Kevin A. Lynch

KEVIN LYNCHGROUP-7

Pournima BarhateSayali NaikSneha SarodeRamya SharmaNikita Wadgave

BiographyKevin Lynch - WorksThe Image of the CityThe elements of cognitive images of the cities 5 principles - Understanding Neighborhoods Through Mental Mapping (mapping method)Design Principles for WayfindingThe View From the RoadGood City FormQuotes - Kevin Lynch

1.Biography

Kevin Andrew Lynch(1918Chicago,Illinois- 1984Martha's Vineyard,Massachusetts) was an Americanurban plannerand author. His most influential books includeThe Image of the City(1960) andWhat Time is This Place?(1972).

Lynch studied atYale University,Taliesin (studio)underFrank Lloyd Wright,Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and received a Bachelor's degree in city planning fromMITin 1947.He worked in Greensboro, NC as an urban planner but was recruited to teach at MIT by Lloyd Rodwin. He began lecturing at MIT the following year, became an assistant professor in 1949, was tenured as an associate professor in 1955, and became a full professor in 1963.

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 an 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.

Parallel to his academic work, Lynch practiced planning and urban design in partnership with Stephen Carr, with whom he founded Carr Lynch Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lynch died at his summer home in Martha's Vineyard in 1984.

At Yale University with Frank Lloyd Wright The Image of the City (1960)

Site Planning Lynch Kevin and Hack Gary

The View from the Road (1964)

What Time is this Place?

Managing the Sense of a Region

Good City Form

Wasting Away(with contributions by Michael Southworth, editor)

2. Summary of the book The Image of the City

The Image of the City (1960)Lynch's most famous work,The Image of the City, is the result of a five-year study on how observers take in information of the cityHis main contribution was to provide empirical research on city planning, studying how individuals perceive and navigate the urban landscape.

It also explores the presence of time and history in the urban environment, and therefore how these external factors affect people.

The first straightforward approach to the city, taken by how every individual is looking at it, which includes, sense aesthetical experience through space and time. An urban system can therefore be either perceived as stable or in constant change, which is the most noticeable effect of external factors affecting any environment.

On this concern, Lynch states that, unlike Architecture, Urbanism is in constant change: today, fifty years later, this issue could be regarded and discussed with further attention, as architecture, too, is subject to external factors and different perceptions, scale, but mostly a cultural aspect. Lynchs aim is to understand the relation between environmental images and urban life, at the basis of urban design principles; he therefore brings up an analysis of three different towns, putting into practice a research method whose successfulness is tested through the results of the analysis itself.The research focused on Boston, Jersey City and LosAngeles. As explained, the method undertaken concentrated on two phases, consisting firstly in office-based interviews, where the sample citizens were also required to draw up a map in order to make a rapid description of the city. The second phase consisted in a systematic examination of the environmental image evoked by trained observers .This is how, through surveys and research, Boston appears to be perceived only as one-sided, Jersey City is described as a formless place on the edge of something else and Los Angeles, despite being well structured, seems as faceless as Jersey City, delivering a sense of confusion.Lynch focuses on four main concepts correlated to a wise urban planning:an urban system has to be held legible, through definite sensory cuesits image has to be perceived by the observer, arbitrarily selected by the community and finally manipulated by city planners.legibility and imageability would then lead to the identification of a structure, and therefore a precise identity, which are both parameters through which it is possible to analyze an urban system and its own elements.Lynch reckons that there might be different relations of complexity within every structure: these consist in the relations between definite elements, which are identified in:path_landmark_edge_node_district.

3.The elements of cognitive images of the cities 5 principles

Using three disparate cities as examples (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles), Lynch reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and predictable ways, formingmental mapswith five elements.

In the book Lynch also coined the words "imageability" and "wayfinding".Image of the Cityhas had important and durable influence in the fields ofurban planningandenvironmental psychology.Paths - the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel.Edges -perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;Districts - relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some identity or character;Nodes intersections, focal points .Landmarks - readily identifiable objects which serve as external reference points.

4.Design Principles for WayfindingCreate an identity at each location, different from all others.Use landmarks to provide orientation cues and memorable locations.Create well-structured paths.Create regions of differing visual character.Don't give the user too many choices in navigation.Use survey views (give navigators a vista or map).Provide signs at decision points to help wayfinding decisions.Use sight lines to show what's ahead.

The View From the Road (published in 1964) by Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and John R. Myer, was dedicated to the idea that highways & roads could be works of art.

In an age when most of us spend significant amounts of time traveling, the ideas that Kevin Lynch portrayed is important.

When we are travelling in car we have little to look at other than what is out the window , which provides planners ample opportunities to play with visual effects and create an interesting and scenic drive.

The interlocking and intricate systems that highways & roads create are visually interesting and make statements about where one is and where you can go as well as show how connected we really are.

Lynch used an interesting means to show what they felt were the visual requirements of highways & road design.

Good City Form (1984) is a kind of inspiring book that every urban planner and architect should read and analyze. book explains the connection between urban landscapes physical form and its interaction with human activities.

The main question that Lynch tries to reveal in that book is 'What makes a good city?he has studied past and present practices of urban landscapes in cities, villages, parks and built-up settlements. He studied examples from different kind of cities throughout the whole world and supported his theories based on features that are typical to every human being. one of the greatest accomplishments conveyed from this book is that the book creates universal dimensions to figure out both the social and physical aspects about urban landscape.

These dimensions are vitality, fit, sense, access and control and two meta-criteria of efficiency and justice.

Dimensions articulated within the book represent the indivisible relationship of constructions and values.

From these dimensions he re-underlined that holding a solely mechanic view of urban environments by no means can build up a good city. 6.Quotes - Kevin Lynch

The Image of the City Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and character, but it is the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own. While it may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changing in detail. Only partial control can be exercised over its growth and form. There is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases.

Environmental Images

We must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants.

In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual.

A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security. He can establish an harmonious relationship between himself and the outside world. This is the obverse of the fear that comes with disorientation.The Adaptable Image

The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and have a creative part in developing his image.

The observer with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees.