Good City Form

As one who straddles the two worlds of practice and scholarship with great ease and comfort, I am struck by that rare work of craft which is at once profoundly thoughtful as well as clearly directed. Most serious scholars bend over backwards to embrace the myth of "objectivity", while most practitioners salivate over superficial "best practices". Kevin Lynch's masterpiece, Good City Form, avoids both traps while offering a template for judging the effectiveness of different types of urban form and providing a guide for successful urban design projects. His starting points, a masterful overview of models of urban form throughout history and a sensitive ode to humanist values, help establish a foundation for performance dimensions to measure "good city form": Vitality, Sense, Fit, Access, Control, Efficiency and Justice. As an example, the discussion of what city design is (i.e. urban design) on pages 290-291 is masterful. Unlike many design theoreticians, Lynch uses simple and direct language rather than resort to pretension and manipulation of terminology. Beyond the deceptively simplistic tone is a multilayered understanding and more importantly a genuine love of the city. Lynch is a keen observer, a sensitive designer, and a profound thinker. Thus, his definition of what urban design should be discusses three aspects of cities: human activity, process and control, and of course, physical form. Indeed, as my own professional experience has shown to me, in order to be a truly impactful urban designer, one needs to pay close attention to all these aspects of what makes a city. I would highly recommend this book to reflective practitioners, scholars interested in the practice of urban design, and students interested in shaping the future of our cities. Practicing urban designers would do well to pay heed to Lynch's discussions of control and justice in the design process. For those who are new to the field, the book works well with two others as an excellent advanced introduction to urban design: "The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History" by Spiro Kostof, and "Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form" by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee. What the three books share is a profound sense of humanity in the design of cities that is much more critical than the ebb and flow of design fashions.

In the world of urban design, obsessed with spectacular novelty and superficial aesthetics, this ambitious and profound work of Kevin Lynch is refreshing, yet enduring. He suggests a theory of urban design based on fundamental human values and examines how such values lead to the notion of a "good city form". His performance dimensions (e.g. access, fit, vitality) are broad enough to be interpreted and re-interpreted for specific contexts and sites. And the appendix, which briefly summarizes other theories of city form, is a tour-de-force by itself. A masterpiece which deserves greater attention and consideration, especially by those under the illusion that urban design is more or less architecture writ large!