Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City is, at its core, a self-assessment test for cities. Cities are one of the greatest inventions of humanity, if not the greatest. Designed to make life safer and more prosperous, not all of them succeed at the most fundamental level: being legible to the people who inhabit them. Can citizens recognise the urban qualities around them? Lynch set out to extract the mental map that every person constructs of their immediate urban environment, and to ask what it reveals about the cities we build. Before Google Maps. Before urban tech. Before urban data.
While Jan Gehl observes from the outside, Kevin Lynch -with a nod to the Situationists– is a pioneer in studying how the mind interprets and reacts to urban space. Furthermore, he proposed the method of mental maps: rudimentary for its time but conceptually advanced, paving the way for the discipline of psychogeography (see our article about Colin Ellard’s “Place of the Heart. The Psychogeography of Every Day Life”.)
‘Our’ Image of the City
When we think about our cities, we don’t just see streets; we see our own mental map. Kevin Lynch’s “The Image of the City” is the seminal work that founded the field of environmental psychology and the geography of perception. Lynch’s approach, method and results turned “The Image of The City” into one of the most influential texts in the discipline of urban design published to date.
Lynch’s psychological focus opened up a new perspective in urban planning: that of designing the city through the psychology of its inhabitants. The novelty was to look at the city from the dweller’s perspective, and not from the urban planner’s. A sort of bottom-up approach that confronted the usual top-down thinking of modernists architects and planners.
A third way
But Lynch’s approach also didn’t quite fit with the opposite perspective, the one championed by intellectuals like Lefebvre and the situationists during the decades after World War II. According to these the city should be designed to foster our most libertarian desires, so that the urban landscape would provide us with a continuous carousel of liberating moments or situations.
Lynch’s work dates from 1960, a decade of intellectual and political turmoil. Unlike the situationists, who tried to draw the sentimental map of the city according to their own interpretation, Lynch tries to draw the mental map of the average citizen. Getting that image from the brains of those citizens onto paper, Lynch reasons, is the first step in measuring the success or failure of the landscape designer, the urban planner, and the architect. Because Lynch argues that, just as orientation (in the jungle, in the desert, in the sea) is one of the basic skills of survival, an urban landscape that offers adequate spatial orientation will favor the vitality of public space.
Qualities of urban image
For a city to configure in our brain a coherent image it must:
- be “legible”, facilitating the inhabitant or visitor the basic understanding of its structure. Paris is an example of a legible city, enclosed in a belt like the Bulevard Periferique, with the Seine meandering through its middle, and a main landmark like the Eiffel Tower that acts as a great lighthouse that guides us wherever we are. Alongside the Eiffel Tower, there are other secondary landmarks that help us to always know where we are: the Sacre Coeur to the north, the Tour Montparnasse, or La Defènse as a boundary in the west.
- possess a structure, convey an identity and a meaning
- be evocative
- transmit a certain sense of imperfection, of being unfinished, so that we feel we can still have an active or constructive role in it
- be safe, something that obviously leads us to consider Tonucci’s “The city of children”: a safe city is one in which we see children playing in the street.
Superkilen Park (Copenhagen)
To achieve these qualities Lynch proposes to break down the city into “fundamental blocks or elements”.
The 5 Elements of The Image of the City
The image of the city, according to Kevin Lynch, depends on the combination, relationships and qualities of 5 constituent elements: nodes, roads, edges, districts and landmarks.
- Landmarks are those reference points that one can remember with closed eyes and that any child would draw on a map of his city or neighborhood.
- Districts are the urban ensembles endowed with a certain homogeneity or characteristic quality (it can be the typology of buildings, its port character, or the configuration of its squares).
- Edges are the perceived linear boundaries between áreas (the beach, a railway line, a major avenue).
- Nodes are those points where we have to make decisions: crossroads, traffic circles, or squares.
- Finally, the paths are the ways to move from one node to the next.
Of these 5 elements, nodes and paths are particularly interesting in our research journey, during which we have set out to discover how urban data can help us to design higher quality and more sustainable public spaces and services.
