The author of "City Image" is Kevin Lynch, an American who has taught in the School of Architecture of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 30 years. He helped to establish the Department of Urban Planning and developed it into one of the most famous architectural schools in the world.

As the homework of this semester's Introduction to Western Modern Urban Planning Theory, I carefully read the first and third chapters of Lynch's "City Image", and now I report my insights, feelings and understandings from this book as follows. Kevin Lynch and his "City Image" lay particular emphasis on the empirical study of urban environment cognition. He regards the "image" of urban space as composed of five elements: path, edge, region, node and sign, in an attempt to reveal the essence of urban space.

In this book, the author selects three American cities for comparative study, namely Boston, Los Angeles and Jersey City. In the first part of the book, he proposed the concepts of environmental image, the identifiability and image of city image, and how to establish environmental image. The third part of the book mainly introduces the elements of the city image, including roads, edges, regions, nodes and signs.

Lynch believes that dynamic factors in cities, especially people and people's activities, are as important as static factors. Our sense of the city is often intermittent. It is piecemeal and often confused with other interesting things. Almost every feeling is working. From this we can see that Lynch emphasizes the role of people as the main actors in the city. The interaction between people and their understanding of the quiet factors in the city - buildings, roads, signs, etc. constitute the image of the city in people's minds. The image of the city is kept in people's hearts. Different people have different understandings of the image of the same city and the same area. Only individuals who belong to the same group and have similar life experiences, education levels, and cultural backgrounds can form the image of the city. If people want to integrate into a group, they must have a similar and inclusive urban image, that is, "public image". Lynch believes that the process of image formation is a two-way process between the observer and the observed. As observers, when we are observing cities, we need to find their characteristics and symbols to form an image of the city; At the same time, the observed objects form the characteristics and symbols of the city that are easy for us to grasp, helping us to establish the image of the city. In this two-way exchange and interaction, we really understand the city.

Lynch believes that environmental image can be divided into three aspects: identification, structure and meaning. An effective image is primarily the identifiability of the target, which is called "identification". Secondly, the image must include the spatial relationship and graphical relationship between the target and the observer, and other targets, which forms a "structure". The final goal should have some meaning for the observer, whether actual or emotional, namely "meaning". The three always come together.

The book explains the relationship between the three through the explanation of "entrance and exit". The structure and recognition of cities together form the identifiability of city images. What needs to be pointed out is not that the orderly urban structure is more conducive to the identification of urban image, nor is the more chaotic city more detrimental to the identification of urban image. There is no inevitable connection between the two. People have different views on the image of the same logo, and the meaning of urban characteristics is often changing. Therefore, Lynch suggested that it would be wise to focus on the clarity of the image and let the "meaning" develop freely. In the third chapter of City Image, Lynch mainly analyzes five material factors related to the formation of city image. The definition of each factor and its impact on the formation of city image are discussed in detail, and three American cities are taken as examples. Lynch's conclusion is that the formation of the image depends on the five basic elements (roads, edges, regions, nodes and landmarks) that can form the urban image. The formation mechanism of this intentional activity has a strong phenomenological meaning. "Cognitive map" is such an intentional behavior based on the five basic elements of the intended object and cognitive results. The critically criticized view of phenomenology that cognition (even the object of cognition) is actively "constructed" by human beings has been fully reflected in Lynch's urban cognitive theory: image is a "image" projected by people according to the basic clues of urban form, with strong directionality; The passive or active cognitive style of different cognitive people has a meaning of "constitution" on the spot. When talking about the transformation of city image, Lynch listed five different ways for people to draw maps. He believes that citizens identify the style and features of cities through these five landscape factors. Therefore, urban design should no longer be the subjective creation of architects or urban planning designers, but should explore the natural and historical conditions and characteristics of each city, and organize and play to make each city have its own characteristics. When analyzing these five factors, he introduced design characteristics such as space, structure, continuity, visibility, permeability, and dominance to combine with them, thus creating a new set of design theories and methods.

What is the "city image"?

It seems difficult to summarize an accurate, appropriate and comprehensive definition of city image after reading City Image. The city itself contains rich elements, and the concept of image is more abstract and profound, so I can only interpret the concepts mentioned in the book one by one.

First, what is "image"? Gaston Bachelar (France) defined in his Space Poetics that "the field where images occur is in the activity of the soul, and it appears before thinking." In short, it means that we, as observers, rely on various clues, such as vision, hearing, smell, touch, and motion produced by changes in color, shape, dynamics, or light, And the feeling of gravity field or electric field and magnetic field.

The image itself is not a model after the reality is scaled down, unified, abstract, and precisely miniature, but a purposeful simplification. The final image is formed by deleting, excluding, or even adding elements to the current situation, combining and adapting, and connecting and organizing all parts together. It may be illogical to rearrange it purposefully, But this may be more sufficient and better form the image needed.

Moreover, another very important concept is "public image", which refers to the common impression that most urban residents have in their hearts, that is, in the interaction process of a single material entity, a common cultural background and a basic physiological feature, they hope to reach an agreement in the field.

It is precisely because the environment image is the result of the two-way interaction between the observer and the environment. So the concept of image becomes the subjective concept of the observer. The age, gender, educational level, occupation, temperament or familiarity with the city of urban observers are different, so each observer forms its own image of the city. What urban planning and design explores is to create an environment for many people to use, so the concept of "public image" is obtained.

After a preliminary understanding of the concept of city image, analyze the content and factors that form the city image. The connotation of city image: city personality, city structure, and city implication. City personality: the distinguishability between a city and its surroundings, and its identifiability as an independent individual. This personality has independent existence and unique significance. Urban structure: urban image must include the spatial or morphological relationship between objects and observers, as well as between objects. City implication: the city must provide the observer with practical or emotional implication, which is also a relationship, but is completely different from the relationship of space or form.

