The Image of the City

Kevin Lynch

The Image of the City Lynch describes how individuals perceive and recall features in
urban spaces. The most distinctive elements in the urban landscape - categorised in
paths, nodes, edges, districts and landmarks - give shape to individuals' mental
representation of the city. Lynch’s approach has stimulated research into spatial
cognition, urban design and artificial intelligence, and it still represents an essential
pillar in the analysis of urban dynamics. Nevertheless, an explicit link between The
Image of the City and GIScience has not been completely explored yet. In this paper,
a computational approach to The Image of the City is proposed. Different
perspectives in spatial cognition and GIS research are integrated to obtain a
complete Image of the City, in which the most salient elements are shared by a large
part of citizens.

Nodes, paths and districts were identified through network science techniques.
Methods drawn from the information approach to The Image of the City are used to
detect landmarks, integrating the complexity of points of reference in their visual,
structural and semantic components, as conceptualised by Lynch and successive
research. The methods were applied to the central area of Boston and built using
freely available spatial datasets. Results were compared to Lynch’s maps to evaluate
the methodology: besides a considerable discrepancy with regard to landmarks, a
good correspondence for paths, nodes, edges and districts was found.

A clear image of the surroundings is thus a useful basis for individual growth. A vivid
and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, plays a social
role as well, It can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories
of group communication.