The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

Die zwölfte Ausgabe von Candide widmet sich dem Thema Visual Urbanism – ein vollkommen neues Forschungsfeld. Fotograf*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen experimentierten mit anthropologischen, kulturwissenschaftlichen, soziologischen und geografischen Methoden, für eine Reflexion über die meist unkritische Nutzung von Bildern des öffentlichen Raums. Candide 12 sucht Möglichkeiten, diese Ergebnisse in Architektur und Stadtplanung zu integriert. Dabei beantworten Autor*innen drängende Fragen, wie nach der Nutzbarmachung fotografischer Bilder für die Architektur und vice versa.

The essays in this collection discuss how the city is ‘textualized’, and address many aspects of how texts and images are written and produced in, and about, cities. They demonstrate how urban texts and images provoke reactions, in city-dwellers, visitors, civic and political actors, that, in turn, impact upon the shape of the city itself. Many kinds of urban texts – both manuscript and print – are discussed, including chapbooks, periodicals, poetry, graffiti and street-signs. The essays derive from a range of disciplines including book history, urban history, cultural history, literary studies, art history and urban planning, and explore some key questions in urban cultural history, including the relationship between text, image and the city; the function of the text or image within an urban environment; how urban texts and images have been used by those in positions of power and by those with little or no power; the ways in which urban identity and values have been reflected in ‘street literature’, graffiti and subversive texts and images; and whether theories of urban space can help us to understand the relationship between text, image and the city. As such, this volume will serve to enhance the reader’s understanding of the nature of urbanism from a historical perspective, the creation and representation of urban space, and the processes of urbanization. It investigates how the creation, distribution and consumption of urban texts and images actively affect the shaping of the city itself – a mutually constitutive process whereby text, image and city create and sustain each other.

An analysis of current research and theory about the ways in which cities affect people.

In 1960, Kevin Lynch wrote The Image of the City, which transformed the way design professionals and social scientists dealt with the urban form and design. The Evaluative Image of the City follows the work of Lynch and further explores the role of human evaluations of the cityscape. This book describes how to assess, plan, and design the appearance of cities to please inhabitants. It presents a series of studies on evaluative images and discusses methodologies, findings, and applications to design and planning at various stages. Designers, planners, and businesspeople, as well as the general public, will find this book a valuable guide for improving the image of their surroundings.