DRAFT ONLY-- NOT FOR CITATION OR DISTRIBUTION Imaging the City Symposium April 10, 1999 Department of Urban Studies and Planing, MIT "Imaging After Lynch" Lawrence J. Vale Bish Sanyal's challenge to me was to organize a Faculty Colloquium about the Kevin Lynch legacy. My first step was to ask Sam Warner to join in this venture. For me, and for the dozen students in our small seminar, working with Sam proved to be a great highlight of the whole venture. A second key step was to get Anne Beamish on board as colloquium coordinator. For the Colloquium itself we chose not to do the obvious thing-- to round up those academics and practitioners who explicitly saw themselves as carrying on Lynch's work and ideas. These people have produced lot of fine work, but a lot of the impact of Lynch's work on his own and other fields was already quite apparent during his lifetime. Also, Tridib Banerjee and Michael Southworth had already put together the wonderful collection of Lynchiana that is City Sense and City Design, so there was no urgent need to try to identify neglected corners of Lynch's thought. Nor did we want to devote a whole colloquium to reminiscences about Kevin Lynch, although we probably could have done so productively. As Gary Hack put it, if Lynch taught him anything, it was about the need and value of moving on, moving forward. Unlike many here, I never knew Kevin Lynch. Oddly enough, however, we shared formative experiences at Chicago's John Dewey-inspired Francis Parker School-- albeit 42 years out of synch. The school's motto is: "Everything to help and nothing to hinder," and, on the procenium wall of the auditorium there is a quotation from Francis Parker: "A school should be a model home, a complete community, an embryonic democracy." After 14 years--kindergarten through 12th grade-- looking at, and thinking about, that sentence, while surrounded by the throbbing metropolis of Chicago-- it would be hard not to develop some concern about how cities are planned and designed. The forces acting on our homes, communities, and democracies have been changing, however. In our Colloquium, we wanted to be able to say something about the nature of those changes, and to try to focus what we saw through a Lynchian lens. To do so, we returned to Lynch's seminal work, The Image of the City, and asked ourselves what had happened to the images of cities--especially American and European ones-- in the forty years since that book was written. Let me make three interconnected observations that link cities and images: 1. Changes in the economic base of cities have altered their structure and identity. It isn't just that cities have been economically affected by the restructuring of industries, the rise of the service sector, and the accelerating international mobility of capital-- it is also that settings for employment have changed. Visually and spatially, some whole districts of cities became socially, economically and aesthetically marginalized, while other districts-- such as financial service downtowns and festival market places-- have frequently thrived. 2. There is less national direction given to urban policy and planning, and therefore more room for local activity, much of it driven by the private sector. In lieu of the massive federal efforts to create the Interstate Highway system and urban renewal, we have an urbanism that is much more dependent on the active entrepreneurship of public-private partnerships (themselves prefigured by urban renewal). This has led to an unprecedented surge in the marketing of places, a kind of self-conscious promotional activity for every project premised on careful research about who will be its customers. Our public realm, in this view, is the sum of individual market niches. 3. Because of these trends, the very term "image" has become a verb as well as a noun. To a greater extent than ever before, places no longer simply have images; they are constantly being imaged (and re-imaged), often in ways that are highly self-conscious and highly contentious. Thus, it seems time to rethink a fundamental assumption that undergirds Kevin Lynch's Image of the City. For our colloquium, we assembled a variety of scholars and designers to help us explore the processes associated with image transformation, by examining the burgeoning interconnections between city design and development and the media. A. In calling our Colloquium "Imaging the City" we did not mean to suggest that this trend is either wholly positive or wholly negative, just that it is wholly pervasive. Surely Lynch himself spent the next 25 years of his writing and practice demonstrating and arguing for qualities of city form that went far beyond matters of image. In Good City Form, for instance, he identified five "performance dimensions"--vitality, sense, fit, access, and control-- and showed each how each is affected by meta-criteria of efficiency and justice. In this later formulation, the early ideas of imageability and legibility are largely subsumed under the single category of "sense." Yet it should tell us something about the power of images that Lynch's more full-bodied later work--with its focus on the relationship between form and action--remains eclipsed by the power of his first contribution, still the all-time MIT Press best seller. This notion of image--even though the concept has mutated dramatically