THE IMAGE OF THE CITY

As a student of Landscape i thought it would be very useful and important to know more about the main principles when designing cities, especially in an urban scale. Therefore i decided to read a book which is called " The Image of the City" by Kevin Lynch.
The main focus of discussion in this book is about importance of  clarity or "legibility" of the cityscape.
In the course of examining the visual form of the city the book looks at three American cities: Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles.
Varies methods of analysis were carried out including: a systematic field reconnaissance, mapping the presence of varies elements, their visibility, their image strength or weakness,their connections and disconnections.

One of the other method of  research was a lengthy interview held with a small sample of city residents in which there were requests for descriptions, locations, sketches and for the performance of imaginary trips.
Analysed descriptions about  current cityscape conditon of those three american cities gave me an immense amount of clues how to be able to look at my own proposals from a critical point of view and justify my ideas 

more fairly.


The following images illustrating the summary of analysis of three american cities and they can serve as a typical example of how to approach changes in city design, based on current problematic issues.

outline map of the Boston Peninsula

The visual form of Boston as seen in the field

Problems of the Boston image

The visual form of Jersey City as seen in the field

The visual form of Los Angeles as seen in the field.

From the drawings above I understood  that the basic step of redesigning or bringing some positive changes to the city should be based on the existing advantages and disadvantages of the city which can be seen from site analysis. As it was written in the book, the contents of the city images are classified into five types of elements. These are : Paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. I have also learned in more detail about those elements and the significance of their impact to form a beautiful, legible and communicable model of environment.
From the total content of the book and its drawings I conclude that the first absolutely essential and fair step towards the right, compelling and unambiguous solution for any kind of proposal  ( especially in an urban scale ) would be site analysis or in other words " an objective judgement based on the immediate appearance of elements in the field".