1. POLICIES AND PRACTICE
ASSIGNMENT – 4
FAYAZ ALI
M.ARCH(URBAN REGENERATION)
Sem - 1
JAMIA MILLIA ISLAMIA
NEW DELHI
2. RECONSIDERING THE IMAGE OF THE CITY
Kevin lynch(1984)
The article tells us about how psychology and urban environment are inter related and
psychologists are conducting experiments in laboratories to the wandering variables of
the complicated real environment. It also gives us a clear picture of how people
actually found their way about the streets of big cities, how they conducted their tests
and experiments. According to the views of John Dewey, a transactional psychologist,
perception is an active transaction between person and place. He also states that how
he had learnt more from stories, memoirs and the accounts of anthropologists. He
disclosed K.E buildings key study, the image to us and that the role of the
environmental image was an idea in in the air.
A study was conducted with 30people whom they interviewed and asked them to
present a mental picture of the inner city of Boston, and then the same exercise was
repeated in Jersey city and Los Angeles. A fair idea was taken from these descriptions
that how the city should look like. Then they were asked to describe the distinctive
elements to recognize and place various photographs. The other members of the team
who have no clue about the interviews, makes a survey of their own to make some
guesses about how would the typical image be, given the physical form and then the
two were compared. The tapes and the drawings when compared gave the same
mental image of the street, pavement rise and turn, the building ad open space, turn
out to be the same. The conclusion of the test was that people had relatively coherent
and detail mental image of their city created in an interaction between self and place
and the image ways both essential to their actual functioning and emotional well
being. This study was sharply criticized from the bases of small number of samples
and too biased sample of people. Despite of such well mounted attacks, it failed. And
the work has been replicated in many communities, large or small of countries like
South America, Europe and Asia, because the method was cheap and fun to do.
