ancient cities

contribution was particularly significant at this
time because the tradition of design at the large
scale was very much under attack and discredited
by the social scientists engaged in studies of contemporary
urban problems and the attendant
planning and policy response. Social scientists saw
the deterministic approach of designers as megalomaniacal
and what they had to offer as not particularly
relevant for addressing the fundamental
issues of social welfare and collective well-being.
At best, the design concerns were relegated to a
lower priority.
Lynch’s approach to city design began with a
conversation with community clients about how
they organize and represent their experiences of
the everyday built environment. In this approach,
the design response was to be informed by the
perceptions, values, and expectations of the public,
not professional predilections. It was an argument
that design matters in a fundamental way
and not just as a window dressing. Furthermore,
this was essentially a bottom-up approach, not the
top-down authoritarian design of the earlier tradition
of grand design and visionary aesthetics. In
Lynch’s approach, the role of the designer is to
help people achieve their desired environment,
one that fulfills their immediate needs and offers
flexibility for change and adaptation. His scenario
of city design would involve participation from
the users of the environment in the design and
future control of their urban space. In this view,
the designer serves as a facilitator and technical
expert, perhaps requiring a few minimal master
strokes here and there, as Lynch’s own practice
and projects often reflected.
While championing this new approach, Lynch
also advanced many normative positions in his
writings. He was particularly interested in exploring
future scenarios for change—possible utopias
and dystopias (which he called cacotopias) of
human society.
Thus, a career that began with a passion to
understand the visual and perceived form of the
city evolved into a distinct philosophy of city
design. Lynch’s earlier and renowned work, The
Image of the City, helped restore the place of city
design in public policy, and his subsequent research,
writings, practice, and teaching reflected a new
approach to design that emphasized human purposes
and consequences of the built environment,
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as well as possibilities of city design that engaged
the public in the process.
The philosophical formulations of this approach
culminated in A Theory of Good City Form. The
theory was profoundly normative and explored
the questions of what constitutes good city form
and what might be its performance characteristics.
Lynch searched for answers to these questions in
the historical models of ideal city, examined them
analytically and empirically in contemporary
research, and explored them in speculative scenarios.
Many of these writings were published in
journal articles or book chapters. In A Theory of
Good City Form, Lynch argued that a normative
theory is necessary to identify the performance
characteristics of good city form. He proposed
five basic dimensions of performance—vitality,
sense, fit, access, and control—and two meta-dimensions
described as efficiency and justice. The
first dimension, vitality, is the requirement of the
form to sustain life, health, and biological functions
of the inhabitants. Sense has to do with the
perception and cognition of the environment and
includes much of the imageability requirements he
advanced earlier. The dimension of fit refers to the
degree of congruence between the environmental
form and the customary, desired, or expected
behaviors of the users of the environment. Access
is the dimension that defines availability of amenities,
conveniences, and opportunities within the
environmental form and the aggregate efficiency
and equity in the distribution of such resources.
The dimension of control refers to matters of
rights, responsibilities, and ownership of common
space, as well as the ability of the inhabitants to
change and transform such spaces. Finally, the
two meta-dimensions of efficiency and justice,
according to Lynch, refer to the balancing act
between minimizing cost while maximizing distributive
justice and equity in the organization of
resources in space.
One could reinterpret these criteria today in
the form of a synthesis of John Rawls’s 1971
original theory of justice and Amartya Sen’s
1999 treatise on human capability as the basis
for development as freedom. While Lynch was
aware of and cited Rawls’s work, it was not possible
for him to anticipate Sen’s work, much of
which postdated his book. It is fair to assume
that his emphasis on the justness of the city form