The American urban planner Kevin Lynch (1918 - 1984) was one of the most significant contributors to 20th century advances in city planning and city design. Having studied at Yale University, and Taliesin under Frank Lloyd Wright, Lynch received a Bachelor's degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where in 1948 he began lecturing and went on to become a professor. In his career Lynch wrote or co-wrote seven books, and the posthumously published collection of writing and projects City Sense and City Design offers a fascinating insight into his life’s work, and more broadly, to his shifting concerns about planning and urban design. Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. Why is ‘good city form’ important? Because cities have the ability to provide the biological, psychological, social and cultural needs of its citizens. The efficacy of the city’s performance can be measured through its imagibility, so says the theory.

Lynch provided seminal contributions to the field of City Planning through empirical research on how individuals perceive and navigate the urban landscape. [12] 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. Besides, the readers are guaranteed a captivating and insightful experience with Kevin Lynch’s relatable examples and with detailed explanations that give room for contemplation. Illustrating the identification of spaces or a neighbourhood by comparing it to familiar everyday objects and providing cases of occurrences commonly known to all, prove that an inquisitive reader without prior knowledge in the field of architecture could also find appreciation for the book and its inspiring texts.

Three weeks after his wedding, Lynch was drafted into the Army Corps of Engineers, serving in the siege of Peleliu, the Philippines and Japan through January 1946. [7] After the war, he completed his undergraduate education at MIT and received a Bachelor's degree in city planning in 1947. [8] Academic career [ edit ] The book was published by the MIT Press in 1960, focusing on the evaluation and perception of a city’s form among its inhabitants, and their ability to formulate mental maps to orient themselves with ease. At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a 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.” He suggests that urban inhabitants should be able to actively form their own stories and create new activities. He presents his work as an agenda for urban designers. They should design the city in such a way that it gives room for three related ‘movements’: mapping, learning, shaping. First, people should be able to acquire a clear mental map of their urban environment. Second, people should be able to learn how to navigate in this environment by training. Third, people must be able to operate and act upon their environment. April 1954). "The Form of Cities". Scientific American. 190 (4): 54–63. Bibcode: 1954SciAm.190d..54L. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0454-54.

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. And finally, 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 the most successful node seemed both to be unique in some way and at the same time to intensify some surrounding characteristic" [1] :77The 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. Lynch’s psychological focus opened up a new perspective in urban planning: that of designing the city through the psychology of its inhabitants, as opposed to the idea that the city could rather be the product of a top-down process. Lynch’s hypotheses today could be modeled, for example, by artificial intelligence 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. Where Jacobs and Cullen viewed their works as a means to react against suburbanisation and the more expansive forms of city that emerged in the post-war era, Lynch was more prepared to grapple with how to make sense of new, more dispersed and complex metropolitan and regional patterns of living, and also the emergence of mass automobility, later made explicit in The View from the Road, co-written with Donald Appleyard and John R. Meyer. 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.

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). 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. Nodes as generators of architecture 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 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. Critique of the method 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

Henceforth, the author formulates five elements that help constitute an observer’s mental map- paths, edges, districts, nodes and edges. While the importance of each element and their roles are defined with examples from the three cities in focus, their interrelations and design ideas to create whole images based on their characteristic parts are also discussed. Edges are the perceived limits of the districts (the beach, a railway line, a major avenue). Nodes are those points where we have to make decisions: crossroads, traffic circles, or squares. The Image of the City had set out to become the American urban planner , Kevin Lynch’s, most influential works in the twentieth century. A product of five endeavouring years of research and extensive study based at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A. For Lynch, the benefit of using such elements in design was to create a more coherent spatial organisation at large scale, so that new types of city could also have ‘sensuous form’. This hints at an interesting aspect of the book. While Lynch’s research was conducted at a time when specialist, scientific methods were becoming increasingly familiar on both sides of the Atlantic, and city planning and design was becoming more technocratic, Lynch retained an interest in people - the city user as he called them - and the reader can still see a poetic and romantic point of view. Lynch retained a belief in urbanism as art, and accords importance to the emotions of individuals and city users. Structure — that each element is relative to other elements and the observer, therefore part of a greater system