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This paper presents a pedagogy of anachronism where learning occurs through a misfit between theory and practice. It was developed and tested in a class taught from 2016 to 2019, where students repeated Kevin Lynch's original 1960 experiment on cognitive mapping in a location much smaller in scale and with a very different social composition from the cities that Lynch analyzed. The deliberate misfit transformed a method designed to understand user perception into the very problem itself, provoking students to ask important epistemological questions and recognize the situatedness of theory. A pedagogy of anachronism resists the uncritical instrumentalization of canonical ideas and trains students to think deeply about the normative and epistemological basis of design/planning practice. The paper ends by suggesting different types of misfits that can extend this pedagogy for other learning objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orchestrating façades and fenestration has become a much elevated art in contemporary California. Highly articulating the way a building faces onto the street is an expertise of Oakland‐based architect Thom Faulders. Blaine Brownell, architect, educator and researcher in emergent materials, examines Faulders Studio's recent oeuvre and its audacious and attractive material expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposal of Cognition and the Built Environment (MØYSTAD, 2017) is that architecture is a basic mode of human cognition. The production as well as the use of our environment is a cognitive process in and of itself. Building human environment relates to and is informed by the prior built environment. One of Christopher Alexander’s observations (1987) was that “building cities” actually means changing cities. Project by project. This insight carries implications for how we understand architecture, for how we understand the human brain and for how they interact. This paper will outline (1) the interaction between some spatial and morphological properties of the built environment on one hand, and (2) some of the recently discovered properties of the brain on the other, which seem to mirror similar properties of the external environment. Based on these two sets of properties I will then (3) make a brief discussion of some theories that seem to suggest an outline, not complete but still useful, of the cognitive relationship between (1) and (2).

The notion of 'smart cities', with their ubiquitous linked sharing of data and observation, can be both problematic and simultaneously utopian. Tridib Banerjee, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC) where he previously held the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning, explores the recent adoption of the concept, particularly in the Global South. Notably, Le Corbusier's modernist city of Chandigarh in India has just been named a smart city. What will this mean for law and order, culture, and urban vitality for its inhabitants in coming years? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Kevin Lynch's Image of the City is central to film studies, where cognitive mapping is often used to position screen depictions of cities in terms of genre affiliation, urban development, and subject formation. However, Lynch's model affirms that to image the city is to possess it, and that representation is an activity undertaken by human observers of a place rather than integral to places themselves. It is, in the end, a model fully aligned with—and one that naturalizes—the capitalist (re)development of the city and the role that commercial cinema plays in this process. The city symphony is closely associated with Lynchian mapping, but I argue such films articulate an alternative to it, one in keeping with Jameson's model of the location and coming to consciousness of the subject within ideology. City symphonies depict a day in the life of an urban environment, combining unities of time, space, and theme with rapid and complex montage. I show how Seeing the World pt 1: A Trip to New York (Burckhardt, 1937) uses a doubled structure to insist on New York as a place constructed (rather than perceived) by the images and representational strategies of its planners, inhabitants, visitors, and visual cultures, including cinema. By invoking and then mocking established itineraries through the city while pointing to the constructed nature of these itineraries as well as the city itself, Burckhardt's film performs a new kind of cognitive mapping, one that dispenses with the image of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chaos theory is the motive force behind a wider cultural and artistic shift, not predicated by any overarching grand unifying narratives. Professor of Media and History at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, Andrew Culp examines the contemporary destabilising condition of chaos and our decades‐long pact with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Em um contexto de cidades contemporâneas, com a crise da utilização do espaço público urbano, a praça continua possuindo um importante papel na identidade social e econômica de nossas cidades, sendo um elemento urbano que merece atenção, e adequações diante desse novo panorama. Este trabalho se apresenta com o objetivo de propor um estudo e análise da vitalidade desses espaços públicos, demonstrando assim suas potencialidades e fragilidades de maneira parametrizada. Assim, uma pesquisa bibliográfica exploratória foi levantada, desenvolvendo uma síntese de teóricos do urbanismo que falam sobre a vitalidade dos espaços públicos. Essa síntese foi aplicada a uma amostra de praças do município de Artur Nogueira, resultando numa avaliação de suas fragilidades e potencialidades demonstrando assim efetividade em sua análise.

