the layers of imaging, the
pervasiveness of media is making it more and more difficult to have an unadulterated
experience of place.
In fact, the role of imaging in the modification of the attitudes of architects and planners
may be one of the more worrying suspicions that has emerged from this seminar, in my mind.
Besides being primary actors in the production of visualizations, visions and revisions,
planners and architects are also the first to be exposed to “brainwashing” through the imaging
that they are subjected to in college.
Distorted notions of meaning may be nesting inside most of us because of what we “learnt
in school”. Perhaps we should be the first to re-inhabit our towns and cities so we can purge
our minds of affected images an re-learn the intuitive process of experiential image-
construction. Although we should become well-aware of the pros and cons of the various types
of images, and we shall study them carefully and scientifically, we must remember that our
primary role is that of shapers of city identity and not that of direct manipulators of meaning.
“We may even be wise to concentrate on the physical clarity of the image and to allow meaning to
develop without our direct guidance”, as Lynch suggests32.
Informative imaging, like visualization and the like, should be a tool in our repertoire, but
we should not let ourselves get sucked into the “business of imaging”. Instead of becoming
Image Mediators, we should improve our skills at being “Immediators”33 of sensate experience,
providing venues for the immediate perception of embodied meanings in structures and
activities, so that “shared meanings” will spontaneously emerge in the process of habitation.
31I have personally dabbled with such issues in past papers, using such tools as “Visual Preference Experiments” and “Fractal
Analysis” of facades (from Bovill, 1996).
33 I like this term because it conveys the double notion of “Non-mediation” and “Immediacy”.
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9 Bibliography
D. Appleyard, K. Lynch, J. R. Myer, The View from the Road, Cambridge: MIT, 1964 (3rd
printing, 1971).
R. Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art, Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1966.
T. Banerjee, M. Southworth, ed., City Sense and City Design, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
R. Barthes, Semiology and Urbanism, VIA II, 1973, p. 155-157.
M. Batty and P. Langley, The fractal simulation of urban structure, Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Inst.
Of Science and Technology, Dept. of Town Planning, in Papers in Planning Research, N.
92, 1985.
S. Bonnemaison, City Politics and Cyclical Events, Design Quarterly, 1990, 147: 25-32.
C. Bovill, Fractal Geometry in Architecture and Design, Boston: Birkhäuser, 1996.
K. Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge: MIT press, 1960.
K. Lynch, What Time is This Place?, Cambridge: MIT press, 1972.
K. Lynch, Managing the Sense of a Region, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976.
K. Lynch, Good City Form, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
D. MacCannell, Staged Autheticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings, American
Journal of Sociology, 1973, 79 (3): 589-603.
C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, New York: Rizzoli,
1979. English translation in 1980, reprinted in 1984.
A. Rossi, The Architecture of the City, Oppositions Books, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982.
J. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. J. G. Links, New York: Da Capo, 1960.
J. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, New York: Dover, 1989. (Unabridged
republication of second edition, 1880).
W. Rybczynski, City Life, New York: Touchstone, 1995.
R.L. Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, Kevin Lynch and the Cognitive Theory of the City, in Design Book
Review 26, Cambridge: MIT Press, Fall 1992.
A. Whittick, Ruskin’s Venice, London: Watson-Guptill, 1976.
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APPENDICES
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Overview
Introduction: Imaging After Lynch
Nearly forty years after the publication of Kevin Lynch's landmark volume, The Image of the
City (1960), city design and development practitioners still grapple with ways to measure and
nurture "good city form." [1] Lynch's early work emphasized the perceptual characteristics of
the urban environment, stressing the ways that individuals mentally organize their own
sensory experience of cities. Increasingly, however, city imaging is supplemented and
constructed by exposure to visual media, rather than by direct sense experience of urban
realms. In the "hyper-visual"[2] contemporary city, the whole question of city image and city
imaging warrants renewed scrutiny. Lynch's famous study deliberately de-emphasized the
meanings that places hold for their inhabitants, yet this aspect remains central.[3] City images
are not static, but subject to constant revision and manipulation by a variety of media-savvy
individuals and institutions. In recent years, urban designers (and others) have used the idea
of city image proactively-- seeking innovative ways to alter perceptions of urban, suburban,
and regional areas.
The word image can mean many things. An image can be a physical likeness, and it can be a
mental representation, or even a symbolic and metaphorical embodiment. The term imaging
as it is understood here involves actors and actions concerned with transforming all of these
kinds of meanings. City imaging, in this sense, is the process of constructing visually-based
narratives about the potential of places. This media-enriched image-building process involves
not only place-based and form-based visions but also strategies for economic opportunity and
environmental stewardship. Place promotion transcends economics-grounded efforts to
attract new investment; it is also a strategy for reinforcing (or reconstructing) city image. As
such, it always matters who builds these images, for which reasons, and for whom. Image-
building efforts encompass not only changes to the built environment but also encode broad
conceptual orientations; image-making is about finding new ways (and new technologies) to
represent and promote cleaner environments, better communities, and socio-economic
progress, yet images may also serve to mask or perpetuate existing inequalities. Images may
be promoted in service of some broad "public good," but they are also subject to extreme
manipulation by market forces that resist any such wider efforts to plan. As Ward and Gold
put it,
Economic instability, restructuring and an acceleration of the international mobility of capital
have caused many regions to lose the traditional sources of employment that gave them their
primary identity. At the same time, individual national governments have retreated from
their former interventionist strategies. Taken together, these forces have fragmented the
traditional planning approach as the main agency shaping and managing the processes of
spatial change and left a vacant policy niche within which local promotional activity has
flowered (Ward and Gold, 1994, p. 8).
This "policy niche" provides many opportunities for urban designers who, together with media
professionals, are devising new ways to change public attitudes toward urban places.
The 1998 DUSP Faculty Colloquium examines emerging directions for city imaging, issues that
seem to bridge the concerns of physical planners, media professionals, and city developers in
ways that affect planning practice throughout the United States and abroad. If the imaging
(and re-imaging) of districts, cities, and regions is indeed at the heart of contemporary urban
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development practice, it is essential that urban designers and planners understand the
phenomenon. Only then will they be able to work more effectively within its constraints or to
devise alternative frameworks.
Constructing Urban Identity
In recent years, there has been a growing acknowledgment of the ways that the media and the
built environment work together to shape and alter public perceptions of places.[4] For
decades, urban sociologists have noted how community identity is socially constructed not
only by local residents but also by a wide variety of outsiders, including newspaper reporters
and editors, civic boosters, developers, realtors, marketing firms, and city officials (Janowitz,
1952; Suttles, 1972; Weiss, 1987). Such castings and portrayals can have both positive and
negative connotations. Sometimes, as is vividly conveyed in Mike Davis' (1992) account of the
contradictions of twentieth century Los Angeles, the mythmaking of the boosters has its own
darker counterpart vying to capture the public imagination. While some critics, such as
Michael Sorkin, may regard L.A. as "...the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable
save through the fictive eyes of its mythologizers" (cited in Davis, 1992, p. 20), Los Angeles is
hardly alone. All cities, and the neighborhoods within them, are constructed and interpreted
by many forces; we learn about places not only from the people who live in them but also from
the built environment in which social life takes place and from the media environment
(including the reportage of "pseudo-events"[5]) that helps to edit and alter our perceptions.
Media portrayals and urban development ventures each make judgments about the worth and
potential of people and the places they inhabit. For example, Hollywood producers and
directors seek out distressed urban communities from South Central Los Angeles to Detroit to
set their nightmarish portrayals of inner city life, images that often serve to confirm or extend
negative stereotypes. On television, the situation seems similar, although exceptions such as
MTV's "The Real World" annually seek out urban settings intended to forge the very definition
of what's cool. Still, the most popular television dramas focus on inner-city crime-fighting or
chronicle the 'incoming wounded' of urban emergency rooms. Even the 1990s spate of urban
TV comedies, epitomized by the nine-year run of "Seinfeld," tend to confirm stereotypes of "a
vibrant city that is quirky and diverse but not very nice" (Grunwald, 1997).
The metro-media nexus occurs not only within the realms of film and television (not to
mention older media forms); increasingly, urban images are conveyed through newer digital
media. Popular computer-based games such as Simcity 2000 provide participants to direct the
development of a metropolis, and encode a myriad of assumptions about how cities can be
structured. Other alternative cyberworlds, also use physical cities as metaphors for creating
new interactive social realms that allow those with computers to experience urbanism-at-a-
distance.
Even as new communications technologies mediate the experience of the city through the
creation of parallel fictional worlds, city imaging efforts also continue to thrive in the built
world of urban real estate development. Here, too, the old values of "location, location,
location" that drive urban redevelopment initiatives have gained new media partners.
Increasingly, flagship development projects take on the trappings of staged ventures, in which
image-building is at the head of the agenda.
In the effort to shift and lift public (or investor) confidence, places get named or re-named to
convey future hopes-- as with Detroit's Renaissance Center-- or to convey a more upscale or
pastoral image. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that seems to be diversifying and
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accelerating. At mid-century, tenements and slums were replaced by public housing projects
with names like "Orchard Park" and "Elm Haven;" in the late 1990s, many failed housing
projects are themselves being torn-down and rebuilt as New Urbanist mixed-income
communities, again with new identities and new names, not to mention new glossy brochures
and promotional videos. Baltimore's notorious Lafayette Courts project is reimaged as
Pleasant View Gardens; Atlanta replaces Techwood Homes with Centennial Place; Chicago
tries to bury the infamy of Cabrini-Green in a billion dollar new neighborhood.[6] Similar re-
imaging occurs in other parts of American cities: now-seedy areas get recast as Arts Districts,
and abandoned 19th century industrial landscapes become resuscitated as centers of Heritage
Interpretation, Historic Preservation, and (it is hoped) Economic Development.
Twenty-five years ago, Kevin Lynch called on designers and planners to help city officials and
city dwellers develop a clearer sense of the passage of time in urban areas. Now, however, his
intriguing question "What Time is This Place?" (Lynch, 1972) is being answered by calculated
efforts to select and highlight certain past eras of the city's culture and ambiance, while
bypassing less marketable elements, periods (and persons)[7]. Everything from the
streetscape and the architecture of new and renovated facilities to the typeface of tourist
brochures and signage attempts to recapture a lost piece of heritage in a way intended to
portend a new post-industrial economic viability. Redevelopers of Tampa's Ybor City, for
example, seek to attract tourists and reinvestment dollars by harkening back to the late 19th
century days when the neighborhood marked the global center of cigar manufacturing and
served as a nexus for Italian, Cuban, and Spanish immigrant culture-- even though the
neighborhood is now home to a predominantly African-American population.
Re-imaging also occurs at the level of the city as a whole. Places such as Pittsburgh and
Cleveland-- not long ago widely stereotyped as the epitome of 'rust belt' decline, are now re-
interpreted as the poster children of rust belt renaissance. To accomplish this image change,
city leaders have long recognized that tangible evidence of economic growth is not sufficient;
what matters is both high profile physical redevelopment and the skillful marketing of such
efforts at visible change. The New Cleveland Campaign, for instance, is premised on equal
doses of urban development and public relations. Other cities, in the United States and
elsewhere, stage elaborate promotional campaigns in the attempt to attract national and
international events such as major conventions or the Olympic Games.
In many places, the process of image making has extended beyond city limits to encompass the
broader regions in which metropolitan homes and workplaces are increasingly found. In
Lynch's terms, this is about "managing the sense of a region," in ways that enable residents to
identify-- and to identify with-- a wider set of jurisdictions (Lynch, 1976). Progress on regional
image-making has been sporadic and slow, especially in areas of high racial and ethnic spatial
polarity between inner city and outer suburbs. For every vague notion of "Chicagoland," there
are many cities where personal identification ends strictly at the city line. Still, there are
more promising counter-trends, from Portland Metro-- where regional government and
ecologically-sensitive management seem to have made significant gains-- to the burgeoning
rails-to-trails open-space networks that cut across political jurisdictions in regions throughout
the United States.
Assessing the Images and the Image-Makers
Most of those who have begun the assessment of re-imaging efforts have attacked them as
superficial and divisive, yielding Disneyfied cities that are more racially and economically
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polarized than ever before. Such critics-- typified by those who contributed to Michael Sorkin's
edited collection of essays entitled Variations on a Theme Park (1992)-- have bemoaned what
they see as the 'privatization of public space,' a trend seen as permitting enhanced
surveillance and fortress-like urban design.
Cultural geographers in Britain and Europe (with minimal participation by American
colleagues) have contributed recent volumes with titles such as Selling the City: Marketing
Approaches in Public Sector Urban Planning (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990); Selling Places: The
City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present (Kearns and Philo, eds., 1993); Place Promotion: The
Use of Publicity and Marking to Sell Towns and Regions (Gold and Ward, eds., 1994);
Marketing the City: The Role of Flagship Developments in Urban Regeneration (Smyth, 1994);
and-- perhaps most provocatively-- Reimaging the Pariah City: Urban Development in Belfast
and Detroit. (Neill and Fitzsimmons, 1995).[8] At the still broader locus of nations and
nationalism, too, architecture and urban design have regularly been used in the service of
promoting the preferred self-image of powerful persons and institutions. Whether through
efforts to consolidate colonial rule or through post-colonial attempts to forge group-based
identities through the design and construction of new capital cities and parliamentary
districts, image-making has been a central aspect of city-making (AlSayyad, 1992; Vale, 1992;
Wright, 1991).
At all scales, then-- from the local to the international-- the image-making process seems
ubiquitous and complex. Most academic critics have tended to see all such efforts as uniformly
nefarious; selling anything is equivalent to selling out. They see these attempts at constructing
new group identities as serving the interests of dominant groups, while further marginalizing
all others. Yet, it is far from clear that the broad brush critique yields a wholly satisfactory
picture. If "imaging the city" is indeed the ascendant mode of design and development we
have, then it behooves designers, planners, and city leaders to understand how it works, and
how it can be improved or, if necessary, superseded.
New Directions for Imaging Cities
It is possible to characterize and categorize the range of city-imaging efforts currently
underway in many different ways. One could, for instance, group them according to specific
project types-- housing, retail, industry, institutions, parks, and the like. This classification,
however, masks the renewed emphasis on mixed-use efforts, does little justice to the complex
urban qualities of vibrant neighborhoods, and contributes little to understanding why certain
kinds of development are happening in specific districts at this specific historical moment. It
seems more pertinent to begin by identifying the types of districts where globally-rooted
structural changes in the urban economy have created both the necessity and the opportunity
for large-scale change (King, ed., 1996). At the same time, understanding the dynamic of city
imaging requires examination at many different scales, ranging from the powerful catalyst of a
single highly-imageable new building to attempts to reconceptualize the metropolitan region
as a whole.
Before one can understand very much about the city imaging phenomenon, however, one must
first explore the expanding range of methods and techniques that are available for visualizing
and marketing places. Moreover, one must come to terms with the ways that the work of city
designers and planners is embedded in a wider realm of urban policymaking and colored by
the broader portrayal of cities, suburbs, and regions in the media.
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The seminar is therefore structured into two major sections. The first part, entitled "The
Mediated City," explores the burgeoning interconnections between urban development and
new media, while the second part, entitled "Imaging Cities: Opportunities for Urban
Designers," identifies arenas where urban designers can intervene to help re-image cities in
positive ways, as well as methods by which such involvement can take place.
Endnotes
[1] See also Lynch (1981).
[2] For a discussion of "the hyper-visual American city," see Boyer (1996, pp. 138-150).
[3] In an essay written near the end of his life that reflected on the strengths and weaknesses
of The Image of the City, Lynch observed that "the original study set the meaning of places
aside and dealt only with their identity and their structuring into larger wholes." Yet, as he
candidly notes, "It did not succeed, of course. Meaning always crept in, in every sketch and
comment. People could not help connecting their surroundings with the rest of their lives. But
wherever possible, those meanings were brushed off the replies, because we thought that a
