•The perception of city images in the Tri-City Region of Poland was studied using Geo-coded Social Media, GIS database.•GSM-based “District”, “landmark,” “path” were in good agreements with ...benchmarks, less so for “edge” and “node”.•Instagramability reflected the perception of a place as an architectural landmark and tourist attraction.•Twitterability reflected the perception of a place being nice and relevance to everyday life of communities.•Findings have theoretical and practical implications for urban planners.
“The Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch is a landmark planning theory of lasting influence; its scientific rigor and relevance in the digital age were in dispute. The rise of social media and other digital technologies offers new opportunities to study the perception of urban environments. Questions remain as to whether social media analytics can provide a reliable measure of perceived city images? If yes, what implication does it hold for urban planners? This paper describes a study on the perception of city images using a combination of “big data” and “small data” methods in the Tri-City Region in Poland. The aims were to 1) test the hypothesis whether social media analytics can elicit Lynchian elements of city image in consistency with conventional methods, and 2) develop and evaluate social media-based indicators of Imageability for planning practice. Geo-tagged images and texts were collected from Instagram and Twitter, two popular social media platforms in Poland. Text-Mining, Image Processing, Clustering Analysis, Kernel Density Estimation, and Sentiment Analysis were used. Results were compared with benchmarks constructed from official GIS database, questionnaire responses and sketch maps. “District”, “landmark”, and “path” identified on social media were in good agreements with benchmarks, less so for “edge” and “node”. Two social media-based indicators have influenced the perception of a place: Instagramability, the frequency of a place captured on Instagram, was linked to its perception as an architectural landmark and tourist attraction, while Twitterability, the frequency of a place mentioned on Twitter by name, was linked to its perceived niceness and relevance to everyday life of communities. Methods developed in this study have theoretical and practical implications for urban planners.
In The Image of the City Lynch describes how individuals perceive and recall features in urban spaces. The most distinctive elements in the urban landscape - categorised in paths, nodes, edges, ...districts and landmarks - give shape to individuals' mental representation of the city. Lynch’s approach has stimulated research into spatial cognition, urban design and artificial intelligence, and it still represents an essential pillar in the analysis of urban dynamics. Nevertheless, an explicit link between The Image of the City and GIScience has not been completely explored yet. In this paper, a computational approach to The Image of the City is proposed. Different perspectives in spatial cognition and GIS research are integrated to obtain a complete Image of the City, in which the most salient elements are shared by a large part of citizens. Nodes, paths and districts were identified through network science techniques. Methods drawn from the information approach to The Image of the City are used to detect landmarks, integrating the complexity of points of reference in their visual, structural and semantic components, as conceptualised by Lynch and successive research. The methods were applied to the central area of Boston and built using freely available spatial datasets. Results were compared to Lynch’s maps to evaluate the methodology: besides a considerable discrepancy with regard to landmarks, a good correspondence for paths, nodes, edges and districts was found.
•An approach to computationally extract Lynch's Image of the city is advanced.•For Boston, our computational Image matches well with Lynch's Image.•The most satisfactory outcomes were obtained for districts and paths.•Out of the five elements, landmarks were found most challenging to extract.
This paper explores the role of virtual mapping environments in analyzing people’s perception of spaces and their implications in planning. We examine how people interpret Kevin Lynch’s “city ...imageability” in the digital age by asking two questions: (1) how can we create mental images of city elements by using virtual versus physical environments? (2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of each method? We studied sixty-eight mental maps—created by thirty-four participants—identifying five factors for disagreements on city elements: scale, eye level, details, accuracy/timeliness, and sensory/movement. We conclude by suggesting how practitioners can take a balanced approach for city imageability analysis.
This paper presents a pedagogy of anachronism where learning occurs through a misfit between theory and practice. It was developed and tested in a class taught from 2016 to 2019, where students ...repeated Kevin Lynch's original 1960 experiment on cognitive mapping in a location much smaller in scale and with a very different social composition from the cities that Lynch analyzed. The deliberate misfit transformed a method designed to understand user perception into the very problem itself, provoking students to ask important epistemological questions and recognize the situatedness of theory. A pedagogy of anachronism resists the uncritical instrumentalization of canonical ideas and trains students to think deeply about the normative and epistemological basis of design/planning practice. The paper ends by suggesting different types of misfits that can extend this pedagogy for other learning objectives.
The proposal of Cognition and the Built Environment (MØYSTAD, 2017) is that architecture is a basic mode of human cognition. The production as well as the use of our environment is a cognitive ...process in and of itself. Building human environment relates to and is informed by the prior built environment. One of Christopher Alexander’s observations (1987) was that “building cities” actually means changing cities. Project by project. This insight carries implications for how we understand architecture, for how we understand the human brain and for how they interact. This paper will outline (1) the interaction between some spatial and morphological properties of the built environment on one hand, and (2) some of the recently discovered properties of the brain on the other, which seem to mirror similar properties of the external environment. Based on these two sets of properties I will then (3) make a brief discussion of some theories that seem to suggest an outline, not complete but still useful, of the cognitive relationship between (1) and (2).
