Gordon Cullen (1914-1994) was an English architect,.

an urban designer who carried on

the of the Townscape movement theme. Later on he wrote and published the “Townscape”
book in 1961. He was a key motivator and activist in the development of British theories of
urban design in the post-war period. After his death, David Gosling & Norman Foster
collected various examples of his work and put them together in the book ‘Visions of Urban
Design’.
Gordon Cullen get famous by the Concise Townscape Theory. The “Townscape” book, one of
Gordon Cullen’s masterpiece, illustrated with over 300 works selected from the drawings
Gordon Cullen made during his lifetime, this anthology documents his influential career as
an Urban Theorist, artist and illustrator from 1930 to 1990. The majority of his drawings have
never been published before except in professional reports, and this book contains
numerous drawings executed for the pleasure of observation as well as the product of his
many consultancies.

Recently, the article “Introduction to The Concise Townscape”

written by Gordon Cullen is particularly interesting to me. In the
reading, Gordon Cullen defined urban design as The Art of
Relationship. The goal of urban planning was to manipulate groups
of buildings and physical town elements so as to achieve visual
impact and drama. In other words, cities should be designed from
the point of view of the moving person. Cities come alive through
the drama of juxtaposition.
I got very inspired by Gordon Cullen’s view on urban design. Firstly,
cities should not be too chaotic or too ordered. In that case,
pedestrians will never get bored walking along the streets. Urban
planners should always take both order and variety into
consideration. Secondly, cities should be designed with visible life.
It’s fascinating to see what people are up to. A city should be full of
people doing things that we can see through the window. Visible life
makes city more energetic.

“Introduction to The Concise Townscape” is actually my first reading

on urban planning. Urban planning is still a brand new field to me.
But I find it very attractive so far. I’m looking forward to getting to
know more about cities and environmental planning in this
semester.

This is a wonderful description of the components that make cities and towns work,
from a point of view that celebrates urban life rather than fears it.
It makes you realise just how much written about the city is a literature of fear. But
Cullen seems to get the point, I think:

A city is more than the sum of its inhabitants. It has the power to generate a
surplus of amenity, which is one reason why people like to live in
communities rather than in isolation.

Now turn to the visual impact which a city has on those who live in it or visit
it. I wish to show that an argument parallel to the one put forward above
holds good for buildings: bring people together and they create a collective
surplus of enjoyment; bring buildings together and collectively they can give
visual pleasure which none can give separately. (7)

This is the city as collective enterprise, a collective that becomes greater than the
sum of its parts. Like Capra’s theories of connection, a city is not just a collection of
discrete things like streets and buildings, but rather embodies the art of relationship:
how things fit together, the spaces created between them, how people use and live
in buildings, but also move between them.

Gordon Cullen describes three primary ways in which our environment produces an
emotional reaction key to the planner or architect:

I. Optics — how we see the environment: I love his description of serial vision — how
the town reveals itself in ‘a series of jerks or revelations’, always negotiating
the existing view and the emerging view. I love how he cinematically pieces the city
together as we move through it, he writes:
Suppose, however, that we take over this linking as a branch of the art of
relationship; then we are finding a tool with which human imagination can
begin to mould the city into a coherent drama. (9)

II. Place – how we find and feel ourselves within the environment:

it is an instinctive and continuous habit of the body to relate itself to the

environment, this sense of position cannot be ignored; it becomes a factor in
the design of the environment…

it is easy to see how the whole city becomes a plastic experience, a journey
through pressures and vacuums, a sequence of exposures and enclosures, of
constraint and relief. (10)

And there is always a ‘here’, where you are, and a ‘there’, it is fascinating to think
how we might shape these feelings, make people want to move and explore, fill them
with wonder, excitement, peacefulness.
 III. Content – ‘the fabric of towns: colour, texture, scale, style, character, personality
and uniqueness.’ (11)

In the book “The Concise Townscape”, Gordon Cullen developed the concepts of
‘Townscape’, which has influenced architects, planners and urban designers ever since.
“One building is architecture but two buildings is townscape” (Cullen, 1961, p.9). Gordon’s
views contributed to using townscape as an approach to an urban design philosophy. The
term townscape has since become associated with a variety of concerns in environmental
design ranging from the development of design guides for residential areas to the
conservation of pre-industrial towns. Moreover, this book is presented with good physical
design applications of some aspects of human needs in the visual environment which are
being identified by more scientific research in environmental psychology. The author
believed that urban design not only concerned about relationship between buildings but also
the interaction between people and urban space. This book also has contributed to arts and
history, due to which it explores the certain visual effects in the grouping of buildings
(Weddle, 1962). Moreover, a series of case studies dealing with analysis of general visual
problems of perception, and appreciation could develop architects, urban planners and
designers’ appreciation of shapes and forms. It is a book with a wealth of detail and
references to Codes of Practice and British Standard Specifications, which can be used for
some of the technical aspects of townscape design.

