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Kevin Lynch

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BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT

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Like many of America's leading urbanists, Kevin Andrew Lynch had close links w i t h Chicago - the crucible of urban studies - although his associations concerned his childhood rather than professional career. Born i n 1918 as the third and youngest child of a family of Irish descent, he grew up i n an ethnicallymixed and modestly affluent area on the city's north side. Educated first by private tutors and then at the neighbourhood Catholic primary school, Kevin followed his two brothers to Francis W. Parker a secular high school w i t h a progressive curriculum that encouraged students to think about the world around them. Significantly at a time of economic depression, this included thinking about social issues. In later life, he credited his school experience as instrumental in interesting him in architecture and philosophy and in stimulating his lifelong interest in human environments and social justice (Banerjee and Southworth, 1990: 11). By contrast, his higher education and professional training followed an uncertain path - albeit one that serendipitously allowed h i m to blend an architect's threedimensional and visual design sensitivities w i t h a planner's understanding

of urban form and structure. A year's architectural study at Yale (1935-6) was followed by 18 months spent w i t h the Fellowship of trainee architects r u n by the veteran modern architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and then by a move to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study structural engineering and then biology (1939-40). After briefly being employed by a private architectural practice, he was drafted into the US Army Corps of Engineers for the duration of the Second World War, returning to higher education under a demobilisation scheme i n 1946. He earned a Bachelor of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) i n 1947. This would prove to be his only degree, since he never undertook postgraduate study. These repeated changes i n direction contrasted markedly w i t h the trajectory of the remainder of his career. After a year spent employed as a town planner i n Greensboro (North Carolina, US), Lynch was invited to return to M I T i n 1948 as an instructor in town planning, largely on the strength of his undergraduate dissertation - an enthusiastic treatise on urban renewal w i t h case-study material from Cambridge, Massachusetts (Lynch, 1947). He worked his way up to full Professor by 1963, remaining at M I T until retirement in 1978. Subsequently devoting himself to consultancy through the firm that he founded w i t h his colleague Stephen Carr (Carr, Lynch and Associates), he nevertheless retained his research and teaching

Kevin Lynch

guidelines for his research in future years. An ensuing textbook entitled Site Planning (Lynch, 1962) developed the planning implications of the perceptual analyses offered by The Image of the City, with the jointly-authored A View from the Road (Appleyard et al., 1964) considering the role played by road travel in constructing urban imagery. After a fallow period of critical contemplation (Carr et al., 1984: 523), Lynch published a further sequence of four books. What Time is This Place? (Lynch, 1972) reflected on the temporal meaning of places within the city. Its strong support for the notion of conservation tied in with his next volume, the ambitious Managing the Sense of a Region (Lynch, 1976). Here, Lynch addressed the question of managing the sensory meaning of the environment, considering: 'what one can see, how it feels underfoot, the smell of the air, the sounds of bells and motorcycles, how patterns of these sensations make up the quality of places, and how that quality affects our immediate well-being, our actions, and our understandings' (Lynch, 1976: 8). Growing up in Cities (Lynch, 1977) drew on a participatory multinational programme funded by UNESCO to investigate children's perceptions of the city. Finally, A Theory of Good City Form (Lynch, 1981) considered the relationship between fundamental human values and the city, examining how such values should guide the performance dimensions necessary for good spatial and physical design.

