When travelling to cities I have always thought how much easier it would be to navigate a new place if everything was a grid pattern, so when Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” claimed that “the ugliness of our cities is owing to our gridiron street systems,” I had to stop and think (Jacobs 379). At first I was against what she claimed but the more I read on, I came to realize that her point was not as simple as gridiron is ugly, but instead that there needs to be more visual diversity than just street corner after street corner. Jacobs’ emphasis on landmarks and their ability to provide “diversity” and “prime orientation clues” as well as denoting the “city areas which are important” helped me to understand that in her mind a successful city so much more than just the roads and the buildings, its how everything is perceived to and experienced by the viewer (Jacobs 384).
Similarly, in Kevin Lynch’s “The Image of the City,” in his case studies of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, he places emphasis on the landmarks utilized by inhabitants. I liked when Lynch said that “the sweet sense of home is strongest when home is not only familiar but distinctive as well,” because it meant to me that home is not just the house you live in but also how you interact and react to your surroundings (Lynch 5). Additionally, I was surprised when discussing LA that he found inhabitants felt that “the grid pattern itself is an undifferentiated matrix, within which elements cannot always be located with confidence” (Lynch 33). This observation of Lynch’s emphasized Jacobs’ point to me that landmarks within a city are important for inhabitants and visitors to know their surroundings and feel at home within the space.
Citations:
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Random House, 1961.
Lynch, Kevin A. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.