The Image of the (Smart) City, Redux: Re-examining Kevin Lynch’s Models in a Big Data/VR World

Abstract

Extensive and growing informational infrastructures that inform the shaping of human settlements are engendering new design processes and practices. I speculate about the discursive contexts in which emergent roles for design professionals in designing“smarter” cities are forming. City design methods in-development shaped by contemporary desires, concerns, and anxieties are compared and contrasted with normative theories of city image and “good” city form offered by planning theorist Kevin Lynch from the1960s to the 1980s.