during the last four decades--remains still an especially salient term for interpreting the production, design, and appearance of cities. In coming to terms with the constant battles over images in city design and development, however, it is important to remember the links between image and the other performance dimensions outlined by Lynch. To do so means analyzing images of cities in terms of the distribution of costs and benefits to the places and people they promote. Lynch's early work emphasized the perceptual characteristics of the urban environment, stressing the ways that individuals mentally organize their own sensory experience of cities. I love the book, but it is important to recognize one way that it now seems downright quaint. What Lynch misses-- or perhaps thought he could still safely ignore in 1960-- is the extent to which city imaging is supplemented and constructed by exposure to visual media, rather than by direct sense experience of urban realms. City images are not static, but subject to constant revision and manipulation by a variety of media-savvy individuals and institutions. Yet Lynch's book about city images made no mention of media in their formation. For Lynch--and for those he interviewed--it was still possible to see cities in terms of the direct sensory appreciation of their qualities, and to assess the structure and identity of places based strictly on the physicality of their "paths, edges, nodes, landmarks, and districts." Lynch's seminal work was translated into several languages, and his investigations of city image were replicated and extended with gratifying degrees of confirmation on six continents. Yet such studies rarely probed how city dwellers gained the knowledge about their cities, or questioned whether their ways of knowing differed the further their mental maps went from their places of most frequent direct experience. For Lynch, and for most who have followed him, it was enough to stress that some areas of the city were less "imageable" than others and, thus, appeared as blank spots when people were asked to draw mental maps of their cities. What mental maps miss, however, are the multiple other ways that citizens learn about places, especially--though not exclusively--about places that are more distant from the precincts of their own direct experience. More often than not, evocation of a neighborhood or city name can yield not a mental blank spot but a clearly-imaged stereotype about a never-visited place, based entirely on what has been seen and heard through various forms of media, especially television and film. Our semester-long colloquium, as I now conceive of it, can be seen to have contained three kinds of presentations. One group, what I would call studies of the mediated city, explored the burgeoning interconnections between urban development and a wide range of media. The second group consisted of presentations on efforts by architects, artists, planners, and city designers to re-image cities. And a third group might best be termed "image skeptics"-- those whose presentations questioned the power of media driven images to mold positive urban futures. Let me say a little bit more about each group: 1. Those in the first category attempted to assess the range of media-generated images of American cities, and to show how are these images are constructed. Collectively, they attempted to demonstrate that the advent of film, television, digital media, aerial photography, and public relations have transformed the ways that cities are imaged, and to show that the city development process has been influenced by new kinds of media-intensive marketing processes. a) The session on television did not actually take place yet, because the research is still ongoing, but is an examination of the role of children's television environments in the production of city images and stereotypes. Interestingly, these images collectively emphasize images of childhood independence and unrestricted movement, and bear little relation to the violence and mayhem that dominate the adult-oriented television programs set in cities. b) In the session on film, film scholar Henry Jenkins explored the range of ways that film makers concerned with depicting New York have struggled to capture the totality of that city. By analyzing the range of aesthetic devices used from the silent films of the 1920s to the Hollywood productions of the present, Jenkins showed both the power of urban images and the impossibility of constructing them into a single narrative. c) A third session, by cultural geographers Thomas Campanella and Anne Beamish, assessed the newest subset of mediated urban images: computer-based virtual worlds constructed in cyberspace. Their presentation was structured as a dialectic, in which historically-rooted anti-urban images of American cities were shown to be in tension with more positive aspects of urban imagery. d) In another session, architectural historian Dolores Hayden and photographer Alex MacLean jointly investigated the imaging power of aerial photography as a medium. This kind of photography, like other forms of framed images taken from the ground, offers immense opportunity for designers to construct narrative interpretations of places, and provides visual evidence for planners and development officials to use in facilitating--or containing-- public