links with M I T until his sudden death in July 1984. This stability of employment at M I T perhaps contributed to the consistency shown in his approach to research, since themes that he developed in his work during the 1950s were continually revisited throughout his career. For example, he had pondered the question of how people navigated the streets of big cities as early as 1952, when he linked this issue to broader questions of aesthetics in a seminar at M I T (Lynch, 1984: 152). A year abroad funded by a Ford Foundation grant and largely spent in Florence allowed him to develop a deep appreciation of the significance of place within a city, to devise principles of notation through which to record his observations, and to reflect on the nature of urban form. This abiding fascination w i t h urban form (see also Lynch, 1954) led to a five-year research programme, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which Lynch co-directed with Gyorgy Kepes, the founder and head of MIT's Centre for Advanced Visual Studies. As initiated in 1954, the aim was to undertake an 'investigation directed toward development of a theoretical concept of city form ... and to supply the fundamental criteria and techniques for conceiving, expressing and controlling our perceptual environment' (MIT, 2009: np). The emphasis inverted, however, as the project matured. By 1958-9, it had become 'an investigation of the individual's perception of the urban landscape ... the inhabitant's and the highway traveller's image of the city, and the use of the signs and symbols in the cityscape'. The objective of this work was 'the development of new design possibilities and principles for the city' (ibid.). The principal results of this programme appeared in The Image of the City (Lynch, 1960), easily the most cited of his seven books (Pearce and Fagence, 1996: 584) and the one that effectively laid down the

SPATIAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Broadly speaking, Lynch made four major contributions towards developing a more

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

profound understanding of urban spatial cognition. First, he provided insight into citizens' differential knowledge of the urban environment and supplied an accessible methodology by which it might be studied. Lynch argued that spatial knowledge centres on environmental 'images' - mental representations of the world that people develop through their experience and which act as the basis for their behaviour. This concept, which mirrored a similar idea developed earlier by Kenneth Boulding (1956), was made relevant to an urban context through the concept of 'legibility', or the ease w i t h which individuals can organise the various elements of urban form into coherent 'images'. Lynch (1960) suggested that cities varied i n the extent that they evoked a strong image - a quality that he called 'imageability' - arguing it was most likely that 'imageable' cities were ones that could be apprehended as patterns of high continuity w i t h interconnected parts. In other words, if a city was 'imageable', it was also likely to be 'legible'. The Image of the City reported on how Lynch and his team tested this idea in three American cities: Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City (New Jersey). In brief outline, they interviewed small samples of predominantly middle-class people i n each city to investigate residents' perceptions of the central city, using such techniques as sketch maps, verbal lists of distinctive features, directions for making specific trips in the city and informal questions about orientation. Findings for individual respondents were aggregated and compared w i t h visual surveys carried out by trained observers. The assessments were made on the basis of a five-fold typology of urban elements, namely: 'paths' (channels along which people moved through the city), 'edges' (boundaries), 'districts', 'landmarks' (such as familiar stores, public buildings, statues or physical features),

and 'nodes' (strategic places where navigational decisions have to be made). The results suggested that urban space was perceived i n terms of well-known clusters of points linked together by clearly defined paths that traverse less familiar areas. Perception of districts waned as residents became more familiar w i t h the city, presumably through gaining more detailed knowledge, whereas landmarks assumed greater prominence with familiarity, seemingly because of their role in navigation. Lynch's second contribution concerned way-finding and the importance of the street in structuring urban experience. Juxtaposed against the prevailing ideology that saw the significance of streets primarily i n terms of how well they handled flows, Lynch argued that paths - which primarily meant streets - were the main structural element in images of thei city and that the sensory experience gained from travelling through urban space was qualitatively important i n image formation. Lynch and Rivkin (1959) studied the diverse and sometimes unexpected features that subjects recalled after a walk around a block i n central Boston. As noted above, The View from the Road (Appleyard et al., 1964) extended the analysis to road travel, which was accomplished by studying the conscious, aesthetic and largely visual experience of motorists travelling along freeways into four American cities (Boston, Hartford, New York and Philadelphia). This was supplemented w i t h a more detailed study carried out on a seven-mile section of the Northeast Expressway into Boston. The explanatory results suggested that experience gained from car travel could shape urban imagery beyond the realm currently i n focus. For example, the vista of the distant city skyline, the changing impressions of land and water, and a series of notable landmarks all served to give clues about the nature of

Kevin Lynch

place and the formation of community identity.

