Title

The Image of the Contemporary City

Contact Info
Name of Co-author: Peter Lynch
Affiliation: Faculty, City College of New York, New York City
Address: Peter Lynch Architect, 41 East 11 Street Third Floor, New York NY 10003
USA
Email: plynch@studiothem.com
Telephone: +1 646 744 5010
Name of Co-author: Sergio Martn Blas
Affiliation: Faculty, ETSAM, Universidad Politcnica de Madrid
Address: Sergio Martn Blas, C/ Martn de los Heros 59, 28008 Madrid Spain
Email: sergiomartinblas@gmail.com
Key Words

urban image, contemporary urban form, Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City,
cognitive mapping

Abstract
Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) argued that a strong, "visible, coherent,
and clear" urban image is the foundation of a livable, attractive urban environment.
Has the scale and speed of urbanization since 1960 made Lynchs idea of a clear,
unified urban image obsolete? In Managing the Sense of a Region (1976) and A
Theory of Good City Form (1981) Lynch anticipates the need for a more complex
and multivalent idea of the urban image and proposes a line of research. How do
qualities like ambiguity, instability, accident, intricacy, and unfoldingness help to
create a strong urban image? Drawing upon our research and the work and writings
of contemporary architects and theorists including Bernardo Secchi, John Hejduk,
Manuel de Sol-Morales, Roberto Collov, and Carsten Juel-Christiansen, we
propose that a lack of morphological clarity does not prevent citizens of fast-growing
metropolitan regions from establishing the identity of their city in more complex ways,
from navigating by alternate mental maps.

The Image of the Contemporary City

In The Image of the City (TIC), published in 1960, Kevin Lynch argues that a strong urban image
is the foundation of a livable, attractive urban environment. In TIC Lynch assumes that a strong
urban image must be "visible, coherent, and clear".1 Has the scale and speed of urbanization,
fifty years later, made Lynchs idea of the urban image obsolete? In many cities and metropolitan
regions, the possibility of a clear and unitary urban image has been overwhelmed by the logic
of real estate and infrastructural development, which compromises not only the operability
of plans and regulations conceived so far, but also the legibility of unitary forms, boundaries, and
historical traces. Although the urban context has changed, we argue in this paper that Lynchs
idea of a strong urban image is still relevant if expanded and modified to accommodate the
contemporary condition. A strong urban image is not necessarily "visible, coherent, and clear.
How can qualities like ambiguity, instability, accident, intricacy, and unfoldingness
help to create a strong urban image? This question, which Lynch began to address in some
of his later works, has remained unexplored by most post-Lynchian researchers, who have
often concentrated on cognitive mapping and computer-based applications, which by their
nature presume a non-contradictory model of the city.2 This paper relates the image of the city
formulated by Lynch to the form of the contemporary city. It suggests that a revision of his thesis
will help us explore the fracture between modern and contemporary urban form and give urban
designers a useful conceptual tool.

1. Definition of terms: the image of the contemporary city

In The Image of the City (TIC) Kevin Lynch proposes a strong link between the physical form of
the city, its memory image, and the city as experienced by its inhabitants. In the context of todays
cultural nomadism and the current dispersion of approaches and methods for the study of urban
phenomena, Lynchs position offers three interesting points of departure:

- First, the study of urban form (physical) and its relationship to the mental image of the city
which is held by its citizens3 can be related to the idea of the city as a work of art. From Camillo
Sittes search for the visual quality of the singular urban episode to Aldo Rossis interest in the
relationship between collective memory and formal permanence, the city as a work of art has long
been a productive starting point to analyze urban form.4

- Second, this conception of the city as perceptual ground, as a final fact, allows urban form
to emerge as an autonomous field of research. This should not be taken as a claim that urban
form is in itself autonomous, but rather as an attempt to designate the study of urban form as a
specific field, not hierarchically subordinate to others.

- Third, the city as a work of art, in Lynchs theory, is implicitly realized and completed by the
citizen who elaborates its mental image. Thus the final fact of the city is conditioned by
personal imagination, perception, and memory, and the citizen is given an active role in its
definition.