debate. e) In a fifth session about the metro-media nexus, geographer Briavel Holcomb took up the central question of place marketing, and examined the intentions and tactics of public relations and advertising campaigns conducted by cities (or, more often, by some smaller sub-constituency within them. She made the distinction between the selling of cities (which works within the constraints of existing attributes) and the marketing of cities, in which specific aspects are promoted and developed to appeal to particular types of consumer. f) In the last of this first group of sessions, urban designer John de Monchaux examined the phenomenon of "place-rating," demonstrating both the proliferation of the desire to rank places according to a wide variety of specialized criteria, and the highly-suspect quality of assumptions and data that undergird such widely-marketed pronouncements. All of these media--television, film, computer software, photography, advertising, and public relations-- we concluded, play a role in how actual development decisions are reached and implemented.   2. The second type of presentations examined cases of places that have undergone dramatic urban transformations. In each case, the presenters were asked to attempt to sort out the relationship between actual physical changes and the media representations and public relations campaigns constructed around them. a) Urban designer Dennis Frenchman discussed the resuscitation of neglected industrial landscapes and the re-invigoration of poorly-interpreted historical sites, arguing for a fusion of urban design and storytelling that finds new value in such places. b) Historian Eugenie Birch took up the protracted struggle to transform the South Bronx, demonstrating how thirty years of attempts to nurture its physical and social recovery have been structured by a series of powerful contending images about desired development outcomes, many of which proved to be sources of conflict rather than consensus. c) We also looked at the parallel effort to launch a recovery in Cleveland. Historian Patricia Burgess, economist Ned Hill, and urban designer Ruth Durack traced the story of Cleveland's comeback, analyzing the changing dynamics of plan-making in the 1980s and 1990s. They assessed the central role played by Cleveland's business community in the transformation, and dissected the images used to represent desired new amenities. d) We also looked beyond our usual United States focus to analyze the rapidly developing cities of the Pacific Rim. Geographer Larry Ford examined the political economy of skyscraper production in a variety of Asian settings, from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur to the burgeoning urban centers of China. He showed how the images of skyscrapers are used to attract international attention to emerging economies, but also revealed ways that the western images of these places are transformed by alternative and culturally distinctive uses of space. e) In the last of these studies of urban transformation, cultural economist J. Mark Schuster looked at the most rapidly changing urban environments of all: ephemeral urbanism created (and often rapidly dismantled) in conjunction with a wide variety of urban festivals, environmental art installations, and other temporary cultural events. He argued for the value of such cultural programming in the life of cities, refuted critics who dismiss ephemera as ideologically contrived, and concluded that many of these urban interventions are highly resistant to co-optation by the media. Although we were pleased with the diversity of approaches taken in these five cases, we have also decided to commission two additional papers, one focusing explicitly on the role of urban public artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko, and the other looking at the work of more avant-garde architects and urban designers. In each case we think there are powerful attempts to comment on (and transform) the more conventional images of cities generated by the popular media. Many contemporary artists and architects have learned from the visual vocabulary and methods of new communications technologies in the process of a developing what might best be termed a critical urbanism. All this suggest the need for a more wide-ranging assessment of the extent to which media-disseminated images do (or should) direct city design and development practice.   The last group of presentations--the ones I've put under the heading of "Image Skeptics"--take issue with the primacy of images in various ways, and help frame an agenda for constructive action by designers and planners. a) Sociologist Richard Sennett argued that the concern over imaging is an epiphenomenal product of unease in the white-collar capitalist workplace. He sees the appeal of neo-traditional New Urbanist residential communities as nostalgic "images of restitution" intended to represent the lone source of stability in an economy where life-time attachment to single employers has become increasingly rare. b) Architect and urbanist Julian Beinart argued that the concern with city promotion is both pre-modern and pre-capitalist. By focusing on the marketing of Christian pilgrimage sites in an age when visual media were scarce and difficult to disseminate, he provocatively challenged the present-day assumptions about