study of meaning would be far more complicated than a study of mere identity" [Lynch (1985)
in Banerjee and Southworth, 1990, p. 252].
[4] For a somewhat different account of this relationship, focusing on its implications for
public housing redevelopment, see Vale (1995).
[5] The pseudo-event concept, coined by Daniel Boorstin (1961, pp. 11-12), refers to a
happening that is 1) "not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted,
or incited it," 2) is "planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of
being reported or reproduced," 3) has an "ambiguous... relation to the underlying reality of the
situation," and 4) is usually "intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy."
[6] These public housing transformations are being carried out with support from HUD's
HOPE VI program.
[7] At the same time, however, countervailing efforts seek to highlight the contributions of
previously marginalized groups. See, for example, Hayden, 1995.
[8] See also Jackson (1995), and Paddison (1993). While the Anglo-European literature has
taken a decidedly critical tone, the origins of the place promotion literature are largely
American, dating back to a 1938 volume entitled How to promote community and industrial
development (McDonald). Such work focuses on how to market successfully, rather than on
the more complex cultural questions about what such place-marketing means.
References
AlSayyad, N., ed. (1992). Forms of dominance: On the architecture and urbanism of the colonial
enterprise. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.
Ashworth, G.J. and Voogd, H. (1990). Selling the city: Marketing approaches in public sector
urban planning. London: Belhaven Press.
Boorstin, D. (1987, 1961 original). The image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. New York:
Vintage.
Boyer, M.C. (1996). CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication. New
York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Davis, M. (1992). City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage.
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Gold, J.R. and Ward, S.V., eds. (1994). Place promotion: The use of publicity and marketing to
sell towns and regions. Chichester, UK: John Wiley.
Grunwald, M. (1997). America's living rooms lose a laugh: Quirky TV show epitomized NYC,
yadda, yadda, yadda. Boston Globe. December 27, p. 1.
Hayden, D. (1995). The power of place: Urban landscapes as public history. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Jackson, E. (1995). Marketing an image for main street: How to develop a compelling message
and identity for downtown. Washington, D.C.: National Main Street Center, National Trust for
Historic Preservation.
Janowitz, M. (1952). The Community press in an urban setting. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Kearns, G. and Philo, C., eds. (1993). Selling places: The city as cultural capital, past and
present.. Oxford: Pergamon.
King, A.D., ed. (1996). Re-presenting the city: ethnicity, capital, and culture in the 21st century
metropolis. New York: New York University Press.
Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city . Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1972). What time is this place? Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1976). Managing the sense of a region. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1981). Good city form.. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1990). Reconsidering The image of the city(1985). In Tridib Banerjee and Michael
Southworth, eds., City sense and city design: Writings and projects of Kevin Lynch.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
McDonald, F. H. (1938). How to promote community and industrial development . New York:
Harper and Row.
Neill, W.J.V. and Fitzsimons, D. (1995). Reimaging the pariah city: Urban development in
Belfast and Detroit . Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.
Paddison, R. (1993). City marketing, image reconstruction, and urban regeneration. Urban
Studies 30(2).
Smyth, H. (1994). Marketing the city: The role of flagship developments in urban regeneration.
London: E & FN Spon.
Sorkin, M. ed. (1992). Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public
space. New York: Noonday.
Suttles, G.D. (1972). The social construction of communities. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Vale, L.J. (1992). Architecture, power, and national identity . New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Vale, L.J. (1995). The imaging of the city: Public housing and Communication. Communication
Research. 22 (6).
Weiss, M. A. (1987). The rise of the community builders . New York: Columbia University Press.
Wright, G. (1991). The politics of design in French colonial urbanism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
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Beinart
The draft paper convincingly demonstrates that image construction accompanied cities from
the dawn of civilization. Beinart reminds us of the three basic components of the image of a
city, according to Lynch: structure, identity and meaning. I must confess that I am a bit
puzzled by this triad, especially the “meaning” component, which seems the most elusive of
the three. It seems obvious that structure is an essential element, a conditio sine qua non for
the rest of the triad to exist. Identity comes from structure, in my mind, but not only from it.
I think “activity” is a major component of identity building.
The physical look and the human feel of a city are what give it an identity. Structure alone is
not sufficient. As a matter of fact, it is “activity” that engenders structure. Flourishing
economic activity is what made possible the construction of most of the beautiful medieval
cities and towns in Europe. A peasant society will, on the contrary, build a vernacular village
and its identity will derive from its humble origins.
I am not sure what meaning has to do with all this. I tend to believe that meaning is a
“modern” adjunct to the real triad of structure, activity and identity. Meaning should be
“built-into” a city that has constructed its own identity through the labor of its citizens which
was in turn reflected in its structures. The meaning of a city to its citizens was the meaning of
their lives, not an abstract concept. Both of the aforementioned types of cities – the walled
medieval cities of Europe and the present-day peasant villages of Africa – have “meaning”, a
real meaning that emerged from their own resourcefulness, the skills of their artisans and the
local landscape (Genius Loci) and geology (materials).
Outsiders may not understand such a meaning, unless they traveled there. As Beinart shows
us, outsiders were attracted to ancient cities because of their “contents” or “activities”, and
only in part because of their “container”, i.e. the structure itself. The lack of pictorial
representations in the travel books and books of praise testifies to the difficulty in giving
meaning to a city’s identity through such an experiential medium as its structure.
All of the Campaigns and Initiatives, as well as the Oral Histories and the Travel Books
focused primarily on the “content” of a city. Campostela, Rome, Jerusalem and other holy
cities were targeted by religious tourists because of their Saints, Churches, Mosques and
Synagogues. The structure of the city did not figure prominently in the traveler’s mind. The
communion with holiness and all of its beneficial consequences (indulgences, cures, miracles,
etc.) was the primary motivator there. Olympic cities and World Fair cities are boosted by the
events they “host”. The structural aspects are secondary and if anything they are meant to be
improved in the course of these “image” events. Another example in which structure supports
and is a consequence of activity.
So, Beinart is right when he concludes that “a well-formed city is its own best advertisment”.
What I would add is a city’s “activity” is the best “engine” for the development of its form.
Whether the city becomes well-formed as a consequence of this activity is another story, one
that Ruskin has written very insightfully about. This is where “meaning” becomes important.
The making of good city form to me is a meaningful synthesis of activity and structure, in
which the identity of a place emerges almost spontaneously from the milieu of forces that
operate within and around it.
Good City Form carries meaning with it automatically – gratis – and is a result of a deep
identity rooted in the labor of the people who lived in it and who constructed their places of
work, their churches, their civic buildings and their dwellings in it. When architecture and
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urban design are not the product of this rootedness, the resulting identity will not be as strong
and the need to “crystallize meanings into recognizable and transferable packages of identity”
will emerge.
In the end, however, image building for cities of today and of the past probably attests to a
widespread yearning for “better” cities. Why would we advertise our town, if everything was
already great and everyone was well-off? Who needs tourists anyway?
Venice, my home town, is reaching (probably already has passed) the maximum carrying
capacity for tourists. Venice needs no advertising. As a matter of fact, the city government is
trying to cash in on the marketing of its image by charging advertisers who use its gondolas,
canals, bridges, campos and churches to sell everything from liquor to cars, to perfumes. You
won’t find many ads to invite you to Venice. Not ads produced by the city itself anyway. The
fact is, a well-formed city “naturally” attracts visitors. Venice now needs to “deter” visitors as
the Controinformazione pamphlet tried to do for Bergamo. Venice too is suffering from a
world-wide rush from “outsiders” to buy a second home there. Venetians are the ones being
pushed out. The population of Venice has declined from close to 200,000 inhabitants after
world war II to less than 68,000 today. Clearly, Venice is losing its “lifeblood”. The structure
is still gorgeous, but its “human activity” is degenerating, catering more and more to tourists
rather than to its citizens, failing also to express its own potential in other fields of endeavor.
Not surprisingly, the qualitative loss of meaningful activity is creating an identity crisis in
Venetian society. Are we all just souvenir peddlers, profiting from the sale of “packets of
identity” to outsiders? What identity are we packetizing? Certainly not our current one.
Venice is an example of a gradual loss of identity and meaning, despite the preservation of
structure, because of the gradual decline in spontaneous and meaningful activity.
Italy is gearing up for the Year 2000 Jubilee. Yes, the old sale of indulgences is still a major
business today. Italian infrastructure is being revamped for what is expected to be a year-long
stream of visitors to Rome, Venice, Florence and all the other major historic and religious
cities in Italy. It is an event that will probably bring more people to Italy than a Soccer World
Cup, the Olympic games and a World Fair combined. Will this major event bring as lot of
money to Italy? Yes. Will it add meaning? Probably not. As Beinart correctly points out,
“embodied” meaning is to be extracted only by those who linger in a place long enough to “take
it all in”. If anything, a continuous stream of strangers through your own neighborhood alters
the “embodied” meaning in a very negative way.
Creating new urban beauty is certainly the realm of city designers, who must indeed be
craftsmen of city form as Ruskin would have strongly advocated. But craftsmen must know
their materials and techniques well. City Form craftsmen must dwell in the cities they try to
form, to know the “material”: the existing forms, local building materials, specific indigenous
techniques, is short all of the elements that make up a “rooted” identity and therefore
spontaneously generate “embodied meaning”.
Preserving meaning in historic cities may be another venue for City Designers to engage in, to
prevent irreversible changes of identity due to the pervasive presence of activity catering to
the outsiders’ false perception of the true image of the city.
Sennett
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This draft paper confirms my opinion regarding the importance of “activity” as a primary
element of the construction of a city’s image.
As I already expressed in my reflections on Beinart’s paper, I believe that the physical look
and the human feel of a city are what give it an identity. Structure alone is not sufficient. As
a matter of fact, it is “activity” that engenders structure. Flourishing economic activity is
what made possible the construction of most of the beautiful medieval cities and towns in
Europe. A peasant society will, on the contrary, build a vernacular village and its identity will
derive from its humble origins. Both of these cities will make their citizens feel at home,
because they both sprang from deeply rooted local mores.
To summarize my take on the Sennett paper, I would argue that all activity that is not
“rooted” in the locale, either because it caters directly to local citizens, or because it creates
local wealth and well-being that is reinvested in the city’s structure and services, will do
nothing to improve the city’s identity and it will not therefore create or sustain an “embodied”
meaning to its citizens. The image and meaning perceived by outsiders may not be affected
directly by this, due to the interference of professional public relations and image-building
professionals. Eventually, though, especially if the structure of the city is not so well formed
to start with, the placelessness of modern corporate operations will result in a loss of local
identity and meaning, if such types of businesses prevail in a certain urban setting.
Habitation is indeed central to good city form, but more so is the continued habitation of the
city on the part of those who actually carry out the urban and architectural design and the
building of the city structures. What I read into Sennett’s mention of people’s “retro” taste for
neo-palladian symbols and other such clear, fixed icons of stability and rootedness is a need to
recapture the “time” and “labor” that used to be put into dwellings, civic buildings and other
urban structures. The work most people do keeps them away from and makes them incapable
of designing and building their own structures. Vernacular architecture on the other hand is
made up of many individual, perhaps amatorial, constructions that express and give body to
the local identity of the people who build, live and work in those communities. In our world,
we delegate such an important aspect of human life – the act of building – to a caste of
“specialists” composed of architects, urban designers, planners and construction workers.
Today’s capitalistic mode of construction aims primarily at reducing labor content to keep
costs down. Materials are selected for the same reason: ease of construction hence labor
savings. Design is simplified to modularize work as much as possible, thus making specialized
labor unneeded. Craftsmanship is on the brink of extinction in capitalistic society. Craftsmen
are anti-economical. They cost too much. Their labor is not considered worthy. The almost
complete elimination of labor content in buildings has not prevented buildings from being
constructed. Capitalists look at the number of units of dwelling constructed and don’t seem to
care about the “feel” of such dwellings. The fact that they lack identity and meaning escapes
them. People will pay for them, so that’s what counts. Only the rich can afford to pay the
extra money needed to hire craftsmen (usually from foreign countries where the skills are still
alive) to produce truly beautiful structures, both inside and outside.
Unfortunately, the educational system that trains those whom we delegate to create urban
form for us (architects, planners and builders) has gradually severed the link between these
professionals and the “places” for which they are called to create forms. International styles
are learnt in school, as well as the works of the most famous architects of this century (Wright,
Le Corbusier, etc.). Less and less do we look at the works produced in antiquity, or in the
middle ages, or in today’s vernacular societies. But it is there that we should look to re-
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acquire the taste for the “philosophy” of architecture that sustained the great works of the
past.
We all make the mistake of looking at the great works of antiquity for their formal stylistic
qualities, which we would all abhor and make fun of if someone were to reproduce them “talis
qualis” today, even in an amusement park. What we fail to do, it seems, is to look more deeply
into the web of relations that made those buildings “emerge” out of the respective
civilizations, through the enlightened work of some ancient architects and through the hard
labor of hundreds of skilled workers, all of whom knew how to shape the local materials using
long-refined techniques and especially how to put their harts into the work to make it the best
they could, so they could all be proud of the final result. It is only such a mentality that will
spontaneously produce good city form. Only by re-creating these essential preconditions and
by recasting the mental processes of the new generations of architects, planners and builders,
will we ever be able to produce consistently habitable places with unique identities, where the
image of the city will spring naturally from the embodied meanings that are rooted in the local
culture.
Jenkins
Henry Jenkins emphasizes, with numerous examples, the ambivalent nature of the
filmographic representation of the city (Manhattan in particular, but it could apply anywhere
really).
On the one hand there is the holistic, all-encompassing, apersonal view, in which people are a
blurry mass moving blood-like through the city’s arteries. An equalizing view devoid of
individuals, as one would observe from atop a skyscraper, as De Certeau fittingly remarks.
On the other hand is the city of individuals, the many-threaded weave of human tapestry,
which in the aggregate gives life to the city. At this viewing level the city is fragmented into a
myriad of rivulets of personal narrative, sometimes crossing, most times not… The
Gemeinschaft of small neighborhoods – sometimes limited to a city block or a single tenement
house – is certainly easier to deal with cinematically than the Gesellschaft of the totalizing,
rhythmically incoherent simultaneous activities that concurrently coexist in a metropolis. Yet
the tension between these two facets of urban life is there, palpable, and perceivable by urban
dwellers before it ever became the subject of films.
The big question for urban students and planners is whether there is any way to ease the
tension between the individual and the multitude, to make cities gemeinschafts by design.
One issue that immediately comes to mind is that it seems probable that the sheer size of an
urban population destroys a town-wide gemeinschaft and automatically results in a de-
humanizing gesellschaft. “Limits of Growth” concepts come to mind, as adopted in Portland,
Oregon. Perhaps a population of 10,000 would be the upper limit of meaningful gemeinschaft,
as some proposed in the past? Perhaps it is only a matter of rootedness and true “habitation”
on the part of the population and size has nothing to do with it… Perhaps some degree of
gesellschaft is healthy, but where do we draw the line and how?
I was intrigued by the “third view” of the city introduced by Lefebre. The semi-celestial, semi-
earthbound middle ground provided by windows and balconies. Here the detachment is
measurable and participation in the street-life is optionally available, while maintaining some
degree of separation. It’s a happy mediation between the too big and impersonal sky-view and
the too small and chaotic - but still largely impersonal – ground view. In planning terms this
brought about thoughts about the importance of “scale” in urban streetscapes and the probable
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benefits of limiting building heights and favoring the use of windows and balconies, for
example by making it possible to “open” them to participate in the outside world, a feat that is
no longer taken for granted in today’s architecture.
Campanella & Beamish

