The term 'imageability' was coined by urban theorist Kevin Lynch in the late 1950s, just as Urban Design as a profession was taking shape. In the context of cities and landscapes, the term refers to what many call 'place legibility', or rather "the ease with which people understand the layout of a place." Lynch's ideas were developed in his classic work, Image of the City (MIT). According to Lynch, people develop mental maps of the city and these maps affect how individuals navigate and explore their region. He viewed the city as a network of paths, districts, edges, nodes, and landmarks. I argue that Lynch borrowed this language directly from the then-new field of Network Studies which was in great part incubated at MIT, also. He added to this vocabulary the term 'landmark'. In a future post I hope to discuss how Lynch's addition of 'landmark' could be reflexively applied back on to Network Studies. I also want to extend the notion of imageability to organizations and institutions. But for now, back to the city.

In 1954 MIT Professor Kevin Lynch began studying city form in a five year project funded by The Rockefeller Foundation. The study was done under the direction of Lynch and Professor Gyorgy Kepes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Urban and Regional Studies. Their research findings were the foundation of Lynch's theories on city planning discussed in his seminal work The Image of the City. (MIT Library)

More about the research project can be viewed here. This page includes links to digitized primary research, e.g. the Kellet Base Map (Interview) and Drawn Map. Not everything has been digitized. A guide for researchers can be viewed here. 

A great summary of Lynch was completed by Tridib Banerjee and Michael Southworth. City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch.

There's a wonderful essay that's just been authored by a graduate. I highly recommend giving it a read. It's called Revisiting The Image of the City: The Intellectual History and Legacy of Kevin Lynch's Urban Vision.

To analyze these reactions of his participants Lynch developed a system of spatial reading. The system contains three components: identity, meaning the ability to understand a given physical form as its own entity; structure, that the form must have a spatial relationship to the observer and other objects: and meaning, that the form must include a level of personal or emotional resonance with the observer. (Ellis, 2010)

This type of research builds on old essays like Prolegomena to a Study of the Aesthetic Affect of Cities by Barclay Jones (1960).

The pioneering efforts of Lynch and Kepes were enormous. The role that residents played should not be underestimated. Though it is clearly under-documented. While much praise has followed since Image of the City, I think Lynch would be flattered not by further theorizing, but in proportion to the number of residents that were subsequently engaged since 1960. While there have been endless public engagement initiatives since Lynch, how many have actually followed Lynch's well-designed format?

Classic.

The historical discussion about Earth's cities and their interconnections has traditionally utilized two terms. Global City. And World City. As defined on Wikipedia, a global city is a critical node in the global economic system. Not a very precise definition. Maybe some folks who'll be attending the 4th Annual Toronto Forum for Global Cities will be able to provide a better definition. Saskia Sassen is said to have coined the term. She talked about the concept with Foreign Policy just recently. This article comes just weeks after FP's release of their 2010 Index and a whole issue dedicated to cities. Personally, I think Parag Khanna's "Beyond City Limits" article was the standout. As Parag's sub-title reads: the age of nations is over. the age of cities has begun. If we go back a few years, to 2007, we can revisit Tate's awesome exhibition, Global Cities. To Torontonians and students of the Canadian situation, the recently released Toronto as a Global City: Scorecard on Prosperity - 2010 will be of great interest. Theorizing and understanding the city in its cultural, artistic permutations is essential. Too many numbers make for bad meaning. That's why books like Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age are a must read every now and then. Not that long ago, University of Toronto's Cities Centre initiated a "Global Cities Indicator Facility" for storing and sharing data about Earth's great cities. The Toronto Star covered this amazing resource in June. 

The definition is pretty loose if you're just jumping into the mix. The emergent, increasingly dominant vision of an Open City references data and information policy, modes of informing and consulting the public, approaches to IT and governance. But a few other types of Open exist, potentially causing confusion. When examined in a comprehensive light, each has something to offer the larger, expansive definition. Transformative IT practices are at the heart of most of these visions, but in almost every case IT only portends larger, more engaging practices on behalf of City Hall and leading civic institutions. What exactly is an Open City?

This image, courtesy of Radical Cartography. 

"Any city-dweller knows that most neighborhoods don't have stark boundaries. Yet on maps, neighborhoods are almost always drawn as perfectly bounded areas, miniature territorial states of ethnicity or class. This is especially true for Chicago, where the delimitation of Chicago's official “community areas” in the 1920s was one of the hallmarks of the famous Chicago School of urban sociology. And maps showing perfectly homogeneous neighborhoods are still published today, in both popular and academic contexts alike."

This is a simplified systems view of an emerging e-government system where many if not all services are characterized by a digital portal or contact point. How does someone approach these services? How do we prepare people, including children? How can we begin to bring about constancy amidst all this service-delivery upheaval?