the primacy of imagery. c) At another session, geographer David Lowenthal elegantly questioned the value of "fabricating heritage narratives," and resists the historical distortions promulgated by re-imaging efforts. d) Finally, geographer Judith Martin and urban historian Sam Bass Warner examined the ground-level "commonplace images" of the "modern city region" of Minneapolis/St. Paul. They compared the visual images of an inner city neighborhood to one in the inner suburbs and another in the newest ring of outer suburbs and found provocative similarities in appearance across all three neighborhoods, despite their quite different social reputations. This finding invites renewed engagement with the whole concept of imaging, viewing it as a highly-limited index of overall social desirability. Finally, Sam and I are hard at work at assessing what we have learned from our Colloquium and we hope to identify positive ways that designers and planners can usefully contribute to enhancing the performance of cities, whether working with--or against--the primacy of visual media. PART II: Sam Bass Warner, Jr. Some Seminar Conclusions Let me follow upon Larry's presentation of our seminar with my sense of what we have learned from this undertaking. Surely we learned to our pain that it is ever more difficult for the city planner to locate the public interest in a verbal and visual climate crowded with competing city promotions. The charge to planning professionals has always been to represent the public interest in the affairs of real estate and habitation. Before Kevin Lynch's Image of the City (1960) the public interest was to be found within the canons of art -- make it beautiful -- and the canons of efficiency -- use resources parsimoniously. Professional planners found their roles in maneuvering between these two injunctions. Kevin broke open these boundaries. His very first research asked the public what they saw and what they knew. By such indirection he revealed what they valued. From Image he and his followers went on to question rich and poor, Anglos and Hispanics, oldtimers and newcomers. In his last major book, Good City Form (1981) he tried to advance an urban design theory by adding performance-based criteria to his assessment of any proposal. I, and many others, found this book an enormously impressive achievement that suggested pathways for the American city. But, the underpinnings for a successful individual planner's statement of how a city might be, or ought to be, had washed away. By 1981 Urban Renewal had been thoroughly discredited for its differential class and racial impacts. Single-use zoning was under siege for its social and functional effects, and the commonplace modern design vocabulary of the times was challenged as a mistaken adventure. Planners had been deeply involved in all these matters and their position was compromised. The onset of the environmental movement with its fresh set of demands and values has only further complicated the professional charge to represent the public interest. In such circumstances we launched our faculty-student seminar. Our conviction was that contemporary image-making in film, video, computers, and print formed a climate that all planners must reckon with, but we lacked any sense of how planners might best proceed in such an atmosphere. The seminar stumbled into difficulties at the outset because we ignored a central finding of Lynch's. Prof. Jenkins presented a series of classic films which attempted to describe whole cities, even the modern metropolis. He noted that, despite the variety among the film makers, their movies took as their vantage point the well-established categories of country vs. city, pre-industrial vs. industrial, village vs. corporation. The following presentation by Campanella and Beamish on computer images reported that up-to-date computer adepts also formed their images within these traditional polarities. These film and computer generated constructions, however, didn't seem to seminar members to resemble the complex urban regions we knew. Yet, we were at a loss to find a critical justification for our discomfort because the old gemeinschaft and gesellschaft categories seemed to work. What we needed at this juncture, a path the seminar never took, was to pick up on a Lynch finding. In Lynch's many field studies of residents' and non-residents' images of urban places, he reported the simultaneous existence of variety and agreement. The consensus images, the ones most informants held in common, he labeled the image of a particular city. [Michael Newman, "Planning, Governing, and the Image of the City," Journal of Planning Education and Research, 18 (Fall, 1998), 66] The presence of such urban images, of course, does not tell a planner what the public interest may be, but shared images do tell something of how the public values the elements of its city. This important issue of the relationships between consensus images and public values on the one hand, and the determination of public interest in urban projects on the other hand, calls for further investigation. As the seminar went forward speaker after speaker directed our attention to old and new sources of image making -- television, aerial photography, sociological indices, municipal advertising. Our conviction grew that wherever the public interest may reside, the