Urban Design Reader：The perceptual dimension.pdf

Section Three The perceptual dimension TEAM LinG The perceptual dimension 101 Since the early 1960s an interdisciplinary field of of the City (1960), which had been a key work in both environmental perception has developed and there the field of urban imagery and the emerging field of now exists a significant body of research on people’s urban design. Without diminishing its status as a clas- perception of their urban environment. The initial sic text, Lynch’s essay is important in putting it into work on environmental images was extended and its historical context and in showing how he reflected reinforced by a body of work focusing on the experi- upon and developed his earlier work. Lynch had ini- ential ‘sense-of-place’ and ‘lived-in’ experiences asso- tially been interested in legibility (i.e. how people ori- ciated with the urban environment, which explored entated themselves and navigated within cities), but how people perceive environments and experience soon adjusted his focus to the theme of the city’s places. With sense-of-place came the parallel phe- mental image. Observing that cities had districts or nomena of ‘placelessness’ and concepts of ‘invented’ landmarks or pathways that were easily identifiable and ‘re-invented’ places, entraining ideas of ‘authen- and easily grouped into an overall pattern, led him to ticity’ and the construction/manufacture of place the concept of ‘imageability’ and the identification of and place values. More recently, the field has been his famous five key physical elements – paths, edges, supplemented by work on symbolism and meaning