I found the two papers interesting and full of informative tidbits. On the whole, though, I
came away without a clear picture of the presumed consequences of digital media technology
on the urban environment.
While the two papers on the surface seemed to represent antithetical points of view, in the
final analysis they were more similar than expected. Perhaps it would have been better if
Anne and Tom had polarized their views more pointedly, to better explore the extreme
consequences for the built environment – both positive and negative – of the proliferation of
digital technology.
Both Anne and Tom seem to agree on the inevitability of the city, regardless of the prevailing
technology. Tom says “the city of bricks appears to be in no danger of obsolescence” and Anne
states “We simply cannot duplicate the physical world in all its richness with the present
technology”. Nor do we want to, I think.
So, what I actually got from both papers was a feeling that, despite a perhaps prevailing
cultural undercurrent of anti-urbanism reflected in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Henry
Adams and Henry James and an innate yearning for “nature” as epitomized by Thoreau and
Emerson, the existence of cities continues to be guaranteed by the social, cultural and
economic attractions of urban agglomerations, that William James had pragmatically accepted
as an “inescapable part of America”.
It doesn’t seem likely that digital technology will dramatically alter this eternal ambivalence
between city and country. People can telecommute from their home in the city just as well as
they can from their suburban retreats. It is unlikely that personal choices regarding the
location of one’s dwelling will be drastically altered by the availability of any new technology,
be it the phone, the fax or the internet.
Bricks and mortar will still provide the containers from which one will launch into the ether.
Will the containers be drastically different? I doubt it. Will the automobile be rendered
obsolete? No way says Patricia Mokhtarian.
What might happen is that perhaps we will disengage ourselves from the less important urban
activities that take up a lot of our time – such as running errands – by taking care of them
from our home PC, and perhaps we will have more time to enjoy our physical and social
community because of this. Perhaps we will begin to pay more attention to the beauty and
pleasantness of our community if we spend more “quality time” in it and this may guide the
design of our streetscapes.
Those of us who thoroughly enjoy the activities that make a neighborhood, a town, a village or
a city “alive” will continue to seek out these activities. Those who prefer to commune with
others through the internet will at least do more communing than they would probably do
otherwise. The image of the city that is portrayed by the various digital worlds out there is
not going to directly affect the “real” image of “real cities”. Only engaged habitation and
enlightened urban design and architecture will improve our physical urban environments and
our lives in them. Bad designs will continue to happen unless and until those responsible for
the “look and feel” of streetscapes reconnect themselves with the spirit of the place.
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Digital technology is an important tool for the management of cities, as proven by