Copyright of Arq.urb is the property of Arq.urb and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Due to the global market competition, urban transformations affected most cities which wanted to attract more economic and social resources. The level of urban perceptions and their representations as mental images occupy a more important role in obtaining a successful city. In this way it is created a space that is interesting and enjoyable, being also exposed to all the changes that are taking place due to the advances in architecture and infrastructure. This paper will focus on urban image assessment at the cognitive level using an adaptation of the Lynch method, by identifying the five elements in the urban space: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, leading to imageability and legibility characterization of the image. In this realm, the case study of Craiova city serves as a model of urban evaluation and will be explored. Interviews were conducted with residents of the city to quantify their perception about the urban image elements. The obtained results of the urban image perception are mapped and will be analyzed with aerial images in order to determine the type of urban fabric that is dominant in the city, the fine grain or the coarse grain layout. The results show that the five elements of the Lynch image of the city can be easily mapped and assessed and that a mixture between fine grain and coarse grain is the best solution identified for the city. The paper concludes by outlining the importance of urban image along with other geographical studies in the sustainable planning and development of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landscapes should be seen not as constituencies of things, animate or inanimate, but as continuous fields, visceral milieux of intersecting social situations, shifting topologies and personal mythologies. The 'drawing' of an individual's cognitive map is the residual sediment of their journey through these ambiences. Landscape architect and theorist James Corner explains his conception of landscape and its synthesis with mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the methodology of in-depth interviews, this article explores how blind and visually impaired white cane users conceptualize urban space. The study presented in the article showed that the city is conceived, even without visual mechanisms, through landmarks, paths, edges, nodes and districts, i.e. the types of elements in the city image defined by Kevin Lynch. However, spatial representations of blind people are produced on the basis of spatial experience that is proximal and not distal, as was the case with Lynch. The article discusses elements of the non-visual image of the city that are constructed through direct touch and white cane use. Drawing on Lefebvre's stance on the interconnectedness of the body, practice and representational spaces, the author argues that the white cane is not just an aid that facilitates the mobility of blind people and helps to navigate in the urban space. As part of the 'practico-sensory totality' of the body, it also influences the ways in which the city is experienced and conceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sheer quantity of data about how people interact – spatially and digitally – and travel through cities requires a range of computerised geospatial visualisation tools. Shan He is a coder, designer, architect and data artist. She is also founder of Uber's data visualisation team and inventor of Uber's kepler.gl software. Here she draws our attention to the varying ways such data can be presented to facilitate quick and easy human understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In The Image of the City Lynch describes how individuals perceive and recall features in urban spaces. The most distinctive elements in the urban landscape - categorised in paths, nodes, edges, districts and landmarks - give shape to individuals' mental representation of the city. Lynch's approach has stimulated research into spatial cognition, urban design and artificial intelligence, and it still represents an essential pillar in the analysis of urban dynamics. Nevertheless, an explicit link between The Image of the City and GIScience has not been completely explored yet. In this paper, a computational approach to The Image of the City is proposed. Different perspectives in spatial cognition and GIS research are integrated to obtain a complete Image of the City, in which the most salient elements are shared by a large part of citizens. Nodes, paths and districts were identified through network science techniques. Methods drawn from the information approach to The Image of the City are used to detect landmarks, integrating the complexity of points of reference in their visual, structural and semantic components, as conceptualised by Lynch and successive research. The methods were applied to the central area of Boston and built using freely available spatial datasets. Results were compared to Lynch's maps to evaluate the methodology: besides a considerable discrepancy with regard to landmarks, a good correspondence for paths, nodes, edges and districts was found. Highlights • An approach to computationally extract Lynch's Image of the city is advanced. • For Boston, our computational Image matches well with Lynch's Image. • The most satisfactory outcomes were obtained for districts and paths. • Out of the five elements, landmarks were found most challenging to extract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“The Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch gave rise to the environmental approach, which expressed demographic values. In the environmental approach, architecture of a separate structure merged with the city, losing its aristocraticism and transcendental isolation. The word “lynching” is used in wordplay and means a democratic trial of the aristocratic architecture. The environmental approach results in the death of architecture.

