City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch [Hardcover]

Kevin Lynch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1990

Kevin Lynch's books are the classic underpinnings of modern urban planning and design, yet they are only a part of his rich legacy of ideas about human purposes and values in built form. "City Sense and City Design brings together Lynch's remaining work including professional design and planning projects that show how he translated many of his ideas and theories into practice. An invaluable sourcebook of design knowledge, "City Sense and City Design completes the record of one of the foremost environmental-design theorists of our time and leads to a deeper understanding of his distinctively humanistic philosophy. The editors, both former students of Lynch, provide a cogent summary of his career and of the role he played in shaping and transforming the American urban design profession during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Each of the seven groups of writings and projects that follow begins with a short introduction explaining their thematic content and their background. The essays in part I focus on the premises of Lynch's work. his novel reading of large-scale built environments and the notion that the design of an urban landscape should be as meaningful and intimate as the natural landscape. Next, excerpts from Lynch's travel journals reveal his early ideas on how people perceive and interpret their surroundings, ideas that culminated in his seminal work "The Image of the City. This part of the book also presents Lynch's experiments with children and his assessment of environmental-perception research. The examples of both smallscale and large-scale analysis of visual form in part III are followed by three parts on city design. These include Lynch's more theoretical works on complexplanning decisions involving both functional (spatial and structural organization) and normative (how the city works in human terms) approaches, articles discussing the principles that guided Lynchs teaching and practice of city design, and descriptions of Lynch's own projects in the Boston area and elsewhere. The book concludes with essays written late in Lynch's career, fantasy pieces on utopias and offering new design freedoms and scenarios warning of horrifying "cacotopias" to come. Kevin Lynch (1918-1984) studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and later obtained a Bachelor of City Planning degree from MIT. After a long and distinguished career on the faculty of the MIT School of Architecture and Urban Planning, he was named Professor Emeritus of City Planning. Tridib Banerjee is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California. Michael Southworth is a Professor of Urban Design and Environmental Planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tridib Banerjee is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California.

Michael Southworth is a Professor of Urban Design and Environmental Planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

Jay Pil Choi is Professor of Economics at Michigan State University and a CESifo Research Network Fellow.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 866 pages
• Publisher: Mit Pr (November 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262121433
• ISBN-13: 978-0262121439
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,794,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cities are human!, November 22, 1999

By 

Y. Nevares (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch (Paperback)

This is THE BOOK for anyone -not exclusively urban planners- who wants to understand not only the physical form of the city, but how its citizens interact with the urban landscape. Through his experience and observation, Lynch reminds us that the most important component of a city -the reason why they are built- are its inhabitants.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lynch's researches and projects brilliantly organized, April 7, 1998

By 

Carlos Leite de Souza ([e-mail]) (Sao Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch (Paperback)

Michael Southworth and Tridib Banerjee, former students of Kevin Lynch at MIT's School of Urban Studies and Planning, have organized a brilliant collection of most of Lynch's works. Here we can find his seminal ideas pointed out trough his researches in the field of environmental perception, as well as his urban design projects. The book still presents a good biography of Lynch and serves as a very interesting complement to the books that this fundamental author wrote. It is an extremely important work both to architectural and urban design students as well as to professionals and researches.