39 Kevin Lynch
of urban form and structure. A year’s
Biographical Details and
Theoretical Context
Like many of America’s leading urban-
ists, Kevin Andrew Lynch had close links
with Chicago – the crucible of urban
studies – although his associations con-
cerned his childhood rather than profes-
sional career. Born in 1918 as the third
and youngest child of a family of Irish
descent, he grew up in an ethnically-
mixed and modestly affluent area on the
city’s north side. Educated first by private
tutors and then at the neighbourhood
Catholic primary school, Kevin followed
his two brothers to Francis W. Parker –
a secular high school with a progressive
curriculum that encouraged students to
think about the world around them. Sig-
nificantly at a time of economic depres-
sion, this included thinking about social
issues. In later life, he credited his school
experience as instrumental in interesting
him in architecture and philosophy and in
stimulating his lifelong interest in human
environments and social justice (Banerjee
and Southworth, 1990: 11).
By contrast, his higher education and
professional training followed an uncer-
tain path – albeit one that serendipitously
allowed him to blend an architect’s three-
dimensional and visual design sensi-
tivities with a planner’s understanding
Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-39.indd 292
architectural study at Yale (1935-6) was
followed by 18 months spent with the
Fellowship of trainee architects run by
the veteran modern architect Frank
Lloyd Wright, and then by a move to the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study
structural engineering and then biology
(1939-40). After briefly being employed
by a private architectural practice, he
was drafted into the US Army Corps of
Engineers for the duration of the Second
World War, returning to higher education
under a demobilisation scheme in 1946.
He earned a Bachelor of City Planning
from the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology (MIT) in 1947. This would prove
to be his only degree, since he never
undertook postgraduate study.
These repeated changes in direction
contrasted markedly with the trajectory
of the remainder of his career. After a
year spent employed as a town planner in
Greensboro (North Carolina, US), Lynch
was invited to return to MIT in 1948 as
an instructor in town planning, largely on
the strength of his undergraduate disser-
tation – an enthusiastic treatise on urban
renewal with case-study material from
Cambridge, Massachusetts (Lynch, 1947).
He worked his way up to full Professor by
1963, remaining at MIT until retirement
in 1978. Subsequently devoting himself
to consultancy through the firm that he
founded with his colleague Stephen Carr
(Carr, Lynch and Associates), he never-
theless retained his research and teaching
15/06/2010 6:05:22 PM
 Kevin Lynch
links with MIT until his sudden death in
July 1984.
This stability of employment at MIT
perhaps contributed to the consistency
shown in his approach to research, since
themes that he developed in his work dur-
ing the 1950s were continually revisited
throughout his career. For example, he had
pondered the question of how people nav-
igated the streets of big cities as early as
1952, when he linked this issue to broader
questions of aesthetics in a seminar at MIT
(Lynch, 1984: 152). A year abroad funded
by a Ford Foundation grant and largely
spent in Florence allowed him to develop
a deep appreciation of the significance of
place within a city, to devise principles
of notation through which to record his
observations, and to reflect on the nature
of urban form. This abiding fascination
with urban form (see also Lynch, 1954)
led to a five-year research programme,
funded by the Rockefeller Foundation,
which Lynch co-directed with Gyorgy
Kepes, the founder and head of MIT’s
Centre for Advanced Visual Studies. As
initiated in 1954, the aim was to undertake
an ‘investigation directed toward devel-
opment of a theoretical concept of city
form … and to supply the fundamental
criteria and techniques for conceiving,
expressing and controlling our percep-
tual environment’ (MIT, 2009: np). The
emphasis inverted, however, as the project
matured. By 1958-9, it had become ‘an
investigation of the individual’s perception
of the urban landscape … the inhabitant’s
and the highway traveller’s image of the
city, and the use of the signs and symbols
in the cityscape’. The objective of this work
was ‘the development of new design possi-
bilities and principles for the city’ (ibid.).
The principal results of this programme
appeared in The Image of the City (Lynch,
1960), easily the most cited of his seven
books (Pearce and Fagence, 1996: 584)
and the one that effectively laid down the
Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-39.indd 293
293
guidelines for his research in future years.
An ensuing textbook entitled Site Planning
(Lynch, 1962) developed the planning
implications of the perceptual analyses
offered by The Image of the City, with the
jointly-authored A View from the Road
(Appleyard et al., 1964) considering the
role played by road travel in constructing
urban imagery. After a fallow period of
critical contemplation (Carr et al., 1984:
523), Lynch published a further sequence
of four books. What Time is This Place?
(Lynch, 1972) reflected on the temporal
meaning of places within the city. Its
strong support for the notion of conser-
vation tied in with his next volume, the
ambitious Managing the Sense of a Region
(Lynch, 1976). Here, Lynch addressed the
question of managing the sensory mean-
ing of the environment, considering:
‘what one can see, how it feels underfoot,
the smell of the air, the sounds of bells
and motorcycles, how patterns of these
sensations make up the quality of places,
and how that quality affects our imme-
diate well-being, our actions, and our
understandings’ (Lynch, 1976: 8). Grow-
