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1.7 Reseach Questions
3.1 Literature Review IMAGE OF THE CITY
- Kevin A. Lynch
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INTRODUCTION
The Image of the Environment, Three Cities, The City and Its Elements, City Form, and A New Scale are the five sections of Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City. Legibility, Building the Image, Structure and Identity, and Imageability are discussed in “The Image of the Environment,” a book about city planning philosophy. “Three Cities” examines the different the urban forms of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, identifying similar elements. Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks are five key elements of the city defined in “The City and Its Elements.” Following that, a study of Element Interconnections, The Shifting Image, and Image Quality in a City brings the key elements together. “City Form” covers Path Design, Other Elements Design, Form Qualities, The Sense of the Whole, Metropolitan Forms, and the Design Process. In a clear and full but brief part, “A New Scale” discusses the formation of a clear and complete picture of the whole city.
THE IMAGE OF THE ENVIRONMENT
Legibility - The visual quality of an American city is measured here by analyzing the residents’ mental image of that city. The focus is on visual quality, or the cityscape’s visible clarity or “legibility.” Although legibility is not the only important property of a beautiful city, it is important when considering settings at the urban scale in terms of size, time, and variety. Building the image - Images of the environment are the outcome of a two-way interaction between the observer and his surroundings. The experience of a given reality might change considerably between observers. The city picture may be divided into formal categories of image elements such as path, landmark, edge, node, and district. Structure and Identity - The author discusses how an environmental picture may be broken down into three parts: identity, structure, and meaning. The idea of Imageability is then given, which is described as the characteristic in a physical item that provides the observer a strong image. CITY FORM
The author discusses the possibility of transforming a new metropolitan environment into an imaginative scene that is visible, logical, and clear. “The city resident demands a new mentality and a physical reshaping of his area into shapes that engage the eye, that arrange themselves from level to level in time and space, and that may serve as symbols for urban life,” the author writes. The shape must be somewhat flexible, adaptable to the needs and views of its members.” The sense of the whole - Paths would connect the different nodes as a whole. The nodes would connect and differentiate the pathways, while the edges would differentiate the districts and the borders would differentiate their centres. The entire composition of these components would combine to form a strong and clear picture,and sustain it over areas of metropolitan scale. Metropolitan - The growing scale of our urban regions, as well as the speed with which we cover them, creates plenty of new perception issues. THREE CITIES
Figure 45: City and it’s 5 elements. THE CITY IMAGE AND IT’S ELEMENTS
A public picture of any particular city, it says, is the merging of many individual images. The contents of the analysed city pictures are divided into five categories: routes, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. These elements have all been specified. Element interrelations - These elements are simply the component for a city-scale environmental picture. To create a pleasing shape, they must be patterned together. These pairings may work together to boost each other’s power, or they may clash and destroy each other. The shifting image - Instead of a single full image for the whole world, there might be many sets of images that are more or less overlapping and interconnected. Images might differ not just in terms of the size of the area included, but also in terms of viewpoint, time of day, and season. Image quality - The study of various individual pictures showed a number of additional differences. For example, viewers’ views of an element vary in terms of mass. Boston, Massachusetts; Jersey City, New Jersey; and Los Angeles, California are the three cities examined. Boston is unlike any American city in terms of character, being both clear in form and full of different places. Jersey City was chosen because of its current formlessness, which appears to be an extremely low degree of Imageability at first sight. Los Angeles is a brand-new city with a grid design in its centre area and a completely different scale. Every time, a central region of approximately 2 12 by 12 miles was studied. Two basic evaluations are carried out in each of these cities:
A professional observer did a detailed field survey, mapping the presence of numerous elements, their visibility, image strength or weakness, as well as their connections, disconnections, and other interrelationships.
A NEW SCALE
We want an environment that is not just well-organized, but also meaningful. However, the creation of powerful symbols begins with the clarity of structure and identity. Every human activity that takes place there benefits from such a feeling of place. Education in seeing will be just as important as reshaping what is seen in the formation of the image. Our cities will be a source of everyday satisfaction for millions of people if art and audiences grow together.