These three premises have special critical value at the present moment, when the study and
definition of urban form is dominated by technical categories, tools, and macro models that are
seemingly disconnected from everyday ground-level experience; and when any mention of the
citizen is often looked upon with distrust as populist rhetoric. If Lynchs premises are greeted,
today, with a certain amount of incomprehension or suspicion, this skepticism might in itself be
helpfulserving either to uncover gaps in the arguments of Lynch and his contemporaries, or to
show us how much the reality of the contemporary city has changed since 1960.

Questions of urban form and urban image are related to the more complex question of the
definition of the contemporary city itself. Although the subject is beyond the possibilities of this
paper, a short examination is pertinent. The existence of a fracture in western urban development
around the late 1950s-early 1960s, a shift from the modern city to the contemporary city,

is frequently acknowledged. Despite a range of premises and purposes, most critics associate
the contemporary city with dispersion, fragmentation, disorder, ambiguity, uncertainty, and
emptiness.

One of the most relevant analyses of these categories has been offered by the Italian urban
planner Bernardo Secchi. According to Secchi, the definition of the contemporary city can only
be considered in dialectical relation to the modern city. Recent theories of city planning would
summarize this relationship by referring to two anguishes (using a "Tafurian" word): 5 First, the
anguish of congestion, of the continuous growth of the metropolis that has its origin in the 19th
century. Second, the anguish of dispersion, of the loss of definition of the city in contrast to the
countryside. Modern theories, which answer to the first anguish (need for sanitary conditions,
greenery, the fight for standards, sventramenti, garden cities, and, ultimately, the functionalist
city), are gradually replaced by contemporary theories which respond to the second.

Defining the context produced after such a turn is a difficult task. It is important to emphasize that
both situations overlap today: regulations, standards, and measures to improve urban health and
safety remain necessary in many developing and developed countries. The relationship between
the two anguishes is dialectic, not chronological. Both respond to a similar substrate: the almost
biblical fear of disorder, intricacy, disproportion, and fragmentation provoked by the experience
of the metropolis. This fear is not particular to the contemporary city, but the latter increases the
general sense of metropolitan disorder and disproportion by undermining what seemed to be the
last certainty: the definition of the city itself. If the very idea of the city as an entity is in danger of
disappearing, how can one speak of the image of a city?

2. Contemporary urban theories and Lynchs transitional position

Before we can position Lynchs theory of imageability in this context of decomposition of

certainties, we need to identify some of the most familiar contemporary theories about city form.

Confronted with the above-mentioned second anguish, reactions and interpretations range from
nostalgia to the rhetoric of reality:

- Some positions make a claim for order, definition, unity and clearness, which is identified
with the continuous, relatively dense, functionally complex and compact city of the 19th century
(cf. Tendenza byproducts and defenders of the Ensanche model, Kriers and Culot, French
advocates of the mixit, etc). These tend to reject specific categories associated with the
contemporary city, such as fragmentation, apparent disorder, or dispersion, which are seen
as the mere reflection of economical and social sickness, as simple improvisation, or as the
perversions of ingenuous modernism.

- Other positions accept fragmentation, apparent disorder, and uncertainty as conditions of

the contemporary city, but tend to define the city as the congested and functionally complex
metropolis of the early 20th century (cf. various Manhattan-centric theories from Koolhaas to
Tschumi), or go looking for complexity even earlier in history (Rowe).

- Other approaches simply accept the conditions of what they consider the real contemporary
city. These tend to confuse the description of a working reality, a reality integrated in a certain
logic (economical, social, cultural), with the Project of the city itself. Fragmentation, discontinuity,
dispersion, uncertainty and apparent chaos or disorder are a-critically accepted and elevated
to the status of an undeniable premise for the Project (cf. Robert Venturi and the more recent
rhetoric of OMA).