Over the course of the twentieth century, American planners deployed an array of visual techniques to analyze, represent, and promote the American city. Early planners looked to maps of poverty, disease, ethnicity, war, and land use, as well as archaeology, world’s fairs, and the photography of social reform. They became adept at combining drawings, diagrams, and charts to map information and make visual arguments for urban transformation. These techniques were tools of cultural critique and anticipation that shaped American understandings and expectations of cities. This essay surveys the imagery of urban planning as a prompt to historians to pay close attention to the visual culture of urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Cognitive-environmental urban planning and design began with Kevin Lynch's (1960) The Image of the City. Scientific and technological developments, including discoveries in brain physiology and cognitive psychology, the psychosocial determinants of health, and the spread of navigation and information technologies, have increased the pertinence of cognitive-environmental research to planning. Re-engagement in contemporary debates about brain function and cities can help address long-standing humanistic challenges in planning as well as new challenges arising from emergent urban technologies. We systematically review scholarly work that cites Lynch or invokes cognitive mapping and synthesize cognitive-environmental concepts and methods from fields outside planning. We propose how planning and design practice can align with a cognitive-environmental framework. Cognitive-environmental research engages issues such as the need for equitable access, codes and rules that create good urban form, planning data and information systems, and participatory planning imbued with local knowledge and civic engagement. Urban planners and designers can use cognitive-environmental approaches to work toward more just and humane cities, even as they are transformed by new technologies. Lynch's ideas, particularly his insistence on an engaged approach to learning the city, remain highly relevant. Takeaway for practice: Insights from cognitive-environmental research identify specific priorities and methods for planning, including participant-generated urban information, community engagement and learning, revisions to urban codes and regulations related to neurological differences in the experience of the built environment and technological changes in wayfinding and navigation, and health-focused urban planning initiatives, particularly related to mental wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Here we examine the legacy of Kevin Lynch in Los Angeles (CA). We begin by describing his contributions to planning at the city and regional scales. We then focus on Los Angeles's central core because of its prominence as a case study in The Image of the City. Specifically, we ask how Lynch's ideas influenced planning efforts for Los Angeles's downtown. We use a mixed-methods approach comprising expert interviews and analysis of archival documents, news stories, oral histories, plans, and reports. Although it is impossible to attribute the evolving physical form of Los Angeles to Lynch, we can see the effects of his thinking in the empowerment of local citizens and in the sensibility of planners and urban designers. Lynch's contribution occurred at both the city and district scales, first as a consultant for the general plan and the visual studies that led to its creation, and second by inspiring the work of planners tasked with remaking Los Angeles's downtown. Takeaway for practice: A principal aim of Lynch's work was for planners to engage with citizens and to understand how the public experiences the city. Planners and urban designers in Los Angeles were inspired by his ideas and were able to use at least some of his vision to navigate the thicket of the planning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Kevin Lynch was a distinguished city designer and humanist whose thoughts, theories, and practices have had a far-reaching influence on planning across the world, including in China. Here we identify the impact of Lynch's ideas on China's urban development, design practices, and ideas about urban design education during the various stages of China's urbanization. Our literature review, supplemented by interviews with Lynch's former colleagues in China, reveals the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of his contributions. His thoughts on city construction, rooted in humanism and psychological analysis of how people perceive cities, have had a formative influence in the past 3 decades in the evolution of urban design methods and have helped accelerate the new profession of urban design and new systems of regulating urban development. Takeaway for practice: It is useful to understand how Lynch's ideas, largely the product of American thought, have had influence in China as this country makes a transition to a more pluralistic and locally driven form of planning. China's vast scale and tempo of urban development and planning provide an important example of the impact Lynch made. We can also learn much from the Chinese experience in large-scale urbanization that has relevance for other rapidly growing cities in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many capitals, the central public square is the place where people go en masse when they wish to voice their discontent. The squares used for such collective actions are diverse. Each square has its unique combination of symbols and history; they are used in different ways by the public; and they often have distinct physical characteristics. Yet, in social sciences, when determining what makes collective actions successful, space is often overlooked. In this article, I present an approach for analysing public space in relation to mass protests. I then apply this approach to the Belarusian capital Minsk, where virtually no protests have been successful during the post-Soviet period. In what ways are mass protests in Minsk affected by the perceived (symbolic), social and physical elements of the city’s public spaces? I examine the centre of Minsk in general, and analyse two central squares in particular. The article is based mainly on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with protesters, observers and opposition leaders; research literature; and on my own fieldwork and experiences from living in Minsk. I conclude that space is contributing to the difficulties facing the Belarusian opposition in several ways. 1) The perceived elements of Minsk and the two main squares do not have a preferable symbolic value to the opposition. 2) The social elements of the city show that the political centre is avoided by the public, thus making protests less noticeable. 3) This latter point is important, given that the physical elements of the squares makes policing particularly easy and swift. The physical elements of the squares also limit the protesters’ communication, movement and flexibility. I argue that a spatial perspective should be included in research on collective actions.