- JANE JACOBS
INTRODUCTION
Jane Jacobs, a writer and city activist from New York City, published her debut book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book was originally published in 1961, and it explores the ideas and goals of modern, strict city planning and rebuilding in the postwar United States. She discusses the failures of modern planning ideas and argues that the different foundations of conceptual planning history are all based on a misunderstanding of how cities operate. Jacobs’ best ideas on liveable cities came from detailed observation of city life rather than theories or master plans, which was a completely new approach in the United States in the 1960s and changed the way planners and city residents thought about urban planning. Although Jacobs published Death and Life over 50 years ago, her ideas on how to make cities more livable are still important today. The effect of Jane Jacobs on the New Urbanism movement is studied, and her ideas are then applied to the Atlantic Yards Project, a large urban redevelopment project in Brooklyn, New York.
THE NEED FOR PRIMARY MIXED-USE
The poor main mixing of uses is described by Jacobs. In the past, most big-city flyover states met all four of the requirements for diversity generation. Metropolitan cities had mainly become dedicated to work by the time she wrote Death and Life, and they only fulfilled three of the roles. This shift has been taken into account in planning, which now refers to “Central Business Districts” rather than “metropolitan cities.” Because cities’ central regions have direct influence on other city districts, the central area’s major mix of uses is particularly important, as “a city tends to become a collection of separate interests.” But unfortunately, she considers, strict city planners apply their destructive purposes of city planning to attractive and successful streets and districts. THE GENERATORS OF DIVERSITY
The importance of these four requirements, she believes, is the most important point presented in the book. These four factors do not guarantee that all city areas will produce the same level of variation. However, if these four requirements are met, a city area should be able to reach its full potential. The primary uses are those that draw people to a certain location. These are both necessary for ensuring safety in streets and neighbourhood parks and are also cost-effective. Most stores depend on people passing by during the day, much as neighbourhood parks require people who are in the area for various reasons. Businesses will disappear if consumers are missing, or may never appear at all. She uses the example of the Wall Street neighbourhood to consider the importance of time, which struggles from extreme time imbalance among its users. THE NEED FOR SMALL BLOCKS
She shows the second condition for city variety, the need for short blocks, using the example of Manhattan. Long blocks, such as the 800foot blocks on Manhattan’s West Eighty-eighth Street, separate frequent users of one street from users of the next, socially and economically isolate street areas, and restrict the flow of people between them. Long blocks would be changed if an additional roadway cut through them, providing residents with a variety of different paths to select from.Garden City and Radiant City supporters claim that expensive streets are wasteful, but Jacobs disagrees. She argues, on the other hand, that repeated streets and small blocks are beneficial because they allow for a complex mix of users in a city area. Repeated streets and short blocks, like mixtures of primary uses, are helpful in generating city diversity and liveliness.
THE NEED FOR CONCENTRATION
Only if a city district has a highly uniform volume of people can variety develop. Opposing strict planning and housing theory, she promotes for high place densities as a key factor in a district’s energy, citing attractive high-density residential districts in a number of U.S. cities, including Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Brooklyn Heights in New York, and the North End in Boston. The planning literature’s overcrowded slums are often successful regions with a high density of place, but the slums of real-life America have a low density of place. When variety is crushed by other needs, such as housing developments, high place density alone is insufficient to produce city energy. However, a proper focus on people is one of the requirements for increasing city variety, since the other elements will have little impact if there aren’t enough people in a certain region. If growing concentrations begin to destroy variety, they are too high. Buildings start to resemble one another at a certain point, and the diversity in age and type of building reduces. THE CONDITIONS FOR CITY DIVERSITY
Jane Jacobs’ book Death and Life of a Great American City, based on her observations of many large American cities, develops general requirements for city variety. According to her, the conditions must be taken into account while designing for a varied and necessary city life, but they can never be realised only through city planners’ and designers’ ideas. She develops four criteria that she thinks necessary to produce variety in a city’s streets and districts by examining areas where diversity increases, such as Boston’s North End, New York’s Upper East Side, and San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. The district, as well as as many of its internal parts as possible, must be able to perform more than one major purpose, if not two. These must ensure the presence of individuals who move outside on various schedules and are in the area for various reasons, but who may share numerous facilities. The majority of blocks must be short, which means that streets and opportunities to turn corners must be repeated. The district must combine buildings of various ages and conditions, including a large number of older structures, in order to alter the economic give that they must produce. People must be given enough attention, for whatever reason they are there. In the case of those who have a hard time concentrating, this involves having enough focus.
Figure 46: Interview published on newspaper.
