After reading Kevin Lynch’s section, The City Image and Its Elements I wanted to break down Chicago within Lynch’s five elements or physical forms. Lynch lists these five elements as; paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Lynch describes paths as channels that people move along, and that most people observe the city as they travel along these paths. For me one path I observe the city from on almost a daily bases is Chicago Avenue from the bus that travels along this path. At the beginning of my path, I see small Ukrainian shops and bakeries, and a large chain grocery store. Within a few blocks, the view from my path changes to small Mexican restaurants and “western” clothing stores and occasionally a random contemporary trendy restaurant appears every so often looking oddly out of place. Then comes a bridge that goes over the Kennedy Expressway and that is my signal that it is almost time for me to get off this path and onto another one, the subway Blue line. This path is underground and so I cannot really observe the city in the same manner.
If I stay on my original path, which I do occasionally for numerous different reasons, my observations from my path clearly show that I am getting into a denser part of the city. A few more blocks on the bus and I see some sort of industrial site that looks not only to be decaying, but no one ever seems to be working there either. My view shifts immediately as the bus beginnings to cross over the Chicago River and there are numerous residential buildings lining the river that I imagine to be really nice inside and very expensive to live in. I am now in an area or neighborhood that is called River North. As the bus continues to travel east, I see a chunk of public housing and a community garden that both seem so out of place amongst the high-rise condominiums and upscale restaurants. I always wonder how long it will be before both are torn down, as it
seems like it is just matter time. The bus continues and passes under an L-train and I always think about how slow that particular train, the Brown line is, and how I hate when I have to take it. I see some red awnings for a Christian bookstore, which to me is a sign that I am getting close to the Red line subway stop. I see another red awning for a noodle shop and then at the next block a building for a restaurant painted completely red. If I am not paying attention during those few blocks I get confused when I look up and see where I am at since all three happen to be on the left side and red. Here is where I would get off and get on the Red Line subway, a change of path that would take me underground.
I find it interesting that Lynch starts with the path, as it really is the way we observe our city and find the other four elements he writes about. Edges are everywhere, but it is most obvious on my path when I am in River North and see a chunk of public housing that seems so out of place next to an arts district, high-rise condominiums, and upscale restaurants. Just in these few sentences, I described a district the third element of physical form that Lynch describes, River North. The description for River North under a tourism website for the city of Chicago Chicagotraveler.com describes the district “as a chic, cultural hub filled with art galleries, antique stores, boutiques and of course urban professionals. Boasting Chicago’s highest concentration of restaurants, this small neighborhood has become a favorite destination for locals and tourists alike. River North is aptly named; it lies north of the Loop, west of famed Michigan Avenue and south of Chicago Avenue, with the Chicago River as its boundary on the south and the west.” According to this websites, description of the district the public housing sits directly on the outer edge, as it is on the north
side of Chicago Avenue.
I mention a few nodes along my path that are particular to many others and me who travel this same route. The first node is the Blue Line subway stop along Chicago Avenue. It is not only a subway stop, but also a major intersection. Chicago is set up as grid with an occasional diagonal throughout the city, this happens to be a spot where two of them meet. This is a “node” Lynch is writing about, “they may be primarily
junctions, places of a break in transportation, crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another.” This particular spot in the city does all these things for many others and me. We shift from one structure to another, leaving the street we were traveling on and going underground to a subway. There is crossing over of multiple streets, many of which have their own buses running along them. Also right next to the node happens to be a major expressway that can take one in and out of the city.
The last of the elements that Lynch discusses is a landmark, usually a building of some sort of importance, or something that may be in the distance giving one a sense of direction. Traveling along Chicago Avenue that landmark is the John Hancock building, though I do not see it at every moment along my path when I do see it I know I am traveling east. When I first moved to the city of Chicago, that building was a
directional land marker for me, allowing me to understand where I was within the city.
It is clear how along our paths we observe the rest of the elements that Lynch writes about making up our mental image of the city. My landmark, the John Hancock building has become one of my favorite buildings in the city of Chicago, maybe because I see it almost everyday or that it guided me on my path when I first moved here, but it is always a comfort to me. This structure is dark, black, with antennas at the top and one of the largest buildings in the city, it does not sound comforting, but because it allows me to know my place within the city, as Lynch writes it allows for, “Structuring and identifying the environment”.
Lynch uses the term “way-finding” that he describes as having a mental image of the outside world and
memories of experiences that guide us and allow us to organize our surroundings. He mentions that there are “way-finding” devices that one could use along their way such as maps and route signs, but today devices to help us find our way are much more vast and popular, making it almost impossible to get lost. Before one goes somewhere, they can check Google maps, an iPhone, or GPS device, to not only get the directions, but the most efficient route, by check traffic or when the next bus or train is coming through a tracking device. These all alter our paths, although I described a common path I take everyday, I know that there are multiple paths that I could take and I check before I leave the house which will be the most efficient depending on the arrival of a bus or the flow of traffic. If a path is going to take much longer do to a late bus or heavy traffic, I will take different path. I wonder if this gives one the opportunity to learn a few different paths or if it takes away ones need to really observe their path as they travel, since there is the comfort of never getting lost with your handy way-finding device always with you.
Photographer Jay Wolke’s project along the divide, photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago not only show one of Chicago’s most prominent pathways in and out of the city, but also edges,
districts, nodes, and even landmarks. The Dan Ryan itself is seen as a landmark, but Wolke’s photographs seem to speak about the edge, how the expressway runs through “Chicago’s densely populated South Side neighborhoods.” The expressway is a very important pathway that many people travel every day and this is their way of observing the city.
In Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the City, he writes, “ ‘The city,’ like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.” These interconnected properties could easily be Lynch’s five elements of physical form. De Certeau writes about the pedestrian speech act and its three characteristics, the present, the discrete, and the “phatic.” He writes then when a pedestrian utilizes the pathways set up for him/her in the city, the pedestrian invents ways that do not necessarily conform to the pathways intended purpose, for example when one creates a short cut through an alley, or crosses out side of the crosswalk. When I think of one maneuvering through a city in ways that it had not been intended to be navigated through, I think of the essay Lethal Theory written by Eyal Weizman where he writes about the Israeli Defense Forces’ inverse geometry. During battle soldiers moved through the city in “over-ground tunnels” by blasting through walls moving horizontally and through ceilings vertically. The soldiers did not travel through the normal pathways set up by some urban city plan of Nablus, they created a pathway that allowed the city to become the medium of warfare.
