The Semiotics of Imageability

Several times The Image of the City has made me think of semiotics, which isn’t strange as Kevin Lynch’s book is about the ways in which a city is capable of forming mental pictures in its users, of communicating the identity and structure of its parts and its whole.

For instance, as Lynch describes the foremost of those elements in a city that are relevant to imageability, the path, he lists things that help to make the memory of a path more vivid, that contrasts the path against others, that makes it stand out. This reminds me of Peter Bøgh Andersen’s discussion of the features of computer-based signs, in A Theory of Computer Semiotics, ¹ where a sign’s features either distinguish it from other signs, or distinguishes its current state from other possible states.

Lynch writes:

Characteristic spatial qualities were able to strengthen the image of particular paths. In the simplest sense, streets that suggest extremes of either width or narrowness attracted attention. [...] Spatial qualities of width and narrowness derived part of their importance from the common association of main streets with width and side streets with narrowness. Looking for, and trusting to the “main” (i.e., wide) street becomes automatic [...].

I guess city elements must “attract attention,” as Lynch writes, but in a more Taoistic sense of competition. They can’t attract attention at the expense of other elements, or the image of the whole suffers. So each element must do this in its own unique way. It must differentiate itself and at the same time make surrounding elements stronger as well.

¹ For more on Peter Bøgh Andersen’s A Theory of Computer Semiotics, see my posts “The Computer As Medium,” “The Unbridgeable Gap Between Visible and Invisible Architecture,” “Program Execution As Theatre Play,” and “Sign-Oriented Programming.”