Kevin Lynch What Time Is This Place Pdf

[Mahmod Ohner]

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).

That top-down approach to urban planning found fertile ground during the dark age of totalitarism governments in the first decades of the 20th century. It worked for a clear purpose: making urban life a miserable and monotonous succession of metro-boulot-dodo.

Unlike the situationists, who tried to draw the sentimental map of the city according to their own interpretation, Lynch tries to draw the mental map of the average citizen. Getting that image from the brains of those citizens onto paper, Lynch reasons, is the first step in measuring the success or failure of the landscape designer, the urban planner, and the architect. Because Lynch argues that, just as orientation (in the jungle, in the desert, in the sea) is one of the basic skills of survival, an urban landscape that offers adequate spatial orientation will favor the vitality of public space.

Of these 5 elements, nodes and paths are particularly interesting in our research journey, during which we have set out to discover how urban data can help us to design higher quality and more sustainable public spaces and services.

Although the other way around also works, it may be that the commercial activity (the flow) is the consequence of the construction of the market. (Jan Gehl would tell us that the latter is much less efficient. It is more worthwhile to look first at where life naturally occurs in the city. Then, we will design the public space that best favors that activity and, finally, we will construct the buildings. A method as reasonable as it is not very widespread).

In our research, we want to bring an additional prism to the importance of nodes in the design of services, infrastructures and public spaces. According to the second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy or disorder of a system always increases with time.

Under this prism, nodes are the place where flows (of information, goods, people) are disordered and rearranged. And any reduction of entropy in a part of the system requires the application of energy, energy that heats the system as a whole, as happens in a refrigerator. In a refrigerator, the cold serves to stop the proliferation of bacteria and fungi in the food contained inside, at the cost of heating the room and accelerating the metabolism of bacteria and mites in and around the back of the room. In this article we develop this thermodynamic hypothesis of the production of architecture to host life around the nodes.

We are also interested in street design because good streets mean lively neighborhoods. According to Kevin Lynch, a street becomes a real path if it is suitable for pedestrians to walk along at ease, if it has a clear sense of direction, or if it is endowed with character; for example, by the concentration of a distinctive type of commercial activity, or a special type of paving or facade.

Turning streets into paths can also be achieved through environmental conditions. Lynch proposes using lighting, a technique that the new open-air shopping centers use in a really sophisticated way. As they also use sound (through music, or the murmur of water). In fact, if you walk through a shopping mall of a company like Intu you can find many of these qualities. The result creates in the visitor a comforting sensation that translates into a positive predisposition for consumption.

Taking a walk through this type of open-air shopping mall, we can see how they fulfill the qualities that Kevin Lynch establishes for a quality public space. We know at all times where we are, where we are going, we are at ease and the place transmits a totally legible narrative. The situationists themselves could not have done better. Quoting them, how bitter their victory when the psychogeographic techniques they advocated in the 1950s for the liberation of man are used today to promote consumerism.

Lynch himself recognizes the limitations of the method. The main one is the difficulty that for many people is the mere fact of drawing what is in their head, of faithfully transferring to paper the inner image of the city. But also the problem of selecting a sufficiently large group so that the different socio-demographic groups are correctly represented in the sample. There is another obstacle more of a psychological nature, and it has to do with the difference between the image we remember when we are asked to draw the map and the image we use to make inmediate decisions, for example, when we have to decide which direction to take at an intersection.

And finally, Lynch points to a fourth problem. In his view, the method fails to capture well the interrelationships between elements of the city, nor the changes in the image of the city over time (the maps produced are static).

For example, the visualization of data captured by urban infrastructures makes it possible to represent certain layers of the city over time, revealing hidden aspects of our urban ecosystems. Sentiment analysis techniques, which analyze how citizens feel about their city through data displayed on social networks, partially help to draw a collective mental map of our cities. The interrelationships between elements are also beginning to be visible thanks to data from our cell phones and geo-location technologies.

However, the use of all these technologies and techniques in pursuit of better urban design is still in its infancy. Technologists (who know how to collect data) are not connected to urban planners (who are responsible for changing the shape of our city). And urban planners work with models and are just beginning to practice data science.

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