The elements of city image: roads, borders, regions, nodes, landmarks. Different elements may reinforce and echo each other, so as to enhance their respective influence, or they may contradict each other, or even destroy each other. Most observers classify the elements in the image as an intermediate organization, that is, a composite form. Among them, the road is the dominant factor, the boundary is a linear factor, the area is a two-dimensional plane, the nodes are of strategic significance, and the markers are point shaped references.

The characteristics of the city image: practicality, security, transmission. Practicality: it requires that the city image can truly reflect the city and has the characteristics of implementation. Security: the city image is required to have basic security guarantee for practical use. Transmissibility: city image is required to influence city individuals imperceptibly at a certain level. At the same time, through three examples of cities, we can find that they have their own obvious advantages and disadvantages in urban image, but also reflect the common theme.

People can adapt to the environment and extract the structure and personality of the environment from the materials around them. Although the types of elements used in urban images may account for different proportions with the changes of actual forms, their types and characteristics that make images strong or weak seem very similar in the three cities. At the same time, however, in these three different physical environments, there are still significant differences in people's sense of direction and satisfaction.

1. The importance of space and landscape breadth.

2. The open landscape produces emotional pleasure.

3. Unprocessed or amorphous spaces may not be pleasant but they are conspicuous.

4. The landscape characteristics of the city, vegetation or water surface, are often joyfully concerned and discussed.

5. The influence of social and economic class on urban regional image.

6. The material landscape reflects the symbolic way of time passing.

7. The great changes in the environment and the lack of material elements that reflect history make people happy and upset.

Therefore, we can learn a conclusion about the image of the city: "good places" enable people to understand their own communities, their own past, social networks, and the world of time and space contained in them through some very appropriate methods for people and their culture. Our need for the environment is not only good structure, but also full of poetry and symbolism. It should involve individuals and their complex society, their ideals and traditions, the natural environment and the complex functions and movements in cities. Clear structure and vivid personality will be the first step to develop strong symbolic symbols. Through a prominent well organized place, the city provides a place for gathering and organizing these meanings. This sense of place itself will enhance every human activity that takes place there and stimulate the precipitation of people's memory traces. We must create images through clear and coordinated forms to meet the needs of vivid and understandable shapes. "Bad places" are chaotic, nodes are uncertain, boundaries are ambiguous, isolated, continuous interruption, ambiguous, lack of characteristics and personality, and frequent reconstruction erased the identification characteristics formed in the historical process. Although people have different pursuits for beautiful city images, it seems that people have much the same characteristics for unsatisfactory city images. These basic characteristics are exactly what we ignored in previous design or caused by the assumptions of designers.

In the first chapter, when the author discusses the concept of "environmental image" in detail, he adds an appendix "References on positioning" to the book, which mainly discusses how people determine their own position, that is, the relationship with surrounding things, what references and reference systems are used to achieve the sense of orientation, and the meaning of landscape The formation of image and the meaning of form. This is a very interesting appendix. It tells us a variety of positioning reference systems and different orientations of different people. The most important thing is that these are related to human thinking or culture.

The professional knowledge involved in Chapter II is strong, but there are still some things that can be noted. For example, when describing a poor urban design, you can use the following sentence: "chaos, uncertainty of nodes, fuzzy boundaries, isolation, continuous interruption, ambiguity, bifurcation, lack of characteristics and individuality, etc.", Another very ironic sentence is: "Frequent reconstruction erases the identification features formed in the historical process. Elements themselves, although (sometimes because) they are decorated over and over again to try to show magnificence, often lack features on the surface."

The third chapter, entitled "City Image and Its Elements", introduces the five elements that constitute the city image in detail: roads, borders, regions, nodes, landmarks, and the relationship between these elements, and how they constitute the city image. When I introduced the elements, I was very careful. What struck me was that it was easy to recognize and regarded as an important thing in the "landmark", which involved the "symbol" meaning contained in the image that the author talked about. Therefore, the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York was not only the disappearance of buildings, but also the disappearance of symbols, People's recognition of the city has left a huge gap since then. On the one hand, it can explain why New York and the Americans have lost more deeply after 911 from the perspective of "city image", and it can also add reasons for "rebuilding the World Trade Organization" - the emergence of a new landmark will not only relatively smooth the wound, And while filling in the gaps, let the building contain a lot of meaning, tenacity? powerful? Or others. The author has spent a lot of time in this chapter to analyze various elements, but he has never forgotten that such detailed analysis is based on experience, and in order to bring benefits to the discussion, and then needs to be considered as a whole in urban design. Similarly, "urban image" is also the overall sketch that falls in people's minds. "The image itself is not a model after the reality is scaled down, unified, abstracted, and precisely reduced, but a purposeful simplification. Through the deletion, exclusion, and even additional elements of the current situation, the image can be integrated, and all parts can be related and organized together to form the final image."

The fourth chapter seriously discusses how to apply the previous research results in urban design, so it is highly professional and has practical guiding significance, but what is more exciting is the analysis of urban form he gave us in the first section, because it is full of people. At the beginning, there was something that attracted me: "The urban form must first have the most fundamental function that it should express, that is, transportation, the division of main land use and the key focus. Ordinary people's wishes, joys and feelings of community can be expressed vividly here. More importantly, if the environmental organization is clear and the personality is distinct, then citizens can convey their understanding of the meaning and connection to it, so this can become a real place. " The above sentence resonates with me is "place". Similarly, simply defining place from the building itself is far from defining all values of the field after introducing people. A real place should have its basic functions, be able to condense the wishes and happiness of ordinary people, and have the possibility of communication. Moreover, because it has a clear environmental organization and distinct personality, it can let people communicate to it the meaning they understand, so that it can carry "life".