Within this where should Kevin Lynch be positioned? In TIC he argues that although the
metropolis is no longer a rare phenomenon, yet nowhere in the world is there a metropolitan area
with any strong visual character, any evident structure and the famous cities all suffer from the
same faceless sprawl at the periphery.6 Lynch is already confronting Secchis second anguish,
the need for a definition of the incipient contemporary city, but he does it with modern tools. His

techniques are based on decomposition and element combination, and assume an implicit search
for the universal and permanent conditions of human experience that is genuinely modern. This
is clear in his extensive use of the anthropological noble savage as a source of scientific truth,
with Boston and Jersey City as developed versions of Tikopia and the South Sea.7 In noting the
potentials of a weak image, and in advocating new tools and methods of research, Lynch seems
to acknowledge the limits of the modern project.

While Lynch, in TIC, describes an imageable landscape as something "visible, coherent, and
clear," dense, rigid, and vivid which can be put together either hierarchically or continuously,
as occasion demands, 8 he also acknowledges that ambiguity and open-endedness are
necessary qualities. Mental maps that are too strongly fixed in the imagination, too completely
defined by traditional associations and memories, can discourage new observations and
creative interactions.9 An urban image that is excessively clear and univalent can be
oppressive and counterproductive. Because the city is a non-specific artifact, its "form must
be somewhat noncommittal, plastic to the purposes and perceptions of its citizens."10 In two
later works, Managing the Sense of a Region (1976) and A Theory of Good City Form (1981),
Lynch carries this insight further, acknowledging the need for clarity and ambiguity, legibility
and "unfoldingness", structure and accident, coherence and plurality, stability and change. "A
settlement should permit an unfolding creation of meaning, that is, a simple and patent first
order structure which allows a more extensive ordering as it is more fully experienced, and
which encourages the construction of new meanings, through which the inhabitant makes the
world his own. It is not so clear how this quality of unfoldingness can be measured, or perhaps
even identified. How does one evaluate a place in these terms, or determine what degree of
unfoldingness is wanted? How can it be achieved for the great diversity of people who use a
modern city? Intuitively, it seems right and important, but it is difficult to specify as a workable
measure. Nevertheless, a city which invites ordering is surely better than an orderly city".11 Lynch
expresses his hope that these more obscure qualities of a livable city will be taken up in future
research. "[T]he visible organization of a settlement should not be closed and unitary. Diverse

clues should overlap and penetrate each other, to make a more intricate and redundant network.
Making change and plurality comprehensible may well be the most challenging application of
sensibility today."12

3. Reconsidering Lynchs idea of the urban image

Following Lynchs lead, we ask: how can qualities like ambiguity, instability, accident,
intricacy, and unfoldingness help to create a strong urban image? Our interest is not
only critical, but operative. A strong urban image is one that inhabitants share, that helps them
navigate and orient themselves, that helps them clarify their feelings about a place, and that
allows them to make sense of transformations over time. The expanded/modified idea of the
urban image that we are calling for should operate in such practical ways. Furthermore, this
expanded notion would ideally prove useful for designers and planners.
To explore this question, and the idea of the urban image in general, we propose looking
more closely, ideally scientifically, at the qualities and features that compose the urban image.
Construction of an urban image or mental map is a function of memory. When we construct
the image of a city in our imagination, what qualities and features do we remember and how
do we remember them? This line of investigation would benefit from extensive fieldwork in the
spirit of Kevin Lynch. Such research could also draw upon the knowledge of developmental
psychologists, cognitive scientists, and specialists in related fields.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980), one of the first psychologists to look at human cognitive development,
organizes memory acquisition in discrete developmental stages. Memory for schemes (that
which is generalizable in a system of actions or operations) antedates memory in the strict
sense, which Piaget also calls recognitions or recollections.13 Memory in the strict sense
and the memory image bear only on situations, processes or objects, which are unique
and recognized or recalled as such, in contrast to schemes, which are general (the scheme
of seriation or the concept of squareness, etc.). 14 By Piagets definition, recollection of a

scheme does not require any explicit recollection of, or mental association with, the personal
circumstances under which that scheme was committed to memory, while memories in the
strict sense and memory images are accompanied by a localization in the past, even if that
impression of having been experienced or perceived at some particular moment in the past is
false or erroneous. This distinction is immediately useful for our purposes: when we remember
a city, which of these two types of memory do we draw upon? If we employ Piagets distinction,
we could surmise that the urban image is made up of both types of memoryof schemes and
situations. We could speculate, further, that aspects of the urban image that have the qualities of
clarity and order are constructed from memories of schemes, while those that have qualities of
unfoldingness and ambiguity are built upon memories of personal events.15

