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    Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960)
    Lynch wrote this book as a reaction to the destructive impacts of modernism on American cities. His work was derived from the view of the city dweller, and saw the city as a text. To read it he used methods of interviews and questionnaires to gather data. The book developed a new idea in human perception as it related to the city. Also, Lynch has influenced many urban designers because he was able to link quite abstract ideas of urban structure with the human perceptual experience.

    There are real maps, and then there are mental maps — the maps of our environments that we carry in our heads. By extracting maps of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles from the heads of interview subjects and collecting them in a book, Lynch illustrated the idiosyncratic ways in which we interact with different cities; he then used the results to formulate a new criterion — "imageablity" — for evaluating a city's image. An urban design classic.

    MORE:
    Maps based on Lynch's research
    Notes from MIT's "Imaging After Lynch" symposium
    Info at the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science
    Amazon
    Amazon