The five elements proposed by Lynch are presented in Table 1 with his original definitions. Lynch proposed a set of elements which should be fundamental to the structure of the urban environment and thus were expected to be manifest in people's mental structuring of the environment. This 'public image' was used to identify aspects of good and bad structure in the cities. Because of his focus on identifying ways of improving the physical structure of cities, he was less interested in individual differences in mental images than in the aggregate image of inhabitants of a particular city. His method involved externalising the 'mental images' that city-dwellers have of their cities, through interviews and sketch-mapping excersises. Lynch points out the fear that we associate with becoming disorientated in our surroundings: "The very word 'lost' in our language means more than simple geographic uncertainty it carries overtones of utter disaster" (p.4).Īs a planner, Lynch was interested in analysing the urban form, and in particular identified the criterion of the 'legibilty' of a cityscape which he defined as " the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern" (p.2) a legible city would thus be one "whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern" (p.3). In the age of massive cities, we need this sense in order to navigate between the numerous locations where we carry out our everyday activities: home, work, entertainment, holidays etc. In our distant past we needed a 'sense' of orientation in order to keep track of where we are relative to sources of food and our home. For Lynch, being able to orient oneself in one's environment is a fundamental existential necessity for humans. He was mainly interested in how people structure their image of their environment, so as to design city layouts which would accord with the ways we perceive and understand our environments. Kevin Lynch (1960) was an urban planner who carried out pioneering work on people's urban cognitive maps from the 1950s. The Structure of Environmental Representations - the work of Kevin Lynch Env4 - Environmental Perception, Cognition and Appraisal 9 Cognitive Mapping and Social Change 1
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