Geographical Information Systems and the like. Cyberworlds and cities may be useful as well,
but we should look for other benefits in them, different from those provided to us by GIS and
territorial databases. Cyberworlds may be useful tools for the exploration of the essence of
social interactions in urban environments and may provide useful lessons about the need for
community that they demonstrate, but they probably will never affect the built environment as
Planning Support Systems and other digital computer technologies already are.
Schuster
This highly readable and enjoyable paper was warming, fuzzily suggestive and subliminally
inspiring. The topic is intriguing and appears to be hiding some portentous truth about
human co-habitation that I find irresistible. What can an Urban Designer, Architect or
Planner extract from the various points brought out in Mark Schuster’s paper? After an
eloquent and well-documented review of many pertinent issues, Mark ends the paper with
this question unanswered. I would like to find out what Mark may propose as practical steps
toward educating urban designers and planners for their involvement in the “impractical, the
extravagant, the extraordinary, the useless, the ephemeral”.
I applaud Mark for having included in the paper’s epilogue my favorite of all of Calvino’s
Invisible Cities – Sophronia – whose story I have always cherished. I could always recite the
story by heart, but I never really paid much attention to its meaning. I always liked the
structure of the story, with its surprising final twist that blows your mind away. After reading
Mark’s paper, I have begun to form an urbanistic interpretation of Calvino’s tale.
As I have often asserted in my writings, I believe that “good” architecture and urban design
are generally associated with intimate knowledge of a locale and are spontaneously generated
by a culture. I find there are some important truths in Norberg-Schultz’s Genius Loci. In the
absence of heavy machinery, materials are necessarily obtained within a small radius of a
building site, hand labor is the only mode of construction, designs are simple and time-tested,
constructions techniques are well established and change happens only gradually to the built
landscape, through a Darwinian selection of the “fittest” architecture at any particular time.
This seems to have generally produced “pleasant” results and continues to do so in some parts
of the world. Although this principle definitely applies to “vernacular’ architecture – both
past and present – I think that the best “high architecture” (monumental architecture), while
more flamboyant, also follows an evolutionary and “grounded” progression. This is no longer
the case in most of the industrialized world.
International architectural styles propounded by an internationalized architectural
educational system have made it difficult for “space designers” to be truly attuned to the finer
nuances of real places and to build pleasant streetscapes, with congruous buildings and
human-scaled details compatible with local traditions while innovative and exciting.
More importantly, as Ruskin emphasized 150 years ago 34, labor content in buildings – both of
mind and of hand – has drastically diminished over the years and the heart and spirit that is
associated with hand labor is ostensibly lacking in a lot of modern architecture. Much of our
urban and especially suburban landscapes are not inviting nor pleasant. At best, a modern
34 In both The Stones of Venice and the Seven Lamps of Architecture.
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building works only by itself35 and at only one scale36 or only in one dimension37 – if at all – and
often visually clashes with adjoining property, clearly remarking the separation from itself
and surrounding buildings, thus making public space around it uninviting.
Street furnishing , urban landscaping, on-street parking, brick sidewalks, stone curbs, cast-
iron street lights, wood benches and other public improvements can do a lot to enhance the
street experience of both pedestrians and motorists, but in the end streetscapes are
dominated by individual “archifacts” which may or may not contribute positively to the gestalt
of the place. Often they don’t. It depends on how well they embody an intelligible meaning
and reflect a distinct identity of the place. It depends on who designs them and builds them,
on how well the designers and builders embody local culture and transpose it onto well-fitted
buildings that maintain some continuity with pre-existing ones.
Mark generalizes ephemera to hyperbolic extents by including such events as the moving vans
bringing students back to school in September, or Haley’s comet. While one may generally
agree with the importance of all ephemeral happenings, which therefore may include sunsets,
full moons and may other natural cyclical or non-cyclical events, I would first of all draw the
line between “natural” and “human” events, since it seems that only the latter could be
affected by planners and urban designers. Planners should nevertheless take into account
“natural” cycles in the organization of public events (like Solstice Festivals) or even in the
design of places (like the Aztecs’ architects that lined up their temples to coincide with
particular astronomical alignments). As Mark suggests, a city may even celebrate the return
of students in the fall, with some sort of festival. All these are examples of what Kevin Lynch
calls celebrations of time.
Festivals, parades, carnivals and other festive human activities can be aimed at reclaiming
public space to make it “safe” and civilized (as Bonnemaison suggests), or they can be means
for local citizens to reaffirm their “nativeness” (as MacCullan purports). They may indeed
represent one of the final aims for our human toiling (as Harvey Cox proposes). There is truth
in all of these statements. The main message in Mark’s paper, though, seems to arc back to my
notion of “spontaneous emergence”. The parallel is obvious to me: both permanent structures
and ephemeral festivals are more successful if they truly embody the spirit of a place and are
products of a collective identity in action. The erection of temporary structures seems to
accompany the more successful ephemera, but the truly significant and cyclical temporary
urbanism seems to be a consequence of the success of the ephemeral and not vice versa.
In my hometown of Venice, temporary bridges are constructed and dismantled on two
occasions during the year: one for the Festival of the Redentore (celebrating the end of the
plague of 1575) and one for the Salute fest (celebrating the end of the next big plague in 1639).
Not surprisingly, “natural” catastrophes seem to truly bring people together. These two
religious festivities continue to reassert the true “Venetianity” to this day and are most
beloved by the natives. Temporary architecture is also involved in the Regata Storica when
profusely decorated floating barges are lined up along the Grand Canal for the boat parade
and for the boat races. Venetians reclaim their nativeness on this occasion too, but tourist
involvement is more massive. Venetians set themselves apart from visitors by being on boats
35 As for example the Bilbao Guggenheim building. I have run some preliminary experiments to explore the relationship
between buildings and contexts with very interesting results.
36 I have also begun to explore the way a pedestrian’s interest is retained by building façades at various scales, using fractal
techniques, with more interesting results.
37 The functional dimension often prevails over aesthetic or visual considerations when families decide to relocate to suburbia.
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whereas tourists are stuck on the ground. The boat races are also a purely internal affair
embodying competition between local rowing clubs, like in the Head of the Charles. Carnival,
on the other hand, despite the fact that its recent revival originated from a spontaneous
synergy among young people (including me) in the late 70’s who reclaimed the city and
brought fun back to the then-stale celebrations, is not viewed by Venetians with the same
fondness as some of the other festivals. The feeling is that Carnevale is now controlled by
outsiders (marketers, politicians, the media) and hence not a genuinely Venetian affair. It is
important for ephemera to be “real” local events for them to be truly successful with the
citizenry.
And so it is that I have finally realized what it was in the relationship between the perpetual
and the ephemeral in Sophronia that so intrigued me. Distinctive architectures and signature
ephemera both spring spontaneously from within an “active” population that “inhabits” a place
and affirms a common identity through its actions. Both are “shaped by citizens and passed
along by local practices, customs and word of mouth” (as Mark says). So they are one and the
same, in a sense. Or rather they are complementary facets of human co-habitation, which
together make urban life complete38 and, I would add, more pleasant.
Holcomb
I think the topic is definitely interesting, and I find it very closely related to Julian Beinart’s
paper earlier in the series. I don’t think the treatment of the subject by Holcomb was as
inspiring as Beinart’s though. While the array of examples is interesting and informative,
Holcomb’s conclusions are not fully satisfying to me. I find them a bit shallow and uninspired.
So what if place marketers selectively highlight the rosier images of a city? That’s what
they’re supposed to do! Certainly they will ignore the blighted areas and turn massive socio-
economic hardships into assets, such as “inexpensive labor” or “flexible workforce”. It’s their
job. Leave the critiques about the social inequalities to urban critics. Place marketers do
what they’re supposed to do. Some do it better than others, but you can’t blame them for
making a place look as good as possible as long as they don’t engage in blatant frauds.
I don’t think these types of intentional misrepresentations are necessarily bad, as long as the
motives behind these promotional campaigns are worthy. If we paint a rosier-than-real
picture of a place to create employment for a disadvantaged labor force, I think the end
justifies the means. If the fabricated picture produces positive physical urban improvements –
however limited to certain privileged neighborhoods – these would still be better than no
physical improvements at all and definitely better than further degradation and decay of the
built environment. Unfortunately Holcomb falls short of providing real ammunition to gauge
the effectiveness of these promotional campaigns, especially in terms of the lower classes of
citizens in the targeted locales. We just don’t know if these tools are making life better for the
average urban dweller.
If we were to discover that these ad campaigns only benefit big-money businesses and do
nothing to improve the lot of the inhabitants, then we should definitely come down hard on
those who mischievously deceive the multitudes for the benefit of the few. If they did not
38 Notice how Calvino clearly indicates, in his last sentence, that life without permanent or ephemeral structures would be
incomplete…
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spend public money for the place advertisements, though, we can only critique these ploys on
ethical or moral grounds, but we cannot stop them as long as they don’t break any laws…
If, on the other hand, the economic windfall from these marketing programs does create local
employment and eventually brings about improvements to the urban fabric as well, then bless
them! In short, I am reluctant to assign a positive or negative “moral” value to the
exaggerated claims and distorted (but positive) images produced by the place propaganda
machinery. To me, these image fabrications are value-neutral per se. Holcomb, on the other
hand, seems to attach an apparently negative stigma to these publicity efforts. I cannot agree
with such a view based on the evidence presented.
Much more interesting to me would be the analysis of the exact contents of these ads, both in
the text and in the pictures used. Is there a taxonomy of “good” characteristics that seem to
emerge repeatedly in the advertisements? I think so. First of all, I would clearly differentiate
between touristic messages and business messages. While the former may add some value to
the latter, an ad would generally be directed towards one or the other of these major target
audiences. I think the marketing of places to either tourists or businesses provide a very
intriguing venue of research to someone who’s interested, as I am, in discovering what it
really is that people like or dislike about cities.
I would then divide the “claims to fame” into two fundamental classes: functional claims and
quality claims. Functional claims are (more) factual, quantitatively measurable (to some
extent) and – I would argue – almost necessary to provide a “real” basis for an ad campaign.
Quality claims reach into the intangible (and perhaps ephemeral) and are best related with
photographs and evocative prose than with numbers and facts.
Functional claims include: infrastructural assets (highways, harbor, rail connections, etc.),
inexpensive labor, cheap land/office space, tax incentives and “centrality” claims among
others. I cannot see how an ad campaign could successfully attract new business to an area
without significant functional benefits being put on the table. At a more personal level, the
decision on the part of employees as to where exactly to relocate to, once the company has
decided to move to a new place, is also often based on very functional criteria such as: quality
of education, cost of houses, distance from work. Function is much less of a factor in tourism,
although gateway cities prosper with visitors simply because of their position.
Quality claims reach deeper into the subconscious and try to “strike a cord” with some of our
most intimate feelings. This is where the concept of beauty resides, as well as serene concepts
such as community, tranquillity, safety. More dynamic characteristics are also associated with
quality-places, for instance: arts, music, lively street life both day and night, a variety of
entertainment possibilities, great culinary experiences, and other “cultural” aspects. Both
structure and activity are what create positive or negative images. Quality claims must
therefore select the “most attractive” urban streetscapes coupled with the most appropriate
activities, based on the target audiences. The really interesting question is: are there certain
stereotypical “positive” images that are commonly peddled as high quality? What do the
“good” buildings and streetscapes look like? What are the people doing? What are the
activities?
It would be particularly interesting to explore these issues in terms of the disastrous