Classic Book Review. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City

Literature Review | 2013-01-25 오전 1:09:16 | 조회수 : 2310 | 공개

Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kevin Lynch, in The Image of the City, demonstrates qualities of city form that go
beyond matters of image. In this book, Lynch discusses a research project, carried
out in three American cities: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, in order to
identify the degree of legibility of the cities’ lay-out. For this project, he conducted
interviews with their citizens, and asked daily commuters to reconstruct the image of
the city in drawings. Deriving from their mnemonic of these citizens, he formulates
his theory that a mental image of the city -- “cognitive map” –– is not identifiable
with a visual image.

Based on those interviews, Lynch also notes that there are five elements being used
by citizens as fixed references that orient them in their daily commutes: paths, edges,
districts, nodes, and landmarks. The clearer these elements were, the easier it was for
citizens to move around:
 Paths: major avenues of travel through the environment such as major roads or
footpaths.
 Edges: structures or features providing borders to districts or linear obstacles.
 Districts: sections of the environment which have a distinct character which provides
coherence, allowing the whole to be viewed as a single entity.
 Nodes: intersection area along paths, e.g. road junctions or town squares.
 Landmarks: Static and recognizable objects which can be used to give a sense of
location and bearing.

Lynch’s work was inspired by a behavioral scientist Edward Tolman, who posited in
his Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men that orientation and legibility in one’s
environment were directly connected to the tolerance of difference and others in
society. Lynch followed Tolman’s concepts, and applied this science of human
perception and their urban behavior to his theory; he also developed the ideas of
urban structure with the human perceptual experience, which is shared by Gordon
Cullen, the author of The Concise Townscape (1961).

Despite substantial influences of Lynch’s work, a number of criticisms have been also
raised. First, he has been criticized for neglecting empirical bases for the five element
types, as he devised the five elements before commencing the research. Second,
critics pointed out the selective nature of the interviewee sample Lynch employed;
most were white, middle-class, able-bodied males. It is possible that urban images of
black people and of disabled people may differ substantially and in politically
important respects from those of white or able-bodied people. Finally, it has been
argued (Pile, 1996; Sennett, 1990) that the factor of legibility is too narrow for
assessing the quality of a cityscape. These criticisms urged further urban research
that can explain symbolic, historical and cultural meanings of places alongside the
spatial aspects of city design.

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. A central notion in
this book is that of legibility (also called imageability and visibility). Legibility means the
extend to which the cityscape can be ‘read’. 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. “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. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of
past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action” (p.4). Lynch
proposes that these mental maps consist of five elements: (1) paths: routes along which
people move throughout the city; (2) edges: boundaries and breaks in continuity;
(3) districts: areas characterized by common characteristics; (4) nodes: strategic focus
points for orientation like squares and junctions; and (5) landmarks: external points of
orientation, usually a easily identifyable physical object in the urban landscape. Of these
five elements, paths are especially important according Lynch, since these organize
urban mobility.
A clear mental map of the urban environment is needed to counter the always looming
fear of disorientation. A legible mental map gives people an important sense of
emotional security, it is the framework for communication and conceptual organization,
and heightens the depth and intensity of everyday human experience. The city itself is
thus a powerful symbol of a complex society, argues Lynch. 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). It is important that these
urban elements are not hermetically designed into precise and final detail but present an
open-ended order. Urban inhabitants should be able to actively form their own stories
and create new activities. Lynch 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.

