Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner and author. He is known for his work on the perceptual form of urban environments and was an early proponent of mental mapping. His most influential books include The Image of the City, a seminal work on the perceptual form of urban environments, and What Time is This Place?, which theorizes how the physical environment captures and refigures temporal processes. A student of architect Frank Lloyd Wright before training in city planning, Lynch spent his academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching there from 1948 to 1978. He practiced site planning and urban design professionally with Carr/Lynch Associates, later known as Carr, Lynch, and Sandell.
After graduation, Lynch began work in Greensboro, North Carolina as an urban planner but was soon recruited to teach at MIT by Lloyd Rodwin. He began lecturing at MIT the following year, becoming an assistant professor in 1949, a tenured associate professor in 1955, and a full professor in 1963. In 1954, after receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation to study urban form in Italy, Lynch and his MIT teaching colleague Gyorgy Kepes were awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study perceptions of the urban environment and urban form. In 1958 Lynch wrote an essay ‘The theory of urban form’ with Lloyd Rodwin where the city is described through the complementary of two systems – flows and adapted spaces – interpreted starting from a group of descriptive categories of urban form. Lynch and Kepes' research was published in 1960 as Lynch's book The Image of the City. In 1970, Lynch received funding from UNESCO to study the use of cities by young people in urban areas of Salta, Melbourne, Toluca, and Krakow, a project summarized in his book Growing Up in Cities. Lynch provided seminal contributions to the field of City Planning through empirical research on how individuals perceive and navigate the urban landscape. His books explore the presence of time and history in the urban environment, how urban environments affect children, and how to harness human perception of the physical form of cities and regions as the conceptual basis for good urban design. Parallel to his academic work, Lynch practiced planning and urban design in partnership with Stephen Carr, with whom he founded Carr/Lynch Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lynch's most famous work, The Image of the City, is the result of a five-year study on how observers take in information of the city. Using three American cities as examples, Lynch reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and predictable ways, forming mental maps with five elements:
paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel;
edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some identity or character;
landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as external reference points.
In the same book, Lynch also coined the words "imageability" and "wayfinding". Image of the City has had important and durable influence in the fields of urban planning and environmental psychology.
Personal life
Anne Borders Lynch and Kevin Lynch were married in 1941 and had four children. The Lynches were long-term residents of Martha's Vineyard, where Anne continued spending her summers until her death in 2011.
