The Image of the City

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

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1960

Link

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262120043/the-image-of-the-city/

Cited from

cognitive_science

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Navigation
  • Hippocampal navigation research, which distinguished landmarks, paths, and survey knowledge as distinct representational forms, transferred directly into information architecture as the breadcrumb, the site map, and the "you are here" marker.

    This sourceIdentifies paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks as the elements of environmental wayfinding — the representational forms (landmark, route, survey knowledge) later imported into information architecture as breadcrumbs, site maps, and 'you are here' markers.

Mechanisms

• Architectural Arrangement
  • It operationalises Kevin Lynch's legibility — the ease with which the parts of an environment can be recognised

    This sourceDefines legibility as the ease with which environmental parts can be recognized and organized into a coherent mental image.

• Breadcrumb and Landmark Trail
  • Landmark clutter is the common one: promote too many things to landmark status and each loses the distinctiveness that made it navigable — legibility comes from a few strong anchors, in the sense Kevin Lynch gave the term.
• Landmark-Based Wayfinding
  • It is, in fact, how most human city navigation actually works — Kevin Lynch's study of how people picture cities found landmarks to be one of the five basic elements by which a space becomes legible.

    This sourceIdentifies landmarks as one of five elements through which people structure a legible city image.

• Signage and Wayfinding System
  • The environment itself, read in sequence, does the guiding — a visitor who cannot read the local language still follows the color and the arrows to the right door, drawing on the campus's legibility as a set of paths, nodes, and landmarks.

    This sourceA wayfinding system succeeds by reinforcing those elements at the nodes where choices are made.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262620017/the-image-of-the-city/ ×2

Registry ID ref:48c963b7cf43 · see in the full table