The main idea espoused by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City is that of imageability, an urban design concept that he coined after studying three cities in North America – Boston, Jersey, and Los Angeles. He defines it as “the quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image.” It is primarily dependent on the environmental image of a city, in particular its identity (what makes it unique), structure (spatial relations between elements), and meaning (practical or emotional significance to the viewer). The environmental image aids in the creation of city dwellers’ mental maps, which he deems an invaluable instrument for way-finding.
Lynch discusses five types of the formal elements that are useful in assessing the city’s image: paths, or the channels along which the observer moves; edges, or the linear elements not used or considered as paths; districts, or the medium-to-large sections of the city with a common identifier; nodes, or the strategic spots in a city into which one can enter; and landmarks, or point-references that an observer does not enter. These elements are not static, and can easily shift when the point-of-view of the observant changes. For example, a major road can be considered as a “path” by a person driving a vehicle, but changes to an “edge” when he becomes a pedestrian.
He spends a significant length of the book analyzing each element with respect to the three cities in the study. A very succinct summary of his findings are as follows: Boston is described as a city composed of several individual parts with strong characters, likely perceived as a highly irregular system only linked one-by-one, if at all; Jersey was deemed a city of indistinguishable parts, or a city that you only “pass through” instead of live in; Los Angeles was cited as little more than the central business district and its fringes with general symbols that evoke no strong emotion.
At the core of the book was Lynch’s purpose of pioneering a system to create highly imageable cities. These design recommendations focus on the process of designing elements, especially paths, as structures that shape the city image. He also encourages urban planners to keep in mind the sense of the whole and to design cities that are “made by art, yet shaped for human purposes.”
Lynch’s meditation on the importance of imageability as an accessory for way-finding may get a laugh or two from 21st-century readers who’ve grown used to having a portable, scalable map in their pockets. He could not have anticipated the rise, less than a half century later, of GPS-enabled smartphones and tools such as Google Maps that virtually make way-finding irrelevant for the city dweller’s practical purposes. As such, it’s important to read and assess the book in this context.
The Image of the City is a classic reference in the field of urban design. Its introduction of the five elements of the city image became hallmark concepts that generations of urban planners would later build on. Lynch’s book also influenced the field of environmental psychology which studies the interrelationship between human behavior and their surroundings.
Personally, I found this book very readable as Lynch wrote it to be read by urban planners and city dwellers alike. Although at times monotonous, especially in his discussion of the five elements, I found his enthusiasm contagious as I began to apply the concepts I learned about to the cities that I inhabited in the past. I did feel, though, that it never came across his mind that in the future, arrangements where one technically lives in two cities – one for work, one for dwelling – may become common.
Closing the last chapter I wrote that the book “romanticizes the city image a bit too much.” Lynch was once against ahead of me, as I read his acknowledgement in the appendices that a highly imageable city may also have disadvantages. In particular, one story stayed in my mind: that of the Arunta people, whose forefathers created myths for all the features of the landscape, leaving the current generation with stifled creativity. As with anything in the modern world, the image of the city must be clear yet open-ended, adaptable to change.#