Kevin Lynch Planning

[Louann Mauffray]

Togrow up witnessing the Chicago landscape reinventing itself year after year must have had some influence on Lynch and how he imagined the urban environment. But the path Lynch took from high schooler to urban planning visionary was less than direct. Between 1935 and 1948, lynch spent time at Yale (studying architecture), in Wisconsin (studying more architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright), at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (studying engineering and biology), in the South Pacific (as a member of the US Army), in The Philippines and Japan (as a member of the Army Corps of Engineers), at MIT (getting a BA in urban planning) and in North Carolina (as a practicing urban planner). Oh, and he spent some time in Florence for good measure.

Boston is loaded with edges. Lynch cites the Charles River as the most prominent example. Though the Charles may be considered a path by kayakers and rowing teams, the vast majority of Cambridge and Boston inhabitants are likely to treat it as an edge. It certainly functions as and edge on my cognitive map of Boston. Other edges in Boston might be the historic central artery or The Fens as well as Beacon, Tremont, Boylston and Arlington streets surrounding the Boston Common and Public Garden (or even Charles street, separating the two).

The map above is a rough consensus map of districts that existed in Boston in the 1950s. The hard line represents the minimum agreement area, while the dashed line represents the maximum area. The overlapping areas cause confusing situations like the hypothetical dialogue above. Examples of districts in Boston include Beacon Hill, Back Bay and the South End.

Lynch refers to two distinct types of nodes. Some nodes are junctions of paths and are therefore often transportation-related, while others may simply be a concentration of some type of use or characteristic. Nodes are important to the whole of how a city is perceived because they are related to the concept of path, since they often represent path junctions. They are similarly related to the concept of district since junctions are often prominent features within them. Lynch asserts that nodal points are to be found in almost every mental image of a place, and in some cases they may represent the most dominant feature.

Lynch also collected memory maps, a sort of mental map that is drawn some time after a place is experienced. These were drawn following biking and walking tours. He did this with his students (here is an interesting example that synthesizes many student maps) and research associates (here is an example showing what could be mapped 12 hours after a walking tour).

In addition to some of the more obvious photographs (like most images in this post), the photographer captured some brilliantly subtle elements to the visual landscape, including several images of visual limits. This set of unassuming landmarks and visual limit images comprised shots of sidewalks, grass, fences, cobbles, walls and advertisements.

Lynch is primarily known for The Image of The City, but he continued to teach at MIT and produce equally fascinating work for decades after it was published. In one such book, What Time is This Place?, Lynch eloquently discussed how time is experienced and absorbed in the urban landscape. Instead of relying too heavily on the historic nature of Boston in this volume, he pointed to more commonplace ways the passage of time was being perceived in the city (footprints in concrete as a snapshot in time, observing what people are carrying as an indication of the time of day, trees as seasonal clocks, &c.).

What I will leave you with here, though, is a map of a place just outside of Boston, a place that is in fact often confused with Boston. In the mid-1960s, Lynch performed a project entitled Visual Analysis: Community Renewal Program for the town of Brookline, Massachusetts. The goal of the project was to reveal potential problems in the way inhabitants perceived their town (with the idea that perhaps some of these problems could be remedied). The map below represents the collective public image of Brookline based on interviews performed as a part of the project. What do we think, Bostonographers, has this perception changed much since 1965?

Note: Lynchian paths and nodes that make up the town while fuzzy edges and districts are in the distance (my favorite being the question mark to the south that could still in be Brookline).

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