association of “quality images” with “trophy architecture”. This type of architecture generally
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looks good only at the scale of a skyline view, thus making it excellent for iconographic
branding. Meanwhile these “totemic buildings” are usually miserable failures at the street-
level, where they generally negate human habitation and discourage communal activity. It is
this negative feedback loop that needs to be broken to prevent more and more “signature
skyscrapers” from going up simply to become the new “symbol” of a city, while the livability of
the sidewalks is gradually destroyed by massive cementification (usually to provide parking
for the patrons of the signature building), and by the proliferation of bland and boring façades
wherever these concrete giants meet the earth within the urban fabric.
In short, my main concern with this whole business of place marketing is that it may
encourage bold, and awkwardly monumental, architectural super-icons that will provide a
place-recognition at the expense of true development of an urban identity within the human-
scaled confines of neighborhoods and districts where people enjoy living and working.
Birch
I found this paper and its verbatim presentation not very inspiring. I honestly cannot think of
major issues that emerged from this paper that are truly related to the colloquium’s agenda. I
think it is a case of a paper that was simply “made to fit” the bill as opposed to being molded
around the lines of inquiry that Larry Vale had suggested the author explore.
As interesting as any account of a locale’s planning history may be, the events detailed in the
paper do not seem to shed any light on the role of images in this slow process. Here we have a
complex case of the classic interaction between institutions, politics, residents and planners.
De Caro’s book on Robert Moses is full of these examples.
Images certainly were part of the 20 year history of the Bronx, but so they are part of
anything that happens in cities… There are glimpses of potentially interesting image-related
issues in the paper, specifically the mention of the design guidelines, which seem to reflect
some sort of image of the “neighborhood’s historic fabric” (p.18) and the cursory mention of
Michael Kwartler’s planning exercise using simulations of actual design details overlayed on
existing buildings. Very intriguing, but barely touched upon in the paper.
The only image-related conclusion that Genie Birch presented (conclusions are not in the
paper draft) was to say that there are several levels of images: those created by the Media, by
the Planners, by Institutions, by Citizens, by Outsiders, by Urban Designers and by the
Business community. A bit too little too late… Disappointing!
I suggest that Larry Vale force Prof. Birch to drastically revise her paper to include imaging
every step of the way throughout the paper, although I am not sure if this will lead to a more
interesting and stimulating paper, unless the two aforementioned issues of potential
relevance to imaging are given a much more prominent emphasis.
Lowenthal/Frenchman
This dual presentation (no papers yet available) was advertised as a duel between two
radically opposite views of Heritage, but upon close inspection of the excerpts from
Lowenthal’s book and based on the presentations, I must admit that I saw no such duality. I
thought Lowenthal would be adamantly opposed to the sort of re-invention of heritage sites
that Dennis Frenchman is professionally engaged in. I see no such opposition in his writing,
although the excerpts of his book only marginally touch upon the built environment. The
feeling I get is that Lowenthal accepts the “noble lies” of heritage-mongers as a human
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necessity and throughout his writing he seems to admire fabricated heritage for its better-
than-real character, which serves human needs better than the most accurate history ever
could.
I found the numerous examples in the book chapters entertaining and enlightening. They
clarified the role of heritage vs. that of history and made it apparent that we need to re-invent
the past in the service of the present as Dennis does. “Sites willfully contrived often serve
heritage better than those faithfully preserved”, Lowenthal says. “Heritage departs from
history in what it sees, what it stresses, and what it changes”. Frenchman’s interpretation of
Jamestown seems to try to strike a balance between historical accuracy and technologically-
supported fabrication. The two views of heritage (Lowenthal’s and Frenchman’s) seem highly
compatible to me.
Heritage is a celebration of the past, and a very subjective celebration, based on the self-
interest of a nation, a community, an elite or – sometimes – of a tyrant. Heritage is history
simplified and perfected. The narratives that sustain heritage parks such as Lowell and
Jamestown are modern – possibly more democratic – interpretations of a complex historical
past. They are (or will be) successful inasmuch as they reflect the “image” that the general
public wants to have of a New England mill town or of an early settlement, purified of all the
negativity associated with such sites (like child labor, slavery, mistreatment of indigenous
people, etc.).
I was pleased to hear Dennis reaffirm my creed in the importance of “activity”, when he
defined “place” as “structure plus action”, as opposed to “space”, which is just structure. I
really think this is the key to creating an identity. I guess, if one were to blend my former
definition with Dennis’s, one could say that “place” is “space with an identity”. Once an
identity is created it will act as “a scaffolding to which multiple meanings can be attached”,
according to Dennis’s interpretation of Lynch’s views on the subject. It seems obvious to me
that only spaces with identity can produce “images” in one’s mind, hence be the repositories of
meanings.
In the end, though, I feel much more attuned to Julian Beinart’s view on this whole subject, as
he expressed in the discussion period (quite aside from the fact that he used St. Mark’s square
as an example). The issue is not so much about the fabrication or design of heritage as both
Lowenthal and Frenchman interpret it, but the creation of built forms that will engender
heritage claims for future generations. I think the overall discussion was too slanted toward
“monumentalized” heritage: single, usually rather small, sites or individual buildings.
The attention in these two presentations (and I assume in the upcoming papers) was
dedicated to fabricating heritage based on past relics. I am more interested in the issue of
how to design and build new city forms that would embody the same popular sentiment as that
which guides heritage fabrication, but in today’s gemeinschaft. In other words, how do we
make the leap between the restitution of past heritage to the creation of narratives of
habitation in today’s physical world? What kind of structures and activities should we
encourage in today’s cities that will distill, in a few generations, into a coherent and enriching
heritage narrative? Are historical events necessary to create heritage sites? Or is beauty of
forms and pleasantness of surroundings the real spark that puts heritage fabrication in
motion?
Many of the sites for which heritage narratives are fabricated owe their rebirth and re-
invention not so much to the “story” that they embody but on the forms that they display in the
first instance. Structure comes before all else. If we have good looking forms, or remnants of
such forms, we can “build” the narrative of “action” that gives them full identity. The Lowell
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mills were just sitting there, abandoned. They embodied a “story” which was obfuscated by
the disrepair of the structures and demise of the industrial activity. The restoration of the
buildings made the story come alive again. The same happened in Williamsburg.
There are indeed instances in which the process is reversed, as in the case of Jamestown,
where only a mangled tower remains, but the weight of the story is what gives the whole
heritage fabrication its momentum. “Activity” – in this case the early settlement – is the main
factor here, and “structure” will follow – whether it is unearthed with archeology or fabricated
with virtual technologies.
The bottom line is that in the fabrication or design of heritage sites both “structure”
and “activity” are necessary for success. Not surprisingly these are the same ingredients that
give identity and meaning to today’s cities as well…
DeMonchaux
The rating of places is probably an old habit, as de Monchaux points out, and I agree that this
habit seems to have turned into “a national pastime” lately. It is clear, as both John de
Monchaux and Terry Szold emphasized, that the role of a planner/designer is to make places
better and that striving to be the “best” is a distortion of the planner’s credo. In fact, place
ratings differ rather substantially from the planner’s mission of “improving” the quality of
place and hence the quality of life of a place since they extend the “relative” concept of
improvement of a place from its former state to a new – presumably better – condition. Place
ratings compare different places on a fictional “absolute” scale in a specific instant in time. It
is hard to argue therefore that place-ratings are a natural extension of the urge to improve
one’s lot.
It is also hard to imagine who might really put these place-ratings to good use. I can hardly
imagine a family deciding where to move to based on the Places Rated Almanac, although
some companies might consult it as one of the many factors influencing a corporate relocation,
but probably a very minor factor indeed. There are many other, vastly more important
reasons that force such choices, such as fiscal policies, proximity to natural resources or to
major communication hubs, etc. An amalgamated index might include some of these factors,
but the real decisions are made on much more place-specific and company-specific parameters.
Macro-migrations, such as those between the major metropolitan areas rated in the Almanac
completely miss the point as far as individuals or families are concerned. A specific job offer
from a specific company located in a certain metropolitan area will induce a family to look for
a house in such area. The main decision is made by “higher” authorities. Once the relocation
has been so decided, a family would search for a home, based on town-specific factors (such as
the quality of the schools, the tax rate, etc.), but also based on available housing stock,
preferences for “country” rather than for “urban” settings, and many other personal tastes and
needs that are too fine-grained to be captured by aggregate indexes such as those in the
Almanac or other similar publications.
I think the main use of these ratings is political. As Mayor Menino’s brochure on Boston’s
ratings clearly indicates, the rating business provides ammunition for “boosterism” when the
ratings are positive. When they are negative, they may become instruments for opposition
parties who will campaign on such negative factors. The fact is that there are so many ratings
going around that every political faction, depending on whether it is in power or on the
sidelines, will probably be able to selectively pick and choose from the list of plusses and
minuses. Occasionally, a negative rating in one category may actually spark remedial action,
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MIT-DUSP-CDD
which may be one of the more positive effects of the ratings, but overall it seems that the real
power of these ratings is not much different from that of the plethora of opinion polls that are
conducted daily on every possible topic.
I think John’s review of the shortcomings of the ratings would benefit from the addition of his
opinion on “remedial” actions to correct the shortcomings and make these measures more
reflective of a planner’s concerns.
Leaving all that aside, though, there is one thing that emerges from this discussion that
reconciles the apparent rift between place-raters and planners/designers. It is the urge to
measure change and evaluate it. We may not agree with the methods use to arrive at these
ratings, but we all feel that some means for evaluating “before-and-after” a planning
intervention would certainly be useful, especially if comparable across different interventions
on different places. Such measures may not be possible at all, but, as John suggests, they
should certainly be explored by researchers in the planning profession. Kevin Lynch certainly
tried to point the way in Good City Form and the “Dimensions of Performance” that he
presented were aimed at this worthy goal: vitality, sense, fit, access, and control plus the
:meta-criteria” of efficiency and justice.
Under the heading sense, Lynch propounds his “formal components” of Identity (which he
terms “the simplest form of sense”) and Structure. As I repeatedly pointed out before, I truly
think that Identity is produced by the conflation of structure and activity. And it seems to me
that the place-ratings authors, as well as Lynch to a large extent, concentrate on the latter
instead of the former. Most of the measures are what I would call “functional”, pertaining to
infrastructure for activity or to other measurable aspects of “life” as opposed to “place”.
Lynch’s dimensions of performance are also of this type, in my view. Quality of Place, which
de Monchaux and Landis and Sawicki find to be missing from these ratings, is so elusive that
even Lynch couldn’t quite nail it down. He did a better job than most, in that he identified
performance dimensions that “reflected” quality of place, but these dimensions were really
still activity dimensions reflecting structural dimensions but they did not tackle structure per
se.
As I indicated before, my personal interest is in visual perception of places and in the
preferences that people somehow build up in their (sub-) conscious mind about places. I am
attempting to make a contribution to the definition of Quality of Place, looking at the visible,
physical structure of cityscapes.
The issues brought out by this paper reinforce my resolve to continue to pursue this most
elusive line of inquiry, which may lead us to more complete (and accurate?) assessments of the
effects of planners’ and designers’ interventions on city form.
Hayden & MacLean