In many capitals, the central public square is the place where people go en masse when they wish to voice their discontent. The squares used for such collective actions are diverse. Each square has its unique combination of symbols and history; they are used in different ways by the public; and they often have distinct physical characteristics. Yet, in social sciences, when determining what makes collective actions successful, space is often overlooked. In this article, I present an approach for analysing public space in relation to mass protests. I then apply this approach to the Belarusian capital Minsk, where virtually no protests have been successful during the post-Soviet period. In what ways are mass protests in Minsk affected by the perceived (symbolic), social and physical elements of the city's public spaces? I examine the centre of Minsk in general and analyse two central squares in particular. The article is based mainly on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with protesters, observers and opposition leaders; research literature; and on my own fieldwork and experiences from living in Minsk. I conclude that space is contributing to the difficulties facing the Belarusian opposition in several ways. 1) The perceived elements of Minsk and the two main squares do not have a preferable symbolic value to the opposition. 2) The social elements of the city show that the political centre is avoided by the public, thus making protests less noticeable. 3) This latter point is important, given that the physical elements of the squares makes policing particularly easy and swift. The physical elements of the squares also limit the protester's communication, movement and flexibility. I argue that a spatial perspective should be included in research on collective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the south-eastern part of the Katanga Province (Democratic Republic of the Congo), high concentrations of copper and cobalt are found in the soils of the well-known "Copper Belt". Due to dominant south-eastern winds, the metallurgic industry in Lubumbashi has been the source of spatially concentrated atmospheric deposits of nonferrous metal particles and associated substances in a cone-shaped zone, situated north-west of the metal processing site. The existence of this zone has been evidenced using two different techniques: firstly, by means of landscape metric comparisons of the vegetation and bare soil patterns in two study areas, one inside the pollution cone and one outside; secondly, by means of the city perception theory developed by Kevin Lynch. Higher fragmentation and lower vegetation presence were observed inside the pollution cone, reflecting the negative impact of the atmospheric deposits. Those differences were higher for sites closer to the emission source. Lynch's approach outlined the negative impact of diverse industrial plants on the perception of the local population. Six pollution districts and several contaminated paths, limits, nodes and polluting landmarks were identified. Citizens even recognize them as part of the collective image of the city.

It may seem that rural villages - the basic units of settlement for millennia since humankind first began to tend the land - have been thoroughly usurped by the massive rise in urbanisation over the last centuries. But is this really the case? Tracing the emergence of urbanism and its perception from Aristotle to today, lecturer and writer David Grahame Shane reveals the role that the village model continues to play in both the developing and the developed world - including within the much discussed phenomenon of megacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What has our sense of the acceleration of time got to bear on our experience of cities? How might it be consciously countered by architects 'finding time' through 'thoughtful design and measured observation'. 'A self-declared 'cultural polymath', Tim Makower is the founder of Makower Architects. A partner at Allies and Morrison for many years, he has significant experience in leading large-scale projects, ranging from the King's Cross Masterplan in London to the Old Doha Regeneration Framework, which he draws on here and in his book Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale (Wiley, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including architectural design of historic buildings, long-lasting buildings, and urban public spaces.