In my view this book is an incredible valuable work to understand how people perceive,
inhabit and move around in the urban landscape. It shows that urban space is not just
composed of its physical characteristics but equally by representations in mental
images. Mobility is not just (the potential for) free-flowing movement but heavily relies on
structuring and identifying the environment through the aid of mental maps. Lynch’ work
has been influential to many. Theorist of postmodernity Fredric Jameson (1991) for
instance refers to Lynch when he argues that the cognitive map is a means to cope with
societies complexities by bridging ‘objective’ and abstract representations of space, and
subjective existential experiences of ‘lived space’. Lynch can also be seen as a
precursor to the influential thesis by Henri Lefrebvre from 1974 that space is not just ‘out
there’ as a mathematical entity or a priori category but always socially produced. Lynch’
work has many implications for urban design and raises various questions about the
present role of mobile and locative media technologies in the urban context.
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. We are far more able than ever before to “write” the city
with our own subjective experiences and share these with other people through mobile
media. A recent post by Martijn de Waal discusses this issue of ‘semantic way-finding’.
The element of visibility is crucial here. Lynch is talking about elements of the city that
are publicly visible to all people. But what happens when people increasingly rely on
private and idiosyncratic points of orientation through their portable devices? Locative
media add invisible layers of social meanings to the city that are only visible through a
different interface (the mobile screen), accessible to others elsewhere, although often
only to those who are members of that service or community. What does this mean for
notions of general legibility, the public and private character of mental images, and
social inclusion/exclusion?
In addition, Lynch’ emphasis on clear legibility of the urban environment poses some
critical questions about the current tendency to saturate the urban landscape with
information. What happens to the overall legibility of the city when every building, object,
and place wants to communicate and announce its existence to us by yelling “I Am Here,
Look At Me!”? To what extend will mobile and locative devices come to act as filters for
coping with the torrent of information, or actually become part of the problem itself?

Another issue brought up by Lynch’ work is the eternal question of (the end
of) serendipity, so often discussed in relation to mobile media and location-based
services. 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” (p. 5).
Lynch work also introduces a question that is especially relevant nowadays. Is our
capacity for orientation and way-finding something we learn (and thus can unlearn as
well when we externalize this to our GPS navigation devices, see earlier posts on this
blog here, here, here, and here), or is it innate to people as well as other animals? Lynch
takes a clear stance when he says “it now seems unlikely that there is any mystic
“instinct” of way-finding” (p. 3), but that seems to be countered by recent biological
evidence about for instance bird migrations.
Finally, some more critical remarks. Lynch primarily emphasizes the role of the visual
sense. He says how people find their way in the city by relying on vision. Other faculties
such as hearing and even smelling are lacking in his work. Some later authors have
stressed the role of sound in experiencing the city (e.g. Paul DuGay about the Walkman;
Michael Bull about the mobile phone as an audio device; Caroline Basset, and De Jong
& Schuilenburg in a special issue of Open Magazine about sound). A related omission in
Lynch’ analysis of the urban experience is the role of media in general and text in
particular. This is odd since Lynch so prominently uses the term legibility in his work. Of
course it could be countered that media did not play such a big role in the urban context
at the time of writing of this book (1960) but this misses the point that cities from their
inception have been inscribed by signs and media, as Malcolm McCullough so
clearly demonstrated in his keynote speech at The Mobile City 2008. An early modern
writer such as Walter Benjamin for instance already looks at the relation between print
media and the city, and emphasizes that the modern city is increasingly being
dominated by “script-images”. “Script – having found, in the book, a refuge in which it
can lead an autonomous existence – is pitilessly dragged out into the street by
advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos”, he says in
an essay called “Attested Auditor of Books”.
Still, “The Image of the City” is a classic work and can be reread as a fresh work in this
age. Lynch’ division of mapping/learning/shaping can well be applied as important
questions that can be posed for each locative media project. To what extend do locative
media accurately or insightfully map our (experience of) environment? To what extend
do locative media teach us to see and experience our environment? To what extend do
locative media enable us to shape and modify our environment?

