The Image of the City

Front Cover
MIT Press, Jun 15, 1964 - Architecture - 202 pages
The classic work on the evaluation of city form.

What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

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Contents

The Image of the Environment
1
Three Cities
14
The City Image and Its Elements
46
City Form
91
VA New Scale
118
B The Use of the Method
140
Two Examples of Analysis
160
Bibliography
182
Copyright

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About the author (1964)

Kevin Lynch (1918-1984) studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and later obtained a Bachelor of City Planning degree from MIT. After a long and distinguished career on the faculty of the MIT School of Architecture and Urban Planning, he was named Professor Emeritus of City Planning.

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