Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions

Planners face a controversial task because their professional role requires them to be spokespersons for the public interest. In a welter of conflicting pictures and voices, how might the public interest be discovered? Once identified, how might it be expressed so that competing publics attend to it? There are no easy answers, but the experience of planners today suggests ways of working and innovations of promise.

The focus on planning practice prompted the editors to analyze images that are now at work in our cities. For Vale and Warner, all city design and constructions offer material that people should include in images of their environment. The built and building city are part of the experience of all city dwellers; it is theirs to incorporate, interpret, or ignore. Essays included in this text trace the interplay between physical objects of planners and architects and the social experience and outlooks of image makers and their audiences.

Imaging the City explores urban image making from civic boosterism of medieval cities to iconic imagery of Times Square. Vale and Warner bring together urban historians, geographers, city planners, architects, and cultural commentators to analyze the creation of urban imagery from the signature skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur to the re-creation of the South Bronx and the use of city images in film, literature, television, and on the Internet. Urban dwellers, urban planners, architects, municipal officials, sociologists, urban historians—all will perceive their worlds with a heightened sense of awareness after reading this book.

"[A] useful reference, a collection to sample as one is introduced to the many ways the city can be imagined."

-- R. A. Beauregard, Choice

"[D]elightful... easily readable, thoughtful, and instructive for anyone concerned with the design and planning of cities-- [Kevin] Lynch would have found the essays fun, informative, and of broad value."

--D. Ryan, ARCADE--Architecture/Design in the Northwest

"[A] useful reference, a collection to sample as one is introduced to the many ways the city can be imagined."

-- R. A. Beauregard, Choice

"[G]rapples with how images of cities change"

--Planning

"One task for this volume is to help planners navigate this new media-induced era of city imaging. It is based on a colloquium offered at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 1998 and is grounded in Lynch's seminal work, The Image of the City... Students of image will be rewarded by spending time reading and reflecting on the MIT colloquium."

--Greg Andranovich, Journal of Urban Affairs

"[D]elightful... easily readable, thoughtful, and instructive for anyone concerned with the design and planning of cities-- [Kevin] Lynch would have found the essays fun, informative, and of broad value."

--D. Ryan, ARCADE--Architecture/Design in the Northwest

"[A] useful reference, a collection to sample as one is introduced to the many ways the city can be imagined."

-- R. A. Beauregard, Choice

"[G]rapples with how images of cities change"

--Planning

"One task for this volume is to help planners navigate this new media-induced era of city imaging. It is based on a colloquium offered at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 1998 and is grounded in Lynch's seminal work, The Image of the City... Students of image will be rewarded by spending time reading and reflecting on the MIT colloquium."

--Greg Andranovich, Journal of Urban Affairs

"[D]elightful... easily readable, thoughtful, and instructive for anyone concerned with the design and planning of cities-- [Kevin] Lynch would have found the essays fun, informative, and of broad value."

--D. Ryan, ARCADE--Architecture/Design in the Northwest

-[A] useful reference, a collection to sample as one is introduced to the many ways the city can be imagined.-

-- R. A. Beauregard, Choice

-[G]rapples with how images of cities change-

--Planning

-One task for this volume is to help planners navigate this new media-induced era of city imaging. It is based on a colloquium offered at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 1998 and is grounded in Lynch's seminal work, The Image of the City... Students of image will be rewarded by spending time reading and reflecting on the MIT colloquium.-

--Greg Andranovich, Journal of Urban Affairs

-[D]elightful... easily readable, thoughtful, and instructive for anyone concerned with the design and planning of cities-- [Kevin] Lynch would have found the essays fun, informative, and of broad value.-

--D. Ryan, ARCADE--Architecture/Design in the Northwest