As interesting as the presentation was (no paper yet), I found that it to be rich in images but
otherwise lacking in image-theorethical content. As Hayden stated at he beginning of the
presentation:
There are books that focus on the historical and policy end; there are books by architects
that focus on the physical planning; but there is no book which combines the two to create a
new kind of cultural landscape history.
And then later:
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The camera can tell powerful stories about the production of space with the camera, but we want
to combine them with cultural history.
Well, I did not find the lecture to be a success, as measured by the “cultural history” meter.
The most interesting part of the evening was the definition of the 5-part typology of suburbia:
1) Borderland.
2) Picturesque enclave.
3) Streetcar Suburbs.
4) Single-family mass produced automobile suburb.
5) Edge sprawl.
Perhaps the most poignant remark was the assertion that none of these typologies really
ever disappear, but they remain with us… But so what?
Although Hayden and MacLean were “interested in how old cores turn into suburban areas
and become something peripheral” nothing truly new seemed to emerge from their presentation
to explain this trend (beyond the fact that sprawl follows transportation routes and other
infrastructural amenities as is always the case).
I don’t agree completely with the assertion that “Most important of all is that the
fascination began with the landscape and then focused exclusively on the house. The house is
idealized, not the block, neighborhood, or the community”. I differ on the first sentence. I think
that the only thing that justifies the clear and continuing trend toward the single-family home
with a garden is precisely an ambivalent attitude that combines the desire for “space” (and
landscape) with the desire for an isolated “home” within such space.
As Eran Ben-Joseph appropriately pointed out, a more interesting tack would have
been to explore the usefulness of aerial imaging as visual aid to decision-making and planning
and most importantly – I would add – to explore the relationship between aerial images and
ground-level images. It may well be that what looks like blatantly obvious sprawl from the air,
may be mitigated so well with screen plantings and concealed by careful site selection (e.g.
away from heavily traveled suburban roads or away from residential areas) that such sprawl
may not be perceivable on the ground…
Many interesting issues would emerge if one were to undertake the task of comparing
aerial with ground images.
Martin & Warner

