Kevin Andrew Lynch (1918 Chicago, Illinois - 1984 Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts), American urban planner and author. Chicago (officially named the City of Chicago) is the third largest city in the United States and the largest inland city in the country, with an official population of 2,896,016, as of the 2000 census. ... Marthas Vineyard is roughly triangular in shape, and is approximately 30 kilometers in length. ...

Lynch studied at Yale, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and briefly under Frank Lloyd Wright before graduating from MIT in 1947, becoming a professor of urban planning in 1963 and staying until his death almost 35 years later. This article is about the institution of higher learning in the United States. ... Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI, is a large university in Troy, New York, near Albany, founded in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer. ... Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was one of the most prominent architects of the first half of the 20th century. ... MIT redirects here. ...

Lynch's most famous work, "The Image of the City" published in 1960, is the result of a five-year study on how users perceive and organize spatial information as they navigate through cities. Using three cities three disparate cities as examples (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles), Lynch reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and predictable ways, forming mental maps with five elements:

• paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel;
• edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
• districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some identity or character;
• nodes, focal points, intersections or loci; and
• landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as reference points

In the same book Lynch also coined the words "imageability" and "wayfinding". "Image of the City" has had important and durable influence in the fields of urban planning and environmental psychology. In architecture wayfinding refers to the user experience of orientation and choosing a path within the built environment, and also refers to the set of architectural and/or design elements that aids orientation. ... Urban, city, or town