BOOK REVIEW

THE IMAGE OF THE CITY

KEVIN LYNCH
INTRODUCTION - AUTHOR
Kevin Andrew Lynch (1918 Chicago, Illinois - 1984 Martha's
Vineyard, Massachusetts)
Was an American urban planner and author.
He worked in Greensboro, NC as an urban planner but
was recruited to teach at MIT by Lloyd Rodwin.
Lynch provided seminal contributions to the field of city planning through empirical
research on how individuals perceive and navigate the urban landscape.

His books explore the presence of time and history in the urban environment, how urban
environments affect children, and how to harness human perception of the physical form
of cities and regions as the conceptual basis for good urban design.

Lynch's most famous work, The Image of the City published in 1960 by MIT Press, is the
result of a five-year study on how users perceive and organize spatial information as they
navigate through cities.
Using three disparate cities as examples (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles), Lynch
reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and predictable ways,
forming mental maps.

This book is about the look of the cities, and whether this look is of any importance, and
whether it can be changed.
The urban landscape has many roles, but is missed out to be seen, remembered, and to
delight in. Giving visual form to the city is a special and a new kind of design problem.
To examine this new problem, the book looks at three American cities: Boston, Jersey
City and Los Angeles and thereby suggests a method and offers some first principles of
city design.
THEORY OF KEVIN LYNCH

Lynch influenced the field of city planning through his work on the theory of city form
and studies relating to human perceptions of the city, on the perception of the city
environment and its consequences for city design.
Kevin Lynch says "Looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however common place
the sight may be.
Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but of a vast scale,
perceived only in the course of long spans of time.
At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a
setting or view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in
relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of
past experiences
 THE IMAGE OF THE CITY
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city
planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To
answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey
City, formulates a new criterion , imageability and shows its potential value as a guide for
the building and rebuilding of cities.
Lynch explains the image of the city through the following contents:
1. The image of the environment
2. Three cities- Boston, New jersey , Los Angeles
3. The city image and its elements
4. City form
5. A new scale
THE IMAGE OF THE ENVIRONMENT:
Here he explains about legibility , building the image ,
structure and identity and imageability.
1.LEGIBILITY:

According to Lynch , a city is said to be legible when its parts can

be recognized and organized into a coherent pattern.
He says that clarity or legibility is by no means the only important
property of a beautiful city, but is of special importance when
considering environments at the urban scale of size, time, and
complexity. Coherent pattern
To understand this, he says one must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the
city being perceived by its inhabitants.