This idea of two different, overlaid, and complementary memory-images of a place, one more
analytical and the other more narrative or associative, is widespread in literature on and about
the contemporary city. The historian David Frisby identifies Siegfried Kracauer as one of the first
sociologists to make this distinction: Kracauer distinguishes two types of spatial images that
are to be deciphered. The first is consciously formed and to be found in plans and guidebooks.
The second are fortuitous creationsconfigurations of buildings, streets and figures which the
individual confronts. An essential question, for our purposes, is how operative a fortuitous,
associative urban image could be. This is the same question we have raised above: the role
of ambiguity, instability, accident, intricacy, and unfoldingness in the creation of a strong urban
image.

4. A physiognomic approach

An image of the city synthesized from personal memories of situations and physical encounters
with the city we call physiognomic. "Physiognomy" is the notion of a correspondence between
visible physical traits and personality traits. In this context a "personality" is a type of structure
that affirms identity but allows for change, lacunae, and internal contradiction. Along these

lines, a "physiognomic" image of a city would be one that a) ascribes characteristic traits and
qualities to the urban organism; b) recognizes the emotional valence of particular places; and c)
accommodates the senses of contradiction, loss, and transformation over time.
The word has a history of use in this context. Frisby notes Otto Wagners claim from Die
Grossstadt: The citys physiognomy has the greatest influence on the image of the city, and
points out that a physiognomic understanding of the city is characteristic of Walter Benjamin. 16
The word is relevant, not only for its overtones of subjectivity and irrationality, but also because
it acknowledges the citizens ability to personalize his or her hometown and feel affection for
it. Reading their citys physiognomy, residents may identify with its "character development"
and orient themselves according to the dynamics of its change and growth. Part-to-whole
relationships are different than in a schematically constructed mental model. In a "physiognomic"
understanding of the city discontinuous fragments are traces of large-scale entities, just as
human gestures, actions, or omissions are taken to reveal underlying character traits. Internal
contradictions are possible and even valuable, since they represent points of special intensity.
From such a vantage point, blockages, discontinuities, propensities and traits can become
sources to revisit traditional concepts of order, landmark, structure, hierarchy, pattern, and
layering. As Lynch acknowledges in TIC, within a complex and obscure environment people
seize upon and elaborate [the urban] pattern by concentration on minor clues, as well as by
shifting their attention from physical appearance to other aspects.17 Familiar observers develop
landmark clusters out of most unpromising material, and depend upon an integrated set of signs,
of which each member may be too weak to register.18
To what degree do the citizens of a contemporary metropolis imagine their city as an entity, an
organism characterized by qualities and features distinct from its geographic and geometric
layout? A citizen would compose a mental map of such a city from feelings rather than from
objective facts and observations.

Although this hypothesis is broad, we imagine that field studies could test it in a strict sense. The
survey guidelines and questions proposed by Kevin Lynch in Growing Up in Cities are intended

to probe personal, emotional responses to the environment.19 Even in TIC Lynchs researchers
uncovered many subjective responses to the projects study areas. Jersey City, in particular,
elicited strong emotional reactions, albeit negative: Several Jersey City subjects, for example,
spoke with fear of the shape of the Tonnelle Avenue [Traffic] Circle and preferred not to direct
strangers though it, even when it lay on the most direct route to their destination.20 Judgments of
good and bad aside, the survey work described in TIC reveals that an urban black hole like the
Tonnelle Avenue Circle is a salient landmark, one that plays an important role in the overall urban
pattern despite (or rather because of) its lack of clarity.