It was refreshing to see a more “down to earth” approach in Martin’s and Warner’s paper
and presentation. The “view from the road” approach was interesting, but fell short of
providing documented facts about the Images of Commonplace Living. It seems that the main
thrust of the paper was to demonstrate that, as seen from a car, the three neighborhoods
investigated (Seaward, Roseville and Eden Prairie) were not very dissimilar, despite the fact
that they were respectively defined as: Center City (Seaward), Inner Ring Suburb (Roseville)
and Outer Ring Suburb (Eden Prairie).
The most intriguing conclusion may indeed be that there is a suburbanization of the inner city
going on. However, I found the three examples a bit hard to read especially because of the
lack of much-needed maps to guide our “mental images” of the three places, as the various
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“modal blocks” were analyzed. I think the term “modal block” should have been better defined
too…
In particular, referring to the four characteristics that “stand out” from this study,
described in the beginning of the paper, I wonder to what extent the conclusions, especially as
they relate to Seaward, were a mere consequence of the methodology adopted. If one looks at
the neighborhoods purely from a car, then characteristics 1 (sameness of images) and 2 (little
social interaction) are almost inevitable. I suggest that the main difference between a “true”
inner city district and any suburbia would be precisely the ability to use “other modes” of
motion, especially walking, but also public transport, which may be unavailable in the suburbs.
Thus the “downward equalization” that seems to emerge from the paper is a sort of self-
fulfilling prophecy in this particular framework.
I think that, given the theme of the seminar and the Lynchean quotes at the beginning of the
document, the paper would have greatly benefited from a detailed analysis of the three
“districts” and the chosen “paths”, using an integrated approach that blends the View from the
Road and Image of the City techniques into a uniform method. I have tried this in one of my
earlier papers and have examples to show how this could be done. If this was attempted, even
just basing the diagrams on the authors themselves, one may have been able to discern the
real differences in the “images” that residents utilize to navigate the different neighborhoods.
“Landmarks” may be smaller in the inner city (maybe not as small as a doorknob…) and
“edges” may be tighter. Nodes may be stronger toward the downtown and become weaker as
one moves outward… Who knows?
I think it may also be useful to think in terms of performance dimensions that may guide the
choice of living location for both outsiders and local movers. I am not sure that “the region
remains a distant abstraction for those seeking a home” if these people are already living in
the metro area and are simply upgrading their house… Such indexes as: school quality, open
space access, access to cultural centers, theaters, access to large retail complexes, access to
sport events, etc. should clearly show the real differences between neighborhoods. These
differences will not be visible to the naked eye necessarily, nor will they show up in census
data. I also suspect that some structural differences should be visible in the physical world
too, as long as one chooses to look at paths (modal blocks?) that go beyond the automobile
landscapes chosen in the study.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Fabio Carrera

Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning Ph.D. Candidate

Imaging the City

Prof. Larry Vale & Prof. Sam Bass-Warner

The Image of a Good City.

Imaging and Good City Form

December 13, 1998

2 THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF CITY FORM: STRUCTURE AND ACTIVITY........................................................................4

December 13, 1998. 2

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2 The Nuts and Bolts of City Form: Structure and Activity

1 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, p. 5.

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The Fundamental problem is to decide what the form of a human

3 Lynch, Good City Fo rm, p. 48.

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2.3 Planners as managers and creators of structures and activities

3 Fit, Identity and Sense

3.2 Identity and Sense

7 Lynch, Good City Form, p. 151.

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4 The meaning of “Meaning”

10 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, pp. 13-14.

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4.1 Meaning as “intention”

4.2 Meaning as “understanding”

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4.3 Meaning as “significance”

5 “The Image” and other images

22 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, p. 5.

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depict different viewpoints of the complex metropolis, as captured in photos, movies, TV

5.1 “The” Image

5.1.1 The Collective Image

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5.2 Other images

5.3 Image Primitives

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?? Freeze -Frame (or Snapshot)

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5.6 Analytical summary of image terminology

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External Temporality Dynamics Structure Fiction

Table 1. A summary of some key characteristics of city images.

6 Image-Building and Imaging

?? Un-mediated, experiential exposure to real place

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6.1 Experiential Images

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6.2 Mediated Images: Imaging

?? Orchestrated display of selective snippets of Identity, through:

30 Lynch, Good City Form, p. 131-132.