Kevin Lynch

Kevin Lynch (1918–1984) was an influential American urban planner and author. He studied at Yale University, at Taliesin under Frank Lloyd Wright, and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and received a Bachelor’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947. He worked in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an urban planner, but was recruited to teach at MIT, where he taught for the rest of his life.

Lynch made seminal contributions to the field of city planning through empirical research on how individuals perceive and navigate the urban landscape. His books, including The Image of the City and A Theory of Good City Form, explore the presence of time and history in the urban environment, how urban environments affect children, and how to harness human perception of the physical form of cities and regions as the conceptual basis for good urban design.