Deep Dive: These five elements aren’t just theoretical; they are the invisible architecture of our daily commute. A view on how this applies to modern transit can be found at The Collective Mental Map of Urban Mobility.
Nodes as generators of architecture
We are interested in nodes because of their potential to generate architecture. This potential can be argued in several ways. For example, Castells already anticipated in his vision of the “space of flows” that a very powerful architecture had been generated around the great nodes of exchange of flows (be they flows of people, goods, information, capital, etc.), exemplified in the new high-speed train stations, airports, or in the financial districts of vertical architecture.
Michael Batty, from his vision of the “syntax of space” argues that, if the city is a superposition of networks (transport, sanitation, social, etc.), it is at the points of exchange (nodes) that architecture is produced. Thus, the construction of a market would be the architectural consequence of the existence of a place suitable for commercial exchange.
Although the other way around also works, it may be that the commercial activity (the flow) is the consequence of the construction of the market. (Jan Gehl would tell us that the latter is much less efficient. It is more worthwhile to look first at where life naturally occurs in the city. Then, we will design the public space that best favors that activity and, finally, we will construct the buildings. A method as reasonable as it is not very widespread). This is where Lynch and Gehl fit together.
Energy, thermodynamics and intelligence
In our research, we want to bring an additional prism to the importance of nodes in the design of services, infrastructures and public spaces. According to the second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy or disorder of a system always increases with time.
Photo by Dennis Kummer in Unsplash
Under this prism, nodes are the place where flows (of information, goods, people) are disordered and rearranged. And any reduction of entropy in a part of the system requires the application of energy, energy that heats the system as a whole, as happens in a refrigerator.
In a refrigerator, the cold serves to stop the proliferation of bacteria and fungi in the food contained inside, at the cost of heating the room and accelerating the metabolism of bacteria and mites in and around the back of the room. In this article we develop this thermodynamic hypothesis of the production of architecture to host life around the nodes.
For now, we are left with Kevin Lynch’s own argument: it is at the nodes or intersections where we make decisions, that is, where we apply “intelligence.” We stop, we think, we cross paths with other people, perhaps we meet someone we know who has come on another subway line.
All this invites us to make the nodes better places: determining their limits, placing a reference point, making the node transmit the identity of the place, or designing its appearance to indicate the directions to take (avoiding, for example, the feeling of disorientation that we have when leaving certain subway stations to the surface).
Designing the paths: better streets
We are also interested in street design because good streets mean lively neighborhoods. According to Kevin Lynch, a street becomes a real path if it is suitable for pedestrians to walk along at ease, if it has a clear sense of direction, or if it is endowed with character; for example, by the concentration of a distinctive type of commercial activity, or a special type of paving or facade.
Turning streets into paths can also be achieved through environmental conditions. Lynch proposes using lighting, a technique that the new open-air shopping centers use in a really sophisticated way. As they also use sound (through music, or the murmur of water). In fact, if you walk through a shopping mall of a company like Intu you can find many of these qualities. The result creates in the visitor a comforting sensation that translates into a positive predisposition for consumption.
Taking a walk through this type of open-air shopping mall, we can see how they fulfill the qualities that Kevin Lynch establishes for a quality public space. We know at all times where we are, where we are going, we are at ease and the place transmits a totally legible narrative. The situationists themselves could not have done better. Quoting them, how bitter their victory when the psychogeographic techniques they advocated in the 1950s for the liberation of man are used today to promote consumerism.
Edges: the boundaries that define space
Edges are the linear elements that act as boundaries between two areas, implying a break in continuity: a shoreline, a railway line, a wall, a highway. Edges can be barriers that are difficult to cross, or seams that join two areas together. A river running through a city is both: it separates two banks while also connecting them through its bridges.
Lynch found that strong edges help structure our mental map even when we cannot see them directly. A city with strong, readable edges — like Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique or Manhattan’s coastline — is one where you always know, broadly, where you stand. Lynch was perhaps the first urban thinker to notice that legibility often comes what frames a city.