When we discuss how something comes to be, we always talk about pre-conditions. This seems unnecessary. We can just as easily speak about the conditions of something. Yes, 'conditions' does imply some aspect of how a thing presently is ("You visited there, right? So, how are the conditions?"), but for the most part refers to the ways things were during a nascent opportunity. Until recently, Open Government could be described as such. That is, from within the moment of experimentation, publishing, conferences, directives, and so on, a fever persisted. "How can we shift from solving problems to creating the (pre-)conditions for solutions to emerge?" Many solutions will be guided by government organizations but not all. In the pockets and at the periphery, civil society and philanthropy double-team. They create solutions to problems, or put differently, essential connections between essential things are made. But inside public organizations, the right technical infrastructure is needed. The narrative of Open Government nearly gets drawn in to a classic battle, wherein a few groups capable of installing and monitoring 'the new large systems' become the better bidders de facto. It is a narrative that deals heavily in technological infrastructure and is therefore prone to growing oligarchic interests, unlike say the managerial musings of Peter Drucker who looks to the gaps between people.

“Citizenship in and through the social sector is not a panacea for the ills of post-capitalist society and post-capitalist polity, but it may be a prerequisite for tackling these ills,” Drucker wrote. “It restores the civic responsibility that is the mark of citizenship, and the civic pride that is the mark of community.” 

Open Government discourse relies on or desires to use technical metaphors, equating the administrative organization of government to things like operating systems, networks, etc. This alone makes it a movement in the history of management theory. At first, this metaphor is a confusion between tactile worlds of coffee cups and chairs, desks and people and the world of circuit boards, fans and USBs. But this way of describing things will likely avoid the trap that past generations of management lingo fell victim too, namely fashion. Open government discussion uses a vocabulary that is infrastructural, material and durable. Rather than discussing Drucker's affective community, open government discussion focuses on what those affective communities need to thrive.

Because of Open Government's reliance on standards and installed infrastructure, the guiding ideas of the movement must hold to open technical specifications at each stage. In most quarters, that goes without saying. By staying "Open", the movement avoids being too connected to the corporatism involved in outfitting services and organizations. So the movement holds to the open principle as a matter of respectable course and a matter of technical principle. But open standards also establish and delineate marketplaces. Complete towns pop up. Industries. It's awesome. And it's happening now. As we speak.

Open Government becomes just open government after some exercising. First thing. Identity all needs internal to an organization. Begin batching needs based on social concepts. Then pair up with your cool IT team. Talk about technical solutions, like computer languages. Map technical language to the social language used when discovering needs and overlaps in the organization. Let the whole world know about your needs. Then tell them your thoughts on the matter. Identify the language(s) that solutions providers must speak if they want to do business with you, your department, your organization, your company.

Whoever is Open for business, they can do the same. Discover a group's keywords. Map out their relationships. Transfer these relationships into computer language. Encode social and professional terms and words into the customized computer language. This becomes an overlap in the use of languages. Some metaphors are about infrastructure. Needs mapping and computer language development are not metaphorical. But they are about infrastructure. 

The insightful operating system metaphor can lead to a confusion between a description of government and government as a dynamic human system. The two are not the same. But this leading metaphor which merges infrastructure and human process seems to be gaining favour. Philip Ashlock took the metaphor to deep levels when in 2009 he wrote "The Root, Braches, and Fruit of Government as Open Platform." This metaphor between infrastructure and organizational setup is new in the history of management and organizational theory. In a way unlike the past, the language and tools which support us may become so proximate to our social conditions and interactions, that in fact we speak of each as one through interchangeable language. This is merely one dangerous path we should be aware of. 

Government or its laws are similar to an operating system. So it's tempting to promote the fluidity of a term like that, saying 'operating system' IS now the right way to describe law. No easy answer. We say and do what works for now. When to hold to certain terms and when to let go? Hard as hell to say. But I do know that what began as a metaphor is becoming an equation, that is a whole way of describing government and affecting alterations to it. Because the transformation of the whole bureaucracy will be linked to this movement in descriptive language, the use of such devices should remain a central concern as the change of State from analog to digital accelerates. 

To refer briefly to Drucker, if government seeks to alleviate the ills and obstacles of society, and if citizenship in and through the social sector is the pre-requisite to tackling these ills as a collective, then I reason government must act as a platform for the social sector, with citizens realizing themselves in and through the social sector. Citizens are the third act. The fourth act involves each State or country getting... it's act together. Easier said than done. The point here is the language we use to describe this clean-up effort is crucial. Given the spectrum I've just portrayed, how do the narratives cascade up and down between each level? There is no answer set answer to this question. Varies country to country, city to city. And like the Open Government/Open System metaphor, this last question is one preferable device among many. How long each will be of utility, only the citizens can tell. The condition of open government is an understanding that it comes first, then a background element in a series of priorities that culminate in no one and nothing but the actual ills and obstacles to which the whole apparatus has been erected.

The web and democracy as open platforms

SOURCE