Kevin Lynch is one of the most important authors in contemporary urban design. In his book The Image of the City, published in 1960, he explains how we perceive the city through 5 main elements: edges, districts, landmarks, paths and nodes.
The Image of the City: Kevin Lynchs’s approach
The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch is a foundational work for the discipline of urban design, essential reading in any list of the books that have defined the urbanism of our time, alongside the equally formidable The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, which we have also reviewed on Urbequity.
If Jane Jacobs changed, for the better, and hopefully for good, the way we look at the city, Lynch’s book marked the start of a new field of work and study: behavioral geography, the geography of perception and behaviour. The book tries to understand and design the visible part of the city through the image it projects onto our brain. Its approach, method and results place it among the most influential texts in the discipline of urban design published to date.
Lynch’s psychological approach opened up a new perspective in urban planning: designing the city with the psychology of its inhabitants in mind. This contrasted, of course, with the idea that the city could be the product of a few nearly omnipotent creative minds (Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, and so on), who would trace the great avenues, the residential neighbourhoods and the business parks, to then be occupied by citizen-figurines.
An idea that found fertile ground in the darkest periods of Europe’s fascist governments in the first half of the 20th century. Those select creative minds were falsely omnipotent. In reality, they worked for someone above them, interested in making sure our lives were a monotonous succession of *métro-boulot-dodo* (commute, work, sleep).
A third and practical way for urban design
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. The Image of the City is a work low on ideological decibels. For Lynch, a city designed to help us know where we are and where we’re going, without fear of getting lost and feeling safe at all times, is already enough of an advance.
Lynch’s work dates from 1960, a time when the situationists were beginning to abandon the promising path that their first forays into psychogeography and unitary urbanism had opened for bringing psychology into urbanism. If the first would study the effects the urban environment has on the individual’s emotions, the second was meant to go beyond any architectural or artistic discipline in pursuit of a city that would itself be a collective work of art, one in which we would live an exclusively emotional life.
Unlike the situationist intellectuals, 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 out of the minds of those citizens and 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, at sea) is one of the basic skills for survival, an urban landscape that offers adequate spatial orientation will favour the vitality of public space.
Qualities of urban image
For a city to form a coherent image in our minds, 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 Sacré-Coeur to the north, the Tour Montparnasse, or La Défense 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 breaking the city down 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: paths, nodes, edges, districts and landmarks.
- Edges are the perceived linear boundaries between areas (the beach, a railway line, a major avenue).
- 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).
- 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.
- Paths are the ways to move from one node to the next.
- Finally, the nodes are those points where we have to make decisions: crossroads, traffic circles, or squares.
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.
Edges: the boundaries that define space
Edges can be either barriers or seams that join two distinct areas. A river running through a city separates two banks while also connecting them through its bridges. Lynch observed that the most useful edges are those that are legible from both near and far: the ones that communicate, without needing a map, where one part of the city ends and another begins.
A city with clear edges, such as Paris enclosed by its Périphérique, or Manhattan surrounded by water, is a city in which we’re always broadly aware of where we are.
Districts: areas with a distinctive character
Districts are the portions of the city we can mentally inhabit. For some urban thinkers, like Guy Debord’s situationists, it was also possible to inhabit districts sentimentally. They are areas of recognisable identity, whether through the typology of their buildings, land uses, the texture of their facades, or the kind of activity that animates them. Barcelona’s Raval, Rome’s Trastevere, or Paris’s Marais are districts whose identity is immediately legible.
Photo by Kaspars Upmani, via Unsplash
Lynch found that citizens tend to organise their mental image of the city around districts before any other element. This is also why the destruction of a district’s character, whether through hard techniques (mass demolitions or single-use zoning) or soft ones (gentrification, or the erasure of its historical layers), produces cities that feel illegible and rootless.
Landmarks or the reference points we navigate by
Landmarks are reference points that stand out from their surroundings and serve as anchors for orienting ourselves. Unlike nodes, we rarely enter them; instead we observe them from outside, often from a distance. The Sagrada Família, the Eiffel Tower, or the bell tower of a small town all function as landmarks because they’re visible from multiple points and at different distances.
Lynch was quietly subversive on this point: the best landmarks aren’t necessarily the tallest ones (indeed, [Lefebvre critiques the phallic character of urbanism in his Production of Space, but rather those that work at several scales.
Nodes as generators of architecture
But of Lynch’s 5 elements, we’re particularly interested in nodes for 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 around the great nodes of flow exchange (whether flows of people, goods, information, capital, and so on) an “architecture of the turn of the millennium” had emerged, exemplified in the new high-speed train stations, in airports, or in the vertical architecture of financial districts.