ing up in Cities (Lynch, 1977) drew on a
participatory multinational programme
funded by UNESCO to investigate chil-
dren’s perceptions of the city. Finally, A
Theory of Good City Form (Lynch, 1981)
considered the relationship between
fundamental human values and the city,
examining how such values should guide
the performance dimensions necessary
for good spatial and physical design.
Spatial Contributions
Broadly speaking, Lynch made four major
contributions towards developing a more
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 294
profound understanding of urban spa-
tial cognition. First, he provided insight
into citizens’ differential knowledge of
the urban environment and supplied
an accessible methodology by which it
might be studied. Lynch argued that spa-
tial knowledge centres on environmental
‘images’ – mental representations of the
world that people develop through their
experience and which act as the basis
for their behaviour. This concept, which
mirrored a similar idea developed earlier
by Kenneth Boulding (1956), was made
relevant to an urban context through the
concept of ‘legibility’, or the ease with
which individuals can organise the vari-
ous ele­ments of urban form into coherent
‘images’. Lynch (1960) suggested that cit-
ies varied in the extent that they evoked
a strong image – a quality that he called
‘imageability’ – arguing it was most likely
that ‘imageable’ cities were ones that
could be apprehended as patterns of high
continuity with interconnected parts. In
other words, if a city was ‘imageable’, it
was also likely to be ‘legible’.
The Image of the City reported on how
Lynch and his team tested this idea in three
American cities: Boston, Los Angeles, and
Jersey City (New Jersey). In brief outline,
they interviewed small samples of pre-
dominantly middle-class people in each
city to investigate residents’ perceptions
of the central city, using such techniques
as sketch maps, verbal lists of distinctive
features, directions for making specific
trips in the city, and informal questions
about orientation. Findings for individual
respondents were aggregated and com-
pared with visual surveys carried out by
trained observers. The assessments were
made on the basis of a five-fold typology
of urban elements, namely: ‘paths’ (chan-
nels along which people moved through
the city), ‘edges’ (boundaries), ‘districts’,
‘landmarks’ (such as familiar stores, pub-
lic buildings, statues or physical features),
Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-39.indd 294
Key Thinkers on Space and Place
and ‘nodes’ (strategic places where navi-
gational decisions have to be made). The
results suggested that urban space was
perceived in terms of well-known clus-
ters of points linked together by clearly
defined paths that traverse less familiar
areas. Perception of districts waned as
residents became more familiar with the
city, presumably through gaining more
detailed knowledge, whereas landmarks
assumed greater prominence with famili-
arity, seemingly because of their role in
navigation.
Lynch’s second contribution concerned
way-finding and the importance of the
street in structuring urban experience.
Juxtaposed against the prevailing ideology
that saw the significance of streets prima-
rily in terms of how well they handled
flows, Lynch argued that paths – which
primarily meant streets – were the main
structural element in images of the city
and that the sensory experience gained
from travelling through urban space was
qualitatively important in image forma-
tion. Lynch and Rivkin (1959) studied the
diverse and sometimes unexpected fea-
tures that subjects recalled after a walk
around a block in central Boston. As noted
above, The View from the Road (Appleyard
et al., 1964) extended the analysis to road
travel, which was accomplished by stud-
ying the conscious, aesthetic and largely
visual experience of motorists travelling
along freeways into four American cities
(Boston, Hartford, New York and Phila-
delphia). This was supplemented with a
more detailed study carried out on seven-
mile section of the Northeast Expressway
into Boston. The explanatory results sug-
gested that experience gained from car
travel could shape urban imagery beyond
the realm currently in focus. For exam-
ple, the vista of the distant city skyline,
the changing impressions of land and
water, and a series of notable landmarks
all served to give clues about the nature
15/06/2010 6:05:22 PM
 Kevin Lynch
of Boston itself, which the individual
could use to make inference.
Thirdly, Lynch stressed the importance
of time in the meaning of place. In part,
this was a corrective to earlier emphases.
The 1950s research programme was con-
cerned with the identity and structure
of city images, which effectively sepa-
rated meaning from form. Yet he always
regarded ‘the image of the spatial envi-
ronment … as a scaffold to which we
attach meanings’ (Lynch, 1972: 241) – a
subject that he partly addressed through
his multifaceted research on the tempo-
ral dimension of the individual’s experi-
ence of the city. Most notably, What Time
is This Place? (Lynch, 1972) maintained
that people’s innate sense of time was a
vital part of the meaning allotted to place
and an important ingredient in individual
well-being. The feelings of attachment
and identity so engendered needed to be
respected both in policies for environ-
mental change and when dealing with
issues involving conservation.
Finally, Lynch played an important
part in reassessing the value of neigh-
bourhood life in children’s development.
One of his first articles dealt with the ele-
ments of the city’s physical environment
that left the deepest impression, conclud-
ing that ‘knowledge of how people react
to their physical environment, and how
they invest it with emotional qualities, is
quite as important as knowing the techni-
cal or economic or sociological resultants
of a given form’ (Lukashok and Lynch,