Districts: areas with a distinctive character
Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city that we can mentally enter and that have a common identifying character: the typology of buildings, the uses of space, the texture of surfaces, or the type of activity. Paris’s Marais, Barcelona’s Born, or New York’s SoHo are districts whose identity is instantly legible.
Photo by Kaspars Upmani, via Unsplash
Interestingly, Lynch found that ordinary citizens tend to organise their mental map of the city around districts first. The resident of a neighbourhood knows its character quite intuitively, in ways that no masterplan quite captures. This is also why the destruction of district character -through demolition, zoning, or the erasure of historical layers, tends to produce cities that feel illegible and rootless, even when they are technically well-planned.
Landmarks or the reference points we navigate by
Landmarks are external reference points that stand out from their surroundings and serve as navigational anchors. Unlike nodes, we do not enter landmarks, we orient ourselves by them from a distance. The Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Família, or a distinctive church spire in a small town all function as landmarks.
Lynch found that people rely on landmarks more heavily than on street names or addresses to structure their mental maps of the city. Lynch was quietly subversive on this point: the most readable landmarks are not necessarily the tallest or the most monumental, but those visible from many points and many distances. A lesson that much of the 20th century urban planning, with its tase for grand gestures seen best from helicopters, conspicuously ignored.
Critique of the method
Kevin Lynch proposes the following method for drawing this collective mental map of the city:
- Select a group of people
- Ask them to draw a map of their city with the main elements they remember.
- Interview them about the most significant places for them.
- Exercise of recognition and geographic positioning of certain characteristic images of the city.
- Tour of specific areas to work on specific aspects of the map, with the accompaniment of experts.
Lynch himself recognizes the limitations of the method. The main one is the difficulty that for many people is the mere fact of drawing what is in their head, of faithfully transferring to paper the inner image of the city. But also the problem of selecting a sufficiently large group so that the different socio-demographic groups are correctly represented in the sample.
There is another obstacle more of a psychological nature, and it has to do with the difference between the image we remember when we are asked to draw the map and the image we use to make inmediate decisions, for example, when we have to decide which direction to take at an intersection.
We have many more elements of the city in our heads than we remember, so that map we draw about what we remember will always be a small subset of the many things we know about the city. That is where Lynch points to a fourth problem. In his view, the method fails to capture well the interrelationships between elements of the city, nor the changes in the image of the city over time (the maps produced are static).
Future lines of work
In the final pages of “The Image of the City,” Kevin Lynch lays out a roadmap for moving beyond his own work. Aside from validating his ideas through actual urban design projects, he was concerned with the question of developing a technique for representing the city over time.
He also recognized the problem of extending the sample of individuals because of its direct implications for the cost of the study. And, if we were to dream, he wanted to find a way to capture the collective image of the city and its fluctuations without having to repeat the arduous experiment each time.
Today, we are beginning to see how some of these problems that seemed beyond the reach of the urban designer in 1960 can finally be addressed. For example, the visualization of data captured by urban infrastructures makes it possible to represent certain layers of the city over time, revealing hidden aspects of our urban ecosystems.
Sentiment analysis techniques, which analyze how citizens feel about their city through data displayed on social networks, partially help to draw a collective mental map of our cities. The interrelationships between elements are also beginning to be visible thanks to data from our cell phones and geo-location technologies.
Big data and Artificial Intelligence
However, the use of all these technologies and techniques in pursuit of better urban design is still in its infancy. Technologists (who know how to collect data) are not connected to urban planners (who are responsible for changing the shape of our city). And urban planners work with models and are just beginning to practice data science.
Lynch’s hypotheses today could be modeled, for example, by artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained with data collected in real time that would warn us of areas of the city that work and those that don’t work. This would allow us, for example, to make better-informed decisions about potential interventions in public space, and to measure their effect in near real time.
There are so many possibilities that technology opens up that we think it is time to recover Kevin Lynch and remember the ultimate goal of “The Image of the City”: to contribute to making the city make us feel at home. Comfortable, safe, and important.
This article is published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