Piaget and other psychologists have pointed out the essential role of the physical landscape of
objects and places in the development of human cognition, from infancy to the periods of middle
childhood and adolescence. As the child grows, the range of physical interaction and exploration
expands systematically and the city begins to play an essential role in personal development.
Carl Jung offers reminiscences,21 and David Sobel 22 and Edith Cobb 23 present research, to
support the idea that in middle childhood (7-13 years) the landscape beyond the home provides
an armature for the evolution of a childs sense of individuality, his or her construction of a private
me. In the next developmental phase, adolescence, the city becomes a stage for role-playing
and socialization.24 A physiognomic understanding of the city would ideally be a two-way street:
we personalize the contemporary city, by interpreting and shaping it, and it shapes us.

5. Examples: limited interventions

In sum, the image of the contemporary city is constructed not only from the presence or absence
of stable, unitary and holistic references, but also through the complementary influence of
personal memory, partial narratives, and detail. These other factors are stressed in the work
and writings of certain designers and theorists like Carsten Juel-Christiansen, Manuel de SolMorales, Roberto Collov, Bernardo Secchi, and John Hejduk.

In Monument and Niche Danish architect Carsten Juel-Christiansen argues that the new city
is the city in the process of becoming. A new urban totality cannot take as its starting point the
integrated forms of the past; it must be developed by way of the disintegrated forms surrounding
us those we do not yet fully understand.25 Juel-Christiansens desire to reconsider traditional
aesthetic values and open a path for a new knowledge of physical form leads him to the work of
Robert Smithson, mentioning his call for attention to the smooth surface that does not conceal
any depth, towards the banal, the empty, the cool, blank after blank; in other words, [towards] that
infinitesimal condition known as entropy.

A similar avoidance of the great narratives and categories of the past and the substitution of
minor adjustments and realistic small stories can be found in some of the most interesting works
of Manuel de Sol-Morales and Roberto Collov.26 Talking about urban peripheries, SolMorales has recognized that the traditional sense of place has disappeared in the urban areas
where discontinuity of built forms prevails; but where empty spaces dominate theres a different
feeling of the characteristic place, based on the expectative sense of voids and the indifference
of constructions.27 The protagonism given to emptiness, to the weakness of links between built
forms, to the potential interest of distance and dispersion, to the lack of difference and repetition
have become central arguments in Sol-Morales research on the contemporary city.

Bernardo Secchi has also insisted on the transitional condition of the contemporary city
mentioned by Juel-Christiansen, on its potential for change and openness towards alternative
definitions. He has pointed out the crucial importance of the exact distance and empty space
as mediators between dispersed urban fragments, often converging with some of Sol-Morales
concepts. From points like these Secchi proposes a horizon of sense for an unavoidably
dispersed, fragmentary and heterogeneous city.28

One of the most relevant and frequently overlooked contributions to the exploration of
contemporary urban form was made by the New York architect John Hejduk. Design techniques

used by Hejduk suggest, always implicitly, the possibility to operate within the weakness of the
contemporary citys formal structure, with categories and materials such as empty and residual
spaces, openness, dispersion, dislocations, limits, breaks, etc. In projects like Berlin Victims or
Bovisa the weight of detail, personal memory, and narrative is presented as a concrete field of
investigation that stands in contrast to a more complex, apparently obscure environment.

These exampleswhich represent, we believe, some of the most important thinking about
urban design todayshow how the unity and permanence of a collective image in the traditional
sense, linked to the great narratives of the past, has dissolved into a multiplicity of individual
and small stories which operate with new materials: heterogeneity and detail, ambiguity and
voids, fragmentation, contrast and disruption. These architects and theorists propose limited
operationsinterventions that enhance the multiplicity of the contemporary city and build a
specific formal language, an alternative to either the projection of total order or the a-critical
justification of chaos.

6. Concluding thoughts: implications for Chinas urban development

These examples are fragmentary evidence of a new way to approach urban designone that
accepts the character of the contemporary city, and, by understanding it, offers the possibility
of making it a more livable place. If it is possible to expand them from strategies for limited
intervention into a more general approach to urban design, no place will benefit more than China.

The process of Chinas urban development, unparalleled in scale and speed, is widely known
and needs only be referenced here. In the second half of the 1980s rural, peri-urban China
began to be rapidly industrialized and developed, in a manner that exemplifies the contemporary
ad hoc urban landscape described above.29 Current development is also being channeled into
planned, large-scale, mixed-use developments, new satellite cities adjacent to existing cities.

The urban image of these new cities is highly schematic. Many urban plans share particular
features: a central ceremonial north-south axis, a hierarchical road network, functional zones, a
skyline shaped by height restrictions, and centerpiece elements. Within this clearly delineated,
schematic large-scale framework, the layout of the superblock and the individual building cluster
is more ad hoc.

Since this urban expansion represents a never-to-be- repeated opportunity for China, it is
relevant to ask how carefully the spatial quality and livability of these new cities is being
studied. Do such schematic plans provide enough complexity and idiosyncrasy to make the city
identifiable in a physiognomic way? Are the layout of buildings and superblocks differentiated
enough to stimulate civic pride and cognitive development?

The search for a livable, enriching urban form commensurate with the contemporary city includes
many avenues for research and speculation: the investigation of a strong physiognomic urban
image is only one. What is the relationship between the schematic image and an affective
image? Is a schematic image always necessary as a conceptual armature, as Lynch proposed?
Is it possible to invent new types of schemes, new frameworks and armatures for perception/
understanding? We hope that other planners and urban designers are developing the questions
and ideas outlined provisionally in this paper.

Notes

Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City (MIT Press, Cambridge), 91.

ianin, P. (2007) "On Lynch's and Post-Lynchians Theories," Facta Universitatis Series:

Architecture and Civil Engineering, Vol. 5 No. 1, 61-69. (http://facta.junis.ni.ac.yu/aace/

aace200701/aace200701-06.pdf)
3

Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City, 2.

Rossi, A. [1966] (2004) Larchitettura della citt (CittStudi Edizioni, Torino) p.25.

Secchi, B. (2005) La citt del XX secolo (Gius. Laterza e Figli, Roma-Bari), 13.

Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City, 94.

Ibid, 123-139.

Ibid, 90.

Ibid, 139.

10

Ibid, 91, see also 111.

11

Lynch, K. (1981) A Theory of Good City Form (MIT Press, Cambridge MA), 144.

12

Ibid, 145.

13

Piaget, J. [1968] The Problem of Memory and Its Place in Cognitive Functions in Campbell,

S. (ed.) (1977) Piaget Sampler: An Introduction to Jean Piaget through His Own Words (Jason
Aronson NY, New York), 93.
14

Ibid, 93.

15

Piaget identifies other types of memory as well, including a third form of memory related to the

acceleration of acquisition in learning. Ibid, 93 (footnote).

16

Frisby, D., The Metropolis as Text: Otto Wagner and Viennas Second Renaissance, in

Leach, N. (ed.) (2002) The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern
Metropolis (Routledge, NY), 26, 18.
17

Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City, 14.

18

Ibid, 102.

19

Lynch, K. (ed.) (1977) Growing Up in Cities: Studies of the Spatial Environment of Adolescence

in Cracow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Salta, Toluca, and Warszawa (MIT Press, Cambridge MA),
89-93.
22

Sobel, D. (1993) Childrens Special Places: Exploring the role of Forts, Dens, and Bush

Houses in Middle Childhood (Zephyr Press, Tucson AZ).

26

For Collov see Sol-Morales, M. (1989) Another Modern Tradition: From the Break of 1930 to

the Modern Urban Project in Lotus 64, 13.

27

Sol-Morales, M. (1995) Territorios sin modelo, in Il centro altrove: periferia e nuove centralit

nelle aree metropolitane (Electa, Milano).

29

Naughton, B. (1995) Cities in the Chinese Economic System in D. Davis, R. Kraus, B.

Naughton, E. Perry (eds.) Urban Spaces in Contemporary China (Press Syndicate of the
University of Cambridge, New York), 81.