Boston itself, which the individual could use to make inference. Thirdly, Lynch stressed the importance of time in the meaning of place. In part, this was a corrective to earlier emphases. The 1950s research programme was concerned w i t h the identity and structure of city images, which effectively separated meaning from form. Yet he always regarded 'the image of the spatial environment ... as a scaffold to which we attach meanings' (Lynch, 1972: 241) - a subject that he partly addressed through his multifaceted research on the temporal dimension of the individual's experience of the city. Most notably, What Time is This Place? (Lynch, 1972) maintained that people's innate sense of time was a vital part of the meaning allotted to place and an important ingredient in individual well-being. The feelings of attachment and identity so engendered needed to be respected both in policies for environmental change and when dealing w i t h issues involving conservation. Finally, Lynch played an important part in reassessing the value of neighbourhood life in children's development. One of his first articles dealt w i t h the elements of the city's physical environment that left the deepest impression, concluding that 'knowledge of how people react to their physical environment, and how they invest it w i t h emotional qualities, is quite as important as knowing the technical or economic or sociological resultants of a given form' (Lukashok and Lynch, 1956: 152). Two decades later, Growing up in Cities (Lynch, 1977) reported on the ways in which small groups of adolescents from four countries (Argentina, Australia, Mexico and Poland) used and valued the urban environment. In each case, the evidence stressed the role of the home neighbourhood as an anchor point in the child's experience of the city, recognising too the close relationship between

KEY ADVANCES AND CONTROVERSIES

As an academic always seeking to be actively involved in practice, Lynch's work needs to be viewed through a dual lens. In terms of practice, he ranks alongside Jane Jacobs, Mark Fried, Ian Nairn and a handful of others who looked beyond the consensual Modernist approaches guiding urban policy i n the years after the Second World War and resensitised our appreciation of the intricacies of the urban mosaic. Although some have argued that the publication of The Image of the City in 1960 was in tune w i t h the increasing abstraction of the city by heralding 'the transformation of the city into mere signs' (e.g. Maki, 2009: 91), Lynch's work undoubtedly contributed to a new agenda that paid attention to the human scale. As such, it recognised the realities of individual experience at a time when urban renewal policies threatened to brush such niceties aside in the Olympian pursuit of bringing planned order to perceived urban chaos. Yet, as Lynch himself (1984: 159) later recognised, the impact of his original studies on policy for city design was rather less than he had hoped, which he self-deprecatingly argued was because 'they have proved so difficult to apply'. Certainly, interest in direct application of his techniques to practical planning issues proved at best short-lived. By contrast his writings, and most notably his books, left a potent legacy

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

for research in a variety of fields. A Theory of Good City Form (Lynch, 1981), a book which straddled the interstices of urban, environmental and Utopian discourse, has retained an enduring appeal for researchers interested in the ideas of cities as expressions of core human values. The View from the Road (Appleyard et al. 1964) with its focus on visual perception and highway travel, was an early study of driving landscapes (Merriman, 2007: 2) and among the first of a 'long-running ... collection of ethnographies of the 'road' (Laurier et a l , 2008: 3). For its part, Growing up in Cities (Lynch, 1977) was the forerunner of further international collaborative projects on the development of children in cities (Malone, 1999), as well as contributing to the fields of developmental psychology and children's geographies. The influence of these writings, however, is dwarfed by the lasting impact of The Image of the City (Lynch, 1960), which, even after half a century, can still be found firmly lodged in the bestseller lists of books about the urban environment. Its success came from a combination of innovative thinking, timeliness, accessibility and apparent policy relevance. Geographers in particular were looking for new insights into the relationships between spatial cognition and behaviour. I n such circumstances, Lynch's work offered an inclusive package that blended conceptual clarity (based on the concepts of 'legibility' and 'imageability') w i t h ready-made methods of data collection and analysis that apparently revealed the cognitive (or mental) maps held by city residents. Not surprisingly, it quickly became one of the mainstays of the cognitive-behavioural movement that flourished w i t h i n geography in the 1960s and early 1970s, w i t h the basic concepts and methods soon adopted and replicated by others. Within 15 years, there were substantive studies consolidating his