image climate surrounding the planner could affect decision making. As speakers proffered plans -- suburban developments, downtown renewal, alternatives for the South Bronx -- the multiplicity of urban imagery became apparent. What must be confronted was not the stylized renderings of peopled sidewalks that have been the stock in trade of planning department renderings [Friedman], but amalgams of images drawn from many sources of contemporary fashion. So, the typical promotion for a city was shown to have merged the icons of a specific place, like a river view, an old block, or a shiny new piece of architecture, with stock references to happy family life, sports and high culture entertainment, and the felicity of both residential and work settings. Prof. Ford's presentation of the American-style skyscraper downtowns of Asian cities encouraged our sense that urban promotional imagery was a stew cooked up from many ingredients. The visual ingredients of the promoters drew upon what their audiences recognized as familiar. That is, they used what had proven attractive in advertisements for clothing, automobiles, television programs, mutual funds, health insurance, beer and soft drinks, as well as real estate. Yes, promotional images were consensus images, but not as Lynch found them. They were references to imagery that the public knew because these images had been drawn from the fashion book of the times. There was, however, one element that distinguished all these urban promotional materials from all other advertising and public relations efforts. The leitmotiv sang of economic growth and personal prosperity. Just as sex appeal under girds all consumer product advertising, so the promise of economic growth for the wooed firm, and the promise of personal prosperity for the viewer suffuses all urban promotions. Thereby, growth is assumed to be, like sex appeal, a universal value that nourishes all others. Through indirection two papers challenged this promotional priority. Prof. Frenchman, in telling of the new preservation movement, said that the current approach is not to merely adopt a single historical narrative to inform a reconstruction, but to offer visitors and residents a sense of the variety of histories that any place affords. This practice comes much closer to What Time Is This Place? (1972) than former singe-narrative interpretations. It also seemed to escape the strictures of Prof. Lowenthal who derided false front histories. Prof. Schuster's account of the multiplicity of urban festivals, parades, and events also suggested that these "ephemera" often had local and particularistic sponsors that made them presentations of the class, race, and cultural segments of a city. Such sponsorship thereby insulated them from the marketing compulsions of contemporary media. Several presenters challenged the importance of urban visual imagery. Profs. Martin and myself in our review of three different areas within the Twin Cities of Minnesota demonstrated the visual continuity and similarity of an inner neighborhood, a post-World- War-II suburb, and a contemporary outer suburb. Here what residents and visitors see each day is not very different across the entire metropolitan region. Yet, each area carries a very different reputation. The assignment of social value, thus, is not primarily visually driven. Richard Sennett argued that contemporary imagery was not based on what is seen or experienced, but was a construct of a people living in an unpredictable, fast-changing world. The images of the contemporary residential areas were, for him, "images of restitution," dietary supplements for the depravations of the work place. In this criticism the seminar confronted two distinct planning issues. The first, the issue of urban design, comes from asking the question, "What imagery is appropriate to a highly mobile population living within a society whose class, race, and gender relationships are in flux, and whose economy is racing toward new uncharted destinations?" The seminar did not specifically examine current imagery, either the fashions of preservation or the New Urbanism, but there was complete agreement that every urban project is much influenced by its design vocabulary. [Birch] Second, within the seminar presentations lay a buried history that surfaced only occasionally. From the end of World War II to the mid 1970s national governments in Europe and the United States had strong urban policies. Some were closely supervised, as in the role of the Home Office in the United Kingdom. Others were disconnected like the U.S. highway, home mortgage, tax, and urban funding policies. But at both poles of organization there has been in recent years a relaxation of central government initiative and control. Subsequent to this retreat, private business and local governments have come forward to be the leading actors in urban decision making. Under the old national programs, some cities benefited more than others, and some residents within cities gained more than their fellows. Now, under the new big corporation and municipal competition system, it is inevitable that a new group of cities will benefit disproportionately, and within every city some will gain, others lose. Kevin Lynch put forward as one of his criteria, "justice." His is a voice that must not be lost in our studies and debates over image making.