Background

This short film is an adaptation of the classic urban design tome - "The Image of the City" - by Associate Professor Kevin Lynch (1918-1984) of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has been entitled with degrees from Yale University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and MIT. Professor Lynch has accordingly read a lot of books and is unquestionably smart.

His innovative theories, published in seven books set with delicate typography and dozens of articles with crackerjack diagrams, have transformed the lives and visual environments of people in cities from Boston to Buenos Aries.

Professor Lynch:

Looking at cities can give a special pleasure. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction of vast scale, perceived only in the course of long spans of time. At every instant, there is more than the eye can see and more than the ear can hear. Every commoner has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings. A clear image enables one to move about easily and quickly: to find a friend’s house, a policeman, or a button store. It also gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security and intensity of human experience.

To understand the role of environmental images in our own urban lives, this film will consider the visual quality of central Los Angeles – the core of a metropolis.

These visual qualities can conveniently be classified into five types of elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.

Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves. A huge number of paths may be seen as a total network, when repeating relationships are regular and predictable. The Los Angeles grid is a good example.

Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths. They are breaks in continuity. Figueroa and Sunset and Los Angeles and Olympic streets, are usually thought of as the edges of the Los Angeles central business district. Amusingly, they were stronger in this respect than the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways which can also be thought of as a major boundary. Yet dwellers walks over the Hollywood Freeway as if it did not exist.

Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city, which the observer mentally enters “inside of” and which are recognizable as having some common, identifying character. Bunker Hill in Los Angeles is an example of a district of fairly strong historic character.

Nodes are the conceptual anchor points in our cities. They are junctions, a convergence of paths, and moments of shift from one structure to another – and are related to the concept of the journey. Olvera Street and its associated plaza with its sharp boundaries is a choice example.

Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external. The peak of the Los Angeles City Hall is a landmark that is unexampled against the background of the entire city.