Seeing Urban Landscape Through The Image Of The City

“most often our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns”

- Kevin Lynch.

Legibility and system?

Those who have studied planning-related fields must have heard of Kevin Lynch. Lynch, an American urban planner, helped us understand our perceptional form of an urban environment. He brought the mental mapping theory to the urban study field and argued that there is a corresponding set of images in the observer’s mind in any given city. And those series of images are how we make a city “legible.”

The early legibility of the city images might have been started by City Beautiful movement. Since that movement (the 1890s-1990s), we have desired to create social order through a series of beautification and make cities “readable.” Legibility became vital to a place because it creates a system and makes users distinguish and orient in the constant rebuilding environment.

With technology advancing, any GPS device or smartphone could help us navigate any place and City. Now, 60 years after his book was first published, can we still find value in using his mapping method to understand and further improve our built environment?

Basis of constituting the image of the City

In his book “image of the city,” Lynch identified five elements that associate with our “image-making”: Path, Edge, Node, District, and Landmark.

Lynch’s analysis appears to have a few discrepancies in his analytical diagram associated with Path and Edge. Both elements are leaner, but the differences lie in the observer. Paths are “the channels which the observer customarily moves. For many people, they are the predominant element in their image”. On the other hand, Edge is “the linear element.” They are “the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity.”

Path vs. Edge scenario:

Lynch sketched three cities: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, to analyze our collective image of a city. Continuing his visual diagram on a portion Los Angeles map, we can tell how these two elements function differently in our memories.

Assuming the observers were drivers, the two major freeways in most samples’ answers were the Path. With the same logic, First and Main street should also be seen as the Path rather than the Edge.

The First street adjacent to the Civic District and Grand park was considered the Path because of “its obvious function, size, spatial openness, new buildings” (from a pedestrian perspective); the Hollywood and Harbor freeway should be recognized as the Edge that bounds the two open sides in an L shape.

The same contradiction can be reflected in these two maps. The Columbia pike and Brooklyn Queens expressway are the Edges for pedestrians but Paths for vehicle drivers.

What does Lynch’s method mean to a quality site?

Lynch highlighted how different understandings of our surroundings influence how we design and understand buildings. We can see examples when we zoom in on these two locations.

Massing Orientation

When we put these two locations side by side, We find commonalities in site features: both projects are adjacent to a major highway in a car-dependent neighborhood.

1. the location of its bell (clock) tower is at the intersection, which is determined by where the primary traffic enters the site.

2. Other than the shadow study, the distance of the primary viewer determines the project’s front face. For example, there is two perpendicular access to the cathedral, yet the cathedral only faces to the east, is because the view from the bridge has a proper distance to look over the entire building. Similar to the Columbia Pike site, the larger massing is located farther to the intersection, making the whole complex more legible for vehicle drivers and pedestrians across from the streets.

Blank Walls

In many planning documents, we often read languages such as “avoid the blank wall.” Due to the function of the worship places, the cathedral has few fenestrations. But the designer uses landscapes to cover the blank wall and make the fence appear friendly and inviting.