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Cognitive-environmental urban planning and design began with Kevin Lynch's (1960) The Image of the City. Scientific and technological developments, including ...discoveries in brain physiology and cognitive psychology, the psychosocial determinants of health, and the spread of navigation and information technologies, have increased the pertinence of cognitive-environmental research to planning. Re-engagement in contemporary debates about brain function and cities can help address long-standing humanistic challenges in planning as well as new challenges arising from emergent urban technologies. We systematically review scholarly work that cites Lynch or invokes cognitive mapping and synthesize cognitive-environmental concepts and methods from fields outside planning. We propose how planning and design practice can align with a cognitive-environmental framework. Cognitive-environmental research engages issues such as the need for equitable access, codes and rules that create good urban form, planning data and information systems, and participatory planning imbued with local knowledge and civic engagement. Urban planners and designers can use cognitive-environmental approaches to work toward more just and humane cities, even as they are transformed by new technologies. Lynch's ideas, particularly his insistence on an engaged approach to learning the city, remain highly relevant.
Takeaway for practice: Insights from cognitive-environmental research identify specific priorities and methods for planning, including participant-generated urban information, community engagement and learning, revisions to urban codes and regulations related to neurological differences in the experience of the built environment and technological changes in wayfinding and navigation, and health-focused urban planning initiatives, particularly related to mental wellbeing.
Kevin Lynch in Los Angeles Drake Reitan, Meredith; Banerjee, Tridib
Journal of the American Planning Association,
10/2018, Volume:
84, Issue:
3-4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Here we examine the legacy of Kevin Lynch in Los Angeles (CA). We begin by describing his contributions to planning at the city and regional scales. We then ...focus on Los Angeles's central core because of its prominence as a case study in The Image of the City. Specifically, we ask how Lynch's ideas influenced planning efforts for Los Angeles's downtown. We use a mixed-methods approach comprising expert interviews and analysis of archival documents, news stories, oral histories, plans, and reports. Although it is impossible to attribute the evolving physical form of Los Angeles to Lynch, we can see the effects of his thinking in the empowerment of local citizens and in the sensibility of planners and urban designers. Lynch's contribution occurred at both the city and district scales, first as a consultant for the general plan and the visual studies that led to its creation, and second by inspiring the work of planners tasked with remaking Los Angeles's downtown.
Takeaway for practice: A principal aim of Lynch's work was for planners to engage with citizens and to understand how the public experiences the city. Planners and urban designers in Los Angeles were inspired by his ideas and were able to use at least some of his vision to navigate the thicket of the planning process.
Using the methodology of in-depth interviews, this article explores how blind and visually impaired white cane users conceptualize urban space. The study presented in the article showed that the city ...is conceived, even without visual mechanisms, through landmarks, paths, edges, nodes and districts, i.e. the types of elements in the city image defined by Kevin Lynch. However, spatial representations of blind people are produced on the basis of spatial experience that is proximal and not distal, as was the case with Lynch. The article discusses elements of the non-visual image of the city that are constructed through direct touch and white cane use. Drawing on Lefebvre's stance on the interconnectedness of the body, practice and representational spaces, the author argues that the white cane is not just an aid that facilitates the mobility of blind people and helps to navigate in the urban space. As part of the 'practico-sensory totality' of the body, it also influences the ways in which the city is experienced and conceived.
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Kevin Lynch was a distinguished city designer and humanist whose thoughts, theories, and practices have had a far-reaching influence on planning across the ...world, including in China. Here we identify the impact of Lynch's ideas on China's urban development, design practices, and ideas about urban design education during the various stages of China's urbanization. Our literature review, supplemented by interviews with Lynch's former colleagues in China, reveals the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of his contributions. His thoughts on city construction, rooted in humanism and psychological analysis of how people perceive cities, have had a formative influence in the past 3 decades in the evolution of urban design methods and have helped accelerate the new profession of urban design and new systems of regulating urban development.
Takeaway for practice: It is useful to understand how Lynch's ideas, largely the product of American thought, have had influence in China as this country makes a transition to a more pluralistic and locally driven form of planning. China's vast scale and tempo of urban development and planning provide an important example of the impact Lynch made. We can also learn much from the Chinese experience in large-scale urbanization that has relevance for other rapidly growing cities in the developing world.
Due to the global market competition, urban transformations affected most cities which wanted to attract more economic and social resources. The level of urban perceptions and their representations ...as mental images occupy a more important role in obtaining a successful city. In this way it is created a space that is interesting and enjoyable, being also exposed to all the changes that are taking place due to the advances in architecture and infrastructure. This paper will focus on urban image assessment at the cognitive level using an adaptation of the Lynch method, by identifying the five elements in the urban space: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, leading to imageability and legibility characterization of the image. In this realm, the case study of Craiova city serves as a model of urban evaluation and will be explored. Interviews were conducted with residents of the city to quantify their perception about the urban image elements. The obtained results of the urban image perception are mapped and will be analyzed with aerial images in order to determine the type of urban fabric that is dominant in the city, the fine grain or the coarse grain layout. The results show that the five elements of the Lynch image of the city can be easily mapped and assessed and that a mixture between fine grain and coarse grain is the best solution identified for the city. The paper concludes by outlining the importance of urban image along with other geographical studies in the sustainable planning and development of cities.
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