1956: 152). Two decades later, Growing
up in Cities (Lynch, 1977) reported on
the ways in which small groups of ado-
lescents from four countries (Argentina,
Australia, Mexico and Poland) used and
valued the urban environment. In each
case, the evidence stressed the role of the
home neighbourhood as an anchor point
in the child’s experience of the city, recog-
nising too the close relationship between
Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-39.indd 295
295
place and the formation of community
identity.
Key Advances and
Controversies
As an academic always seeking to be
actively involved in practice, Lynch’s
work needs to be judged through a
dual lens. In terms of practice, he ranks
alongside Jane Jacobs, Mark Fried,
Ian Nairn and a handful of others who
looked beyond the consensual Modern-
ist approaches guiding urban policy in
the years after the Second World War
and resensitised our appreciation of the
intricacies of the urban mosaic. Although
some have argued that the publication of
The Image of the City in 1960 was in tune
with the increasing abstraction of the city
by heralding ‘the transformation of the
city into mere signs’ (e.g. Maki, 2009: 91),
Lynch’s work undoubtedly contributed
to a new agenda that paid attention to the
human scale. As such, it recognised the
realities of individual experience at a time
when urban renewal policies threatened
to brush such niceties aside in the Olym-
pian pursuit of bringing planned order
to perceived urban chaos. Yet, as Lynch
himself (1984: 159) later recognised, the
impact of his original studies on policy
for city design was rather less than he
had hoped, which he self-deprecatingly
argued was because ‘they have proved
so difficult to apply’. Certainly, interest
in direct application of his techniques to
practical planning issues proved at best
short-lived.
By contrast his writings, and most
notably his books, left a potent legacy for
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 296
research in a variety of fields. A Theory
of Good City Form (Lynch, 1981), a book
which straddled the interstices of urban,
environmental and utopian discourse, has
retained an enduring appeal for researchers
interested in the ideas of cities as expres-
sions of core human values. The View from
the Road (Appleyard et al. 1964) with its
focus on visual perception and highway
travel, was an early study of driving land-
scapes (Merriman, 2007: 2) and among
the first of a ‘long-running … collection of
ethnographies of the ‘road’ (Laurier et al.,
2008: 3). For its part,Growing up in Cities
(Lynch, 1977) was the forerunner of fur-
ther international collaborative projects
on the development of children in cities
(Malone, 1999), as well as contributing to
the fields of developmental psychology
and children’s geographies.
The influence of these writings, how-
ever, is dwarfed by the lasting impact of
The Image of the City (Lynch, 1960), which,
even after half a century, can still be
found firmly lodged in the bestseller lists
of books about the urban environment.
Its success came from a combination of
innovative thinking, timeliness, acces-
sibility and apparent policy relevance.
Geographers in particular were looking
for new insights into the relationships
between spatial cognition and behav-
iour. In such circumstances, Lynch’s
work offered an inclusive package that
blended conceptual clarity (based on the
concepts of ‘legi­bility’ and ‘imageabil-
ity’) with ready-made methods of data
collection and analysis that apparently
revealed the cognitive (or mental) maps
held by city residents. Not surprisingly, it
quickly became one of the mainstays of
the cognitive-behavioural movement that
flourished within geography in the 1960s
and early 1970s, with the basic concepts
and methods soon adopted and replicated
by others. Within 15 years, there were
substantive studies consolidating his
Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-39.indd 296
Key Thinkers on Space and Place
findings in, inter alia, other cities of the
US, the Netherlands, Lebanon, the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany, Venezuela,
the UK, and Italy (e.g., Jonge, 1962;
Gulick, 1963; Klein, 1967; Appleyard,
1969; Goodey et al., 1971; Francescato
and Mebane, 1973; and Orleans, 1973).
His former colleague Donald Appleyard
(1976) applied Lynch’s ideas to the devel-
opment of a new town (Ciudad Guayana,
Venezuela) and gave credence – at least
in the minds of social science researchers –
to the belief that cognitive-behavioural
research might provide direct input into
urban policy.
These replications quickly suggested
extensions and the need for modification
(Gold, 1980: 97-106). Use of freehand
sketch-maps was criticised as possibly
indicating more about cartographic abili-
ties rather than about cognitive represen-
tations of the city (Spencer, 1973). There
were criticisms of the emphasis upon
vision as opposed to non-visual compo-
nents of sensory experience (Southworth,
1969) and of the lack of attention to the
functional and symbolic meanings of
urban space (Steinitz, 1968). Research-
ers attempting to use the five-fold typol-
ogy of spatial cognitive elements quickly
realised that the classification system was
often difficult to apply and had no specific
basis in psychological theory (Goodey
et al., 1971).
In Lynch’s defence, answers can be
offered for most of these criticisms. The
original studies were avowedly tenta-
tive and invited extension or modifica-
tion. There was no ready-made body
of theory or methodology that could be
pressed into service for studies of urban
spatial cognition. Psychologists, the most
likely sources of such insights, were then
strongly influenced by Skinnerian behav-
iourism and preferred strict laboratory
control to the vagaries of environmental set-
tings. Both the conceptual frameworks and
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 Kevin Lynch 297

