Visual order and the image of the city (part 2)

(cc) David Gane on flickrYesterday, I introduced Kevin Lynch’s five elements that make up The Image of the City in our minds:

1. Paths
2. Edges
3. Nodes
4. Landmarks
5. Districts

Last week, I asked whether architects hate cities. In her chapter on visual order, she sets up streets as our primary setting for viewing the city, and that it is problematic that they announce both activity and endlessness - especially under the tyranny of the grid found as an historical artifact of many cities.

Lynch backs Jacobs, suggesting that paths are the primary element in most of our mental maps because they are the setting in which we view all the other elements:

• Edges cut off paths
• Paths lead to nodes; sometimes, the intersection of two paths creates a node
• We see landmarks from paths; we orient ourselves along paths by them
• We travel through districts on paths

Paths are the key. The “problem” of visual order isn’t the activity on the street, it’s the false perception of an endless expanse of this activity. The architects that might hate the city have identify the problem incorrectly. Jacobs has some suggestions about how to use the other elements to solve this design problem - a much easier fix than:

• removing activity from the street
• ordering it in separate districts, or
• spacing it out so much that it makes sense at the speeds of an automobile

I’ll share those tomorrow.