Image of the city

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City is a wayfinding classic. He interviewed and observed people in three very different cities (Los Angeles, Boston and Jersey City), identifying five kinds of feature that contribute to their mental maps:

• 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 (or other environment) distinguished by some identity or character;
• nodes, focal points, intersections or loci; and
• landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as reference points.

Wayshowing projects should recognise and build on these features to help people navigate. And the environment can be altered to create more navigable places – for example, districts can be given names or landmarks created.

A key concept in Lynch’s work is imageability – a quality of a place that makes it distinctive and memorable:

...where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply and intensely to the senses. (page 10)

There are many parallels between physical and document environments, and imageability is a useful concept to apply to both.

Kevin Lynch (1960). The Image of the City. The MIT Press.