Pleasure, Fun and Flow: Urban Travel in the works of Kevin Lynch

Through a life long commitment to urban design and urban planning, the legacy of American urban scholar Kevin Lynch is today influential in urban design practice as well as in education. In particular this paper will deal with the way Lynch discussed, saw and analysed the role of urban mobility. The work of Lynch offer an opportunity to challenge mainstream ways of thinking about urban mobility that often base the assessment of mobility and its related infrastructural environments on a ‘moral geography' of negative judgement. The most famous example being the automatic by which the notion of ‘non-place' uncritically is being attached to any urban infrastructure space (Augé 1995). Here the argument and analysis based upon the works of Lynch offer different and much more nuanced ground - and thus ultimately more insight and knowledge rather than just moral condemnation. Needless to say there are plenty of uninspiring and socially inactive sites for the contemporary mobile urbanite. However, the point about studying urban mobility through the perspective of Lynch is that we may realise that there are (or perhaps should be) other potentials and options. Thus there are two main points to be made in this paper. First of all, we must understand the ‘aesthetics of mobility'. That is to say we have to understand mobility as more than movement from point A to point B. Rather meaning, culture and identity are produced whilst ‘on the move'. Secondly, the ‘analytical disciplines' of urban study (sociology, political science, geography) has much to gain from looking into the insights produced within the ‘interventionist disciplines' (e.g. urban design, architecture, city planning). Interestingly then the works and thoughts of Kevin Lynch offer insight on both points.