Kevin Lynch — he’s been on my list of folks to read forever on architecture and cities
and space, and with reason as The Image of the City is rather brilliant. He writes:
Looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the
sight may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space,
but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of
time. City design is therefore a temporal art… 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
surrounding, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past
experiences. (1)

I love this nod to the overwhelming — and mostly pleasurable — nature of the city,
the ways it works in both space and time, and like Lofland, Whyte, Cullen, Gehl and
others, he is clearly writing as someone with an appreciation for city life. It is a life
that is in many ways collectively constructed:
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 consonantly modifying the structure for reasons of
their own… No wonder, then, that the art of shaping cities is an art quite
separate from architecture or music or literature. (2)

In The Image of the City, Lynch’s focus is primarily looking at what he calls the
‘legibility’ of the cityscape — how we read cities and how understanding that can
help us (re)build better cities. Why is legibility key?
A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of
emotional security. He can establish an harmonious relationships between
himself and the outside world…(4)

I love this quote even more…

a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also
heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience. Although
life is far from impossible in the visual chaos of the modern city, the same
daily action could take on new meaning if carried out in a more vivid setting.
(5)

This is not to go against the many authors who write about the unknown, Lynch
emphasises that this not to deny the value of labyrinth or surprise, but under two
larger conditions — where there is no danger of losing basic

orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an over-all

framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole….
Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable. (6)

Another important qualification, the power of human beings to shape the urban
environment:

The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and
have a creative part in developing his image. He should have the power to
change that image to fit changing needs… what we seek is not a final but an
open-ended order, capable of continuous further development. (6)

So to understand how this all works, he book tries to get at the ways people
understand and read cities, the

‘public images,’ the common mental pictures carried around by large

numbers of a city’s inhabitants… (7)

I love maps, and so found this a fascinating way to examine people’s relationships to
the urban form, splitting it into useful divisions to be examined:

The mental maps that are shared of streets and landmarks. These are
analyzed in terms of identity (its recognition as a separable entity), structure
(the spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer and other
objects) and meaning (for the observer, whether practical or emotional). (8)

Above all in understanding legibility is this:

imageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high

probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape,
color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified,
powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. (9)
A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city in this peculiar sense
would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite the eye and the
ear to greater attention and participation. The sensuous grasp upon such
surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also extended and
deepened. Such a city would be one that could be apprehended over time as a
pattern of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected.
The perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts
without disruption in his basic image, and each new impact would touch
upon many previous elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move
easily. He would be highly aware of his environment. The city of Venice
might be an example of such a highly imageable environment. (10)

Venice again, but I think this is definitely how a city works best, and this imageablity
is the center of his study of Boston, LA and Jersey City. What follows is a really
interesting way of mapping out perceptions of the city through surveys and
interviews. The maps are brilliant:
Particularly interesting is the look at problems, as in the ‘Problems of the Boston
image’ (p 24 — though you won’t be surprised to find that Boston has fewer
problems than the other two):

This marks what Kevin Lynch describes as the

confusions, floating points, weak boundaries, isolations, breaks in continuity,

ambiguities, branchings, lacks of character or differentiation. (25)

Of course it beats both Jersey City and Los Angeles hands down as a memorable,
enjoyably walkable and legible city. I do myself have a great soft spot for Boston. I
thought I’d go into more detail on LA in a second post, as it is my own city after all. It
also highlights Lynch’s limitations, but there is much to be mined from the book.
First, what development has done to the US city centre:

There is the same piling-up of blank office structures, the same ubiquity of
traffic ways and parking lots (34).

This has made them almost indistinguishable from one another, Lynch notes Jersey
City as the least distinguishable of all — funny that what people most loved about it
was the view of New York’s skyline on their horizon.

Common themes between the cities:

…people adjust to their surroundings and extract structure and identity out
of the material at hand. The types of elements used in the city image, and the
qualities that make them strong or weak, seem quite comparable between the
three…

In terms of broad themes, the key favourite aspects of all cities were space and
views:

Among other things, the tests made clear the significance of space and
breadth of view (43) … there was an emotional delight arising from a broad
view, which was referred to many times. …

Natural landscapes:

The landscape features of the city: the vegetation or the water, were often
noted with care and pleasure. (44)

Also a deep sense of the spatialities of class (race is not discussed at all, except in
an oblique way, a truly blindingly un-scholarly way which the post on LA will deal with
more)

Quite as apparent is the constant reference to socio-economic class: the

avoidance of “lower class” Broadway in Los Angeles, the recognition of the
“upper class” Bergen Section in Jersey City, or the unmistakable division of
Boston’s Beacon Hill into two distinct sides.

Space and time:

… the way in which the physical scene symbolizes the passage of time… (45)

So in broad strokes, there is a lot to think about here… the next post gets into the
nitty gritty of design elements and physical space.
[Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]