methods, therefore, were derived on an inspiration for researchers within plan-

ad hoc basis from a mixture of intuition,
observation and applied commonsense – a
potent amalgam that has maintained the
appeal of Lynch’s approaches despite the
reservations expressed by researchers.
Hence, while many recent citations of The
Image of the City are contextual and essen-
tially reflect the book’s special status as
the progenitor of an important discourse
about urbanism, a substantial number of
studies still employ the original research
techniques or conceptual frameworks as
an integral part of their research design
regardless of the existing weight of criti-
cism (e.g., see Everitt et al., 2008; Huynh
et al., 2008; Vertesi, 2008).
To some extent, these conclusions are
tempered by recognition that the long-
term legacy of Lynch’s writings varies
from discipline to discipline. For instance,
while his oeuvre remains a source of
ning and architecture (e.g. Appleyard,
1978; Ellin, 1996: 34-6ff. Bridge and
Watson, 2002: 6), it has declined as an
active influence upon the research agenda
of human geography. This stems primarily
from the close association between Lynch-
inspired studies of urban imagery and
behavioural geography, which atrophied
markedly from 1980 onwards (see entry
on Reg Golledge). Yet, notwithstanding
the changing directions and priorities
of geographical research, it is important
even here not to underestimate Lynch’s
pervasive contribution. Certainly, there is
no denying the role that his work played
in the recent past as a cornerstone of an
impressive corpus of humanely-informed
research or its continuing status as a
genuine contribution towards building a
deeper understanding of the experiential
qualities of urban space and place.

Lynch’s Key Works

Appleyard, D. Lynch, K. and Myer, J.R. (1964) The View from the Road. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1962) Site Planning, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1972) What Time is This Place? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1976) Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (ed.) (1977) Growing up in Cities: Studies of the Spatial Environment of Adolescence in Crakow, Melbourne, Mexico City,
Salta, Toluca and Warsaw. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lynch, K. (1981) A Theory of Good City Form Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Secondary Sources and References

Appleyard, D. (1969) ‘City designers and the pluralistic city’, in L. Rodwin and Associates (eds), Planning, Urban Growth and
Regional Development: The Experience of the Guayana Programme of Venezuela. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 422–52.
Appleyard, D. (1976) Planning a Pluralist City: Conflicting realities in Ciudad Guayana. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Appleyard, D. (1978) ‘The major published works of Kevin Lynch: an appraisal’, Town Planning Review, 49: 551–7
Banerjee, T. and Southworth, M. (1990) ‘Kevin Lynch: his life and work’, in T. Banerjee and M. Southworth (eds), City Sense and
City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 1–29.
Boulding, K.E. (1956) The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-39.indd 297 15/06/2010 6:05:22 PM