findings in, inter alia, other cities of the US, the Netherlands, Lebanon, the Federal Republic of Germany, Venezuela, the UK, and Italy (e.g., Jonge, 1962; Gulick, 1963; Klein, 1967; Appleyard, 1969; Goodey et al., 1971; Francescato and Mebane, 1973; and Orleans, 1973). His former colleague Donald Appleyard (1976) applied Lynch's ideas to the development of a new town (Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela) and gave credence - at least in the minds of social science researchers to the belief that cognitive-behavioural research might provide direct input into urban policy. These replications quickly suggested extensions and the need for modification (Gold, 1980: 97-106). Use of freehand sketch-maps was criticised as possibly indicating more about cartographic abilities rather than about cognitive representations of the city (Spencer, 1973}. There were criticisms of the emphasis upon vision as opposed to non-visual components of sensory experience (Southworth, 1969) and of the lack of attention to the functional and symbolic meanings of urban space (Steinitz, 1968). Researchers attempting to use the five-fold typology of spatial cognitive elements quickly realised that the classification system was often difficult to apply and had no specific basis in psychological theory (Goodey et al., 1971). In Lynch's defence, answers can be offered for most of these criticisms. The original studies were avowedly tentative and invited extension or modification. There was no ready-made body of theory or methodology that could be pressed into service for studies of urban spatial cognition. Psychologists, the most likely sources of such insights, were then strongly influenced by Skinnerian behaviourism and preferred strict laboratory control to the vagaries of environmental settings. Both the conceptual frameworks and

Kevin Lynch

methods, therefore, were derived on an ad hoc basis from a mixture of intuition, observation and applied commonsense - a potent amalgam that has maintained the appeal of Lynch's approaches despite the reservations expressed by researchers. Hence, while many recent citations of The Image of the City are contextual and essentially reflect the book's special status as the progenitor of an important discourse about urbanism, a substantial number of studies still employ the original research techniques or conceptual frameworks as an integral part of their research design regardless of the existing weight of criticism (e.g., see Everitt et al., 2008; Huynh et al., 2008; Vertesi, 2008). To some extent, these conclusions are tempered by recognition that the longterm legacy of Lynch's writings varies from discipline to discipline. For instance, while his oeuvre remains a source of

inspiration for researchers within planning and architecture (e.g. Appleyard, 1978; Ellin, 1996: 34-6ff; Bridge and Watson, 2002: 6), it has declined as an active influence upon the research agenda of human geography. This stems primarily from the close association between Lynchinspired studies of urban imagery and behavioural geography, which atrophied markedly from 1980 onwards (see entry on Reg Golledge). Yet, notwithstanding the changing directions and priorities of geographical research, it is important even here not to underestimate Lynch's pervasive contribution. Certainly, there is no denying the role that his work played in the recent past as a cornerstone of an impressive corpus of humanely-informed research or its continuing status as a genuine contribution towards building a deeper understanding of the experiential qualities of urban space and place.

LYNCH'S KEY WORKS

Appleyard, D. Lynch, K. and Myer, J.R. (1964) The View from the Road. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1962) Site Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1972) What Time is This Place? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1976) Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (ed.) (1977) Growing up in Cities: Studies of the Spatial Environment of Adolescence in Crakow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Salta, Toluca and Warsaw. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1981) A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Secondary Sources and References

Appleyard, D. (1969) 'City designers and the pluralistic city', in L. Rodwin and Associates (eds), Planning, Urban Growth and Regional Development: The Experience of the Guayana Programme of Venezuela. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 422-52. Appleyard, D. (1976) Planning a Pluralist City: Conflicting Realities in Ciudad Guayana. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Appleyard, D. (1978) 'The major published works of Kevin Lynch: an appraisal', Town Planning Review, 49:551-7. Banerjee, T. and Southworth, M. (1990) 'Kevin Lynch: his life and work', in T. Banerjee and M. Southworth (eds), City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1-29. Boulding, K.E. (1956) The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

