Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City was a remarkably prescient work, predicting much of today’s culture of navigation, and also some of its most dangerous side-effects.
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‘To become completely lost in the modern city is perhaps a rare experience’, he wrote, but once disorientation occurs ‘the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being’. One cannot help but view the Death Valley desert-case as emblematic of such anxiety. For Lynch, external support was meant to complement the mental image not supersede it, it was meant to heighten the observer’s attention and enrich the experience of the landscape, whereas today’s routine achieves just the opposite.
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Observing ‘the city’ as a place which had become fragmented and cluttered by roads and random signs, Kevin Lynch was among the first to attend to the public’s concerns, trying to unravel their spatial confusion. The new visual order was ambiguous, to say the least. Difficult to read, and even harder to internalize. The mental picture of the city; the ‘strategic link’ between the city and people’s ability to navigate it, was clearly compromised.
Could perceptual psychology cater for a more tangible form – a form that could be readily perceived and kept in the mind’s eye as a clear image against the roar of the metropolis? And could this form perhaps then be complemented by some external device, some type of automated navigation, building on the same perceptual principles? These questions began to materialize with the appearance of the concept of the ‘cognitive map’.
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