KEVIN A.

LYNCH
NAME : PRABHAT SHARMA
CLASS : 4
TH
YAER A
ROLL NO. : 20
Kevin A. Lynch
Kevin A. Lynch
Kevin Andrew Lynch (1918 Chicago, Illinois - 1984 Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts) was an
American urban planner and author. His most influential books include The Image of the
City (1960) and What Time is This Place? (1972).
The book by kevin lynch
the image of the city
Biography
Lynch studied at Yale University, Taliesin (studio) under Frank Lloyd Wright, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, and received a Bachelor's degree in city planning from MIT in 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 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.

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.
The Image of the City

Lynch's most famous work, The Image of the City published in 1960, is the
result of a five-year study on how observers take in information of the city.
In this book, Lynch argues that people in urban situations orient themselves
by means of mental maps. He compares three American cities (Boston,
Jersey City, and Los Angeles) and looks at how people orient themselves in
these cities.
People who move through the city engage in way-finding. They need to be
able to recognize and organize urban elements into a coherent pattern.

Lynch reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and
predictable ways, forming mental maps with five elements:
1. Paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people
travel;
2. Edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
3. Districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some
identity or character;
4. Nodes, focal points, intersections or loci;
5. Landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as external
reference points.

PATHS - channels along which the observer
customarilymoves
EDGE - An edge is defined as a
boundary between two areas, including
shores, walls, wide streets, breaks
between buildings, and open spaces.
The bluffs of Mankato serve as an important
edge. They separate the city between the
lower valley and the upper highland.
ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT- is
located downtown on River Front
Street. It includes the Civic
Center and a Movie Theater.
Minnesota State University serves Mankato as
an important landmark. Since 1867, the
university has served as a symbol of one of the
largest and most prestigious colleges in the state.
The River Hills Mall has been around
for a decade. It has a wide variety of
stores such as Target, Sears, J.C.
Pennys, Herbergers and Scheels.
An environmental image has three components: identity (the recognition of urban elements as separate entities),
structure (the relation of urban elements to other objects and to the observer), and meaning (its practical and
emotional value to the observer).
They should design the city in such a way that it gives room for three related movements: mapping, learning, shaping.
1. First, people should be able to acquire a clear mental map of their urban environment.
2. Second, people should be able to learn how to navigate in this environment by training.
3. Third, people must be able to operate and act upon their environment.
Are locative services undermining the potential for exploration and unexpected encounters with new places and people, when our
movements are guided and goal-oriented? ????
Lynch himself feels that disorientation is the cause of fear and anxiety, and already claims that [t]o become completely
lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city (p. 4). Yet under controlled circumstances he
acknowledges that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment
One such question is the extend to which our way-finding shifts from orienting ourselves to mostly objective urban elements to
become increasingly subjective by means of locative media technologies. ??????
The element of visibility is crucial here. Lynch is talking about elements of the city that are publicly visible to all
people.
In the image of the city, discussed the image of the spatial environmentthe mental representation of the character and structure of
the geographic worldas a scaffold to which we attach many meanings and a guide by which we can order our movements. This
image has an immediate practical role in our lives, and also a deeper psychological one....

Many parallel statements can be made about the environmental image of time.... Both have intimate connections with the aesthetics
of landscape and more general implications for social structure and social change. It is evident that we should think of an
environmental image that is both spatial and temporal, just as we must design settings in which the distribution of qualities in both
time and space are considered."
What Time is This Place?
Kevin Lynch's book deals with this human sense of time, a biological rhythm that may follow a different beat from that dictated by
external, "official," "objective" timepieces.
In one's own image of a city or of a larger environment, the sense of place is inextricably meshed with the sense of timea financial
district that bustles on Friday is transformed into a lifeless concrete desert by Sunday, or the deposits of slow historic change can be
spotted around a neighborhood, or renewal bulldozers can suddenly revive a long-suppressed memory of time past. Time and Place
Timeplaceis a continuum of the mind, as fundamental as the spacetime that may be the ultimate reality of the material world.
It opens with several case histories of cities
transformed by time: London after the Great Fire of
1666;
Bath, the preserved city, embedded in the amber of
the eighteenth century;
Stoke-on-Trent, an industrial wasteland, a disaster
area not because it was destroyed but because it was
built;
Ciudad Guyana, a new but not an instant city;
and Havana, container for social revolution.
Plan for rebuilding the City of London (St Paul's Cathedral is indicated in red), 1666