Kevin A. Lynch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- See Kevin Lynch for other people with this name.
Kevin Andrew Lynch (1918 Chicago, Illinois - 1984 Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts), American urban planner and author.
Lynch studied at Yale University, Taliesin (studio) under Frank Lloyd Wright, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and received a Bachelor's degree in city planning from MIT in 1947. He began lecturing at MIT the following year, became an assistant professor in 1949, was tenured as an associate professor in 1955, and became a full professor in 1963.
Lynch provided seminal contributions to the field of city planning through empirical research on how individuals perceive and navigate the urban landscape. His books explore the presence of time and history in the urban environment, how urban environments affect children, and how to harness human perception of the physical form of cities and regions as the conceptual basis for good urban design.
Lynch's most famous work, "The Image of the City" published in 1960, is the result of a five-year study on how users perceive and organize spatial information as they navigate through cities. Using three disparate cities as examples (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles), Lynch reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and predictable ways, forming mental maps with five elements:
- paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel;
- edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
- districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some identity or character;
- nodes, focal points, intersections or loci; and
- landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as reference points
In the same book Lynch also coined the words "imageability" and "wayfinding". "Image of the City" has had important and durable influence in the fields of urban planning and environmental psychology.