Michael Batty, from his vision of “urban complexity” argues that if the city is a superposition of networks (transport, sanitation, social, and so on), it is at the points of exchange (nodes) where architecture is produced. Thus, the construction of a market would be the architectural consequence of a place suited to commercial exchange.
Although it also works the other way around: it may be that commercial activity (the flow) is the consequence of the market having been built. Jan Gehl would tell us the second is much less efficient. It is more worthwhile to first observe where life occurs naturally in the city. Then we design the public space that best favours that activity, and finally we build the buildings. A method as reasonable as it is uncommon.)
Energy, thermodynamics and intelligence
In our research, we want to bring an additional lens to the importance of nodes in designing services, infrastructure and public spaces. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy, or disorder, of a system always increases over time.
Photo by Dennis Kummer in Unsplash
Under this lens, nodes are the place where flows (of information, of goods, of people) are disordered and reordered. And any reduction of entropy in one part of the system requires the application of energy. Energy that heats the system as a whole, as happens in a refrigerator. Inside it, the cold stops the proliferation of bacteria and fungi in the food it holds, at the cost of heating the room and accelerating the metabolism of the bacteria and mites at its back and around it.
In this article we develop this thermodynamic hypothesis of the production of architecture to host life around nodes.
For now, we’re left with Kevin Lynch’s own argument: it is at 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 run into someone we know who arrived on another subway line. All of this invites us to make nodes better places: clearly defining their limits, placing a reference point, making the node convey the identity of the place, or designing its appearance so it signals which direction to take (avoiding, for example, the disorientation we feel when emerging onto the surface from certain subway exits).
Patths: designing better streets
We’re also interested in street design, because good streets mean lively neighbourhoods. According to Kevin Lynch, a street becomes a true path if it’s suited to pedestrians walking along it at ease, if it has a clear sense of direction, or if it’s endowed with character, for example through the concentration of a particular type of commercial activity (as used to happen on Calle del Barquillo in Madrid’s Chueca neighbourhood, once devoted to sound equipment shops), or through a distinctive 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 centres use in a genuinely sophisticated way, just as they also use sound (through music, or the murmur of water). In fact, if you walk through a shopping centre run by a company like Intu, you’ll find many of these qualities. The result creates a comforting sensation in the visitor that translates into a positive predisposition to spend.
If you take a walk through this type of open-air shopping centre, you can see how they fulfil the qualities Kevin Lynch sets out for quality public space. We know at all times where we are, where we’re heading, and we feel at ease, with the place conveying a fully intelligible narrative. Not even the situationists could have done it better. To paraphrase them: how bitter their victory, when the psychogeographic techniques they championed in the 1950s to use ambient technology to overcome a life weighed down by consumerism are used today precisely to promote it.
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 acknowledges the method’s limitations. The main one is the difficulty many people have simply drawing what’s in their heads, faithfully transferring onto paper the image of the city each of us carries. There’s also the problem of selecting a group large enough for the different socio-demographic groups to be properly represented in the sample.
There’s another, more psychological obstacle, having to do with the difference between the image we remember when asked to draw the map and the image we use to make decisions on the ground, for example, when deciding which direction to take at an intersection. We have far more elements of the city in our heads than we remember, so the map we draw of what we recall will always be a small subset of the many things we know about the city.
And finally, Lynch points to a fourth problem. In his view, the method fails to capture the interrelationships between elements of the city, or how the image of the city changes over time (the maps it produces 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.
Beyond validating his ideas through real urban design projects, he was concerned with developing a technique for representing the city over time. He also recognised the problem of extending the sample of individuals, given its direct implications for the cost of the study. And, dreaming a little further, 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’re beginning to glimpse how some of these problems, which in 1960 seemed beyond the reach of the urban designer, can finally be addressed.
For example, the visualisation of data captured by urban infrastructure makes it possible to represent certain layers of the city over time, revealing hidden aspects of our urban ecosystems. Sentiment analysis techniques, which analyse how citizens feel about their city through data shared on social networks, partly help draw a collective mental map of our cities.
The interrelationships between elements are also beginning to be visible thanks to data from our phones and geolocation technologies. This means the urban legibility Lynch pursues connects directly with the notion of spatial complexity tied to the thermodynamic functioning of the city, an idea we develop in our series on thermodynamics and urbanism.
Picture by 300.000 km
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) aren’t connected with urban planners (responsible for changing the shape of our city). And urban planners work with models and are only just beginning to practise data science.
Lynch’s hypotheses could today be modelled, for example, through artificial intelligence systems trained on real-time data that would warn us about which areas of the city are working and which aren’t. 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.
Technology opens up so many possibilities that we think it’s time to bring Kevin Lynch back and remember the ultimate goal of The Image of the City: helping the city make us feel at home. Comfortable, safe, and important.
This article is published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
You can find the Spanish version of this article here.