Bridge, G. and Watson, S. (2002) Introduction: reading city imaginations', in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds), The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 3-10. Carr, S., Rodwin, L. and Hack, G. (1984) 'Kevin Lynch: designing the image of the city', American Planning Association Journal, 59:523-5. Ellin, N. (1996) Postmodern Urbanism. Oxford: Blackwell. Everitt, J., Massam, B.H., Chavez-Dagostino, R.M., Sanchez, R.E. and Romo, E.A. (2008) 'The imprints of tourism on Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico', Canadian Geographer, 52, 83-104. Francescato, D, and Mebane, W. (1973) 'How citizens view two great cities: Milan and Rome' in R.M. Downs and D. Stea (eds), Image and Environment. Chicago: Aldine. pp. 131-47. Gold, J.R. (1980) An Introduction to Behavioural Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodey, B., Duffett, A.W., Gold, J.R. and Spencer, D. (1971) The city scene: an exploration into the image of central Birming as seen by area residents', Research Memorandum 10. Birmingham: Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham. Gulick, J. (1963) 'Images of an Arab city', Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 29:179-97. Huynh, N., Hall, G.B., Doherty, S. and Smith, W. (2008) 'Interpreting urban space through cognitive map sketching and sequence analysis', Canadian Geographer, 52:222-40. Jonge, D. de (1962) 'Images of urban areas: their structure and psychological foundations', Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 28:266-76. Klein, H.J. (1967) The delineation of the town centre in the image of its citizens: a report of methods and preliminary results of a town-sociological study', in Sociological Department, University of Amsterdam (eds), Urban Core and Inner City. Leiden: E.J. Brill, pp. 286-306. Laurier, E., Lorimer, H., Brown, B., Jones, O., Juhlin, O., Noble, A., Perry, M., Pica, D., Sormani, P., Strebel, I., Swan, L, Taylor, A.S., Watts, L. and Weilenmann, A. (2008) 'Driving and "passengering": notes on the ordinary organization of car travel', Mobilities, 3:1-23. Lukashok, A. and Lynch, K. (1956) 'Some childhood memories of the city', Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 22: 142-152. Lynch, K. (1947) 'Controlling the flow of rebuilding and replanning in residential areas', Unpublished Bachelor of City Pl ning thesis, Department of City and Regional Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, available at: hdl.handle. net/1721.1/12525 Accessed 28 August 2009. Lynch, K. (1954) The form of cities', Scientific American, 190 (4): 54-63. Lynch, K. (1984) 'Reconsidering The Image of the City, in L. Rodwin and R. Hollister (eds), Cities of the Mind. New York: Plen pp. 151-62. Lynch, K. and Rivkin, M. (1959) 'A walk around the block', Landscape, 8:24-34. Maki, F . (2009) 'Fragmentation and friction as urban threats in the post-1956 city', in A. Krieger and W.S. Saunders (eds), Urban Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 88-109. Malone, K.E. (1999) 'Growing up in cities as a model of participatory planning and "place-making" with young people', Youth Studies Australia, 18 (2): 17-23. Merriman, R (2007) Driving Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell. MIT (Institute Archives and Special Collections, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (2009) 'Perceptual form of the city 1951-1960: historical note', Iibraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc208.html#toc Accessed 17 August 2009. Orleans, P . (1973) 'Differential cognition of urban residents: effects of social scale on mapping' in R.M. Downs and D. Stea (eds), Image and Environment, Chicago: Aldine. pp 115-30. Pearce, PL. and Fagence, M. (1996) 'The legacy of Kevin Lynch: research implications', Annals of Tourism Research, 23: 576-98. Southworth, M. (1969) The sonic environment of cities', Environment and Behaviour, 1:49-70. Spencer, D. (1973) 'An evaluation of cognitive mapping in neighbourhood perception', Research Memorandum 23. Birming Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham. Steinitz, C. (1968) 'Meaning and the congruence of urban form and activity', Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 34:233-48. Vertesi, J. (2008) 'Mind the gap: the London Underground map and users' representations of urban space', Social Studies of Science, 38:7-33.

John R. Gold, Oxford Brookes University