An understanding of spatial cognition or knowledge is key to architecture.Here Daniel R Montello, Professor of Geography and Affiliated Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), explains the significance of cognitive structures and processes for understanding, perceiving, imagining and designing architectural space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented discussing several articles in the issue discussing topics related to computational architecture and architectural design methods.

Is code entirely incompatible with an intuitive exploration of space? Leon van Schaik, Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) at RMIT University thinks so. He contests the usefulness of the data-crunching capacity of the computer to truthfully model human flows. Moreover, he flags up a concern that an overemphasis on computation could lead architects to neglect an awareness of the place of their own spatial histories in the world, causing them to impose their own subconscious preferences on their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the architects featured in this issue, who are known for their sensitivity to place, studied abroad and continue to practise and teach internationally. Jayne Merkel explores how a broadening of personal experience through travel has helped hone their affinity to the particular and the local over the standard and the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The iconic is a quality more often ascribed to objects than to fields; in an urban context the term is used to describe buildings, which act as landmarks and, by assisting orientation and navigation in the city, guide its flows. Such landmarks are identified with, and used as symbolic representations of the city to both visitors and inhabitants. The iconic potential of the field has not yet been exploited to the same degree. However, conceptual representations, such as the psychogeographic maps of Paris conceived by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn in 1956-7, as well as the quotidian presence of the London Tube map, its design originally proposed by Harry Beck in 1931, have achieved iconic status. Both maps attempt to visualize, interpret and utilize urban connectivity and flows. This paper seeks to broaden and deepen an understanding of the iconic qualities of the London Tube map and its operation as a navigational aid as well as conceptual device framing public perception of London. We will situate the London Tube map in the context of it's own history of inception and interpretation, of Debord and Jorn's maps of Paris, Kevin Lynch's research on the mental image of cities, and a series of interviews conducted in London by the authors, asking participants to describe and sketch their mental image of above-ground and underground London. On the basis of these critical readings, we argue that the London Tube map operates on its users as an iconic, but also as a charged field. It is charged by the overt and implied agenda of its authors, by the history of its evolution and its adaptation to a growing network carried out by multiple authors in a negotiated and sometimes public process, and by the memories and spatial practices it is associated with by its users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychogeography emerged entirely independently in Paris in the 1950s and in the Boston area in the 1950s and 1960s, in the wildly disparate practices of the Situationists and of planners and geographers. At the same time that Guy Debord was creating psychogeography in Paris, MIT planning professor Kevin Lynch was laying the groundwork for what at Clark University in the late 1960s became psychogeography for David Stea and his students. Both practices were equally committed to the development of an objective description of the relationship between the urban environment and the psychic life of individuals, both depended heavily on walking as a method, and both produced maps that have become iconic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kevin Lynch's magnum opus A Theory of Good City Form (1981) is well known as a normative theory of the city. The intersection of human purposeful activity and city form is a principal feature. However, little attention is given in the literature to a small appendix in the book, A Theory of Good City Form (1981), in which the theories that explain the form and function of the city are classified and reviewed. The brief review insightfully reveals embedded values that are implicit in urban theory. We use a similar classification to review the progress of urban theory since Lynch's brief assessment noting the city's complexity can only be effectively explained through multiple historical and theoretical, value-laden perspectives. The values are the bridge between human purpose and city form, between substance - the city - and procedure - decision making about the city, that is between urban theory and planning (procedural) theory. Finally, the review is concluded with the implications of urban theory, informed by A Theory of Good City Form, for urban morphological design theory as well as planning (procedural) theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite many dramatic changes in last fifty years, urban designers still try to measure "city imaging" with same criteria as was described by Kevin Lynch in his landmark volumes. However, city imaging increasingly is supplemented by exposure to recent progresses in communication infrastructures. It seems that once again we need to re-ontologize concepts of city imaging for twenty-first century as his ideas were theoretically created when digital evolution was not such widely affected our world. This paper aims to identify effects of these new digital actors on city imaging. Consequently, we propose that with emergence of Softerial Era and infospherization of almost everything, another kind of landmarks have been evolved (linkmarks) which are highly referenced to a self and relative to his destination and necessities in realtime. We believe they can improve not only our "sense of place" but also "sense of time" as an inevitable necessity in our current life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]