 298 Key Thinkers on Space and Place

Bridge, G. and Watson, S. (2002) ‘Introduction: reading city imaginations’, in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds) The Blackwell City
Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 3–10.
Carr, S., Rodwin, L. and Hack, G. (1984) ‘Kevin Lynch: designing the image of the city’, American Planning Association Journal,
59: 523–5.
Ellin, N. (1996) Postmodern Urbanism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Everitt, J., Massam, B.H., Chávez-Dagostino, R.M., Sánchez, R.E. and Romo, E.A. (2008) ‘The imprints of tourism on Puerto
Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico’, Canadian Geographer, 52, 83–104.
Francescato, D, and Mebane, W. (1973) ‘How citizens view two great cities: Milan and Rome’ in R.M. Downs and D. Stea (eds),
Image and Environment. Chicago: Aldine. pp. 131–47.
Gold, J.R. (1980) An Introduction to Behavioural Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodey, B., Duffett, A.W., Gold, J.R. and Spencer, D. (1971) ‘The city scene: an exploration into the image of central Birmingham
as seen by area residents’, Research Memorandum 10. Birmingham: Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of
Birmingham.
Gulick, J. (1963) ‘Images of an Arab city’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 29: 179–97.
Huynh, N., Hall, G.B., Doherty, S. and Smith, W. (2008) ‘Interpreting urban space through cognitive map sketching and sequence
analysis’, Canadian Geographer, 52: 222–40.
Jonge, D. de (1962) ‘Images of urban areas: their structure and psychological foundations’, Journal of the American Institute of
Planners, 28: 266–76.
Klein, H.J. (1967) ‘The delineation of the town centre in the image of its citizens: a report of methods and preliminary results of
a town-sociological study’, in Sociological Department, University of Amsterdam (eds), Urban Core and Inner City. Leiden:
E.J. Brill. pp. 286–306.
Laurier, E., Lorimer, H., Brown, B., Jones, O., Juhlin, O., Noble, A., Perry, M., Pica, D., Sormani, P., Strebel, I., Swan, L.,
Taylor, A.S., Watts, L. and Weilenmann, A. (2008) ‘Driving and “passengering”: notes on the ordinary organization of car travel’,
Mobilities, 3: 1–23.
Lukashok, A. and Lynch, K. (1956) ‘Some childhood memories of the city’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 22:
142–152
Lynch, K. (1947) ‘Controlling the flow of rebuilding and replanning in residential areas’, Unpublished Bachelor of City Plan-
ning thesis, Department of City and Regional Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, available at: hdl.handle.
net/1721.1/12525, Accessed 28 August 2009.
Lynch, K. (1954) ‘The form of cities’, Scientific American, 190 (4): 54–63.
Lynch, K. (1984) ‘Reconsidering The Image of the City’, in L. Rodwin and R. Hollister (eds), Cities of the Mind. New York: Plenum.
pp. 151–62.
Lynch, K. and Rivkin, M. (1959) ‘A walk around the block’, Landscape, 8: 24–34.
Maki, F. (2009) ‘Fragmentation and friction as urban threats in the post-1956 city’, in A. Krieger and W.S. Saunders (eds), Urban
Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 88–109.
Malone, K.E. (1999) ‘Growing up in cities as a model of participatory planning and “place-making” with young people’, Youth Studies
Australia, 18 (2): 17–23.
Merriman, P. (2007) Driving Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell.
MIT (Institute Archives and Special Collections, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (2009) ‘Perceptual form of the city 1951–1960:
historical note’, libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc208.html#toc Accessed 17 August 2009.
Orleans, P. (1973) ‘Differential cognition of urban residents: effects of social scale on mapping’ in R.M. Downs and D. Stea, (eds).
Image and Environment, Chicago: Aldine, pp 115–30.
Pearce, P.L. and Fagence, M. (1996) ‘The legacy of Kevin Lynch: research implications’, Annals of Tourism Research, 23:
576–98.
Southworth, M. (1969) ‘The sonic environment of cities’, Environment and Behaviour, 1: 49-70.
Spencer, D. (1973) ‘An evaluation of cognitive mapping in neighbourhood perception’, Research Memorandum 23. Birmingham:
Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham.
Steinitz, C. (1968) ‘Meaning and the congruence of urban form and activity’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners,
34: 233–48.
Vertesi, J. (2008) ‘Mind the gap: the London Underground map and users’ representations of urban space’, Social Studies of
Science, 38: 7–33.

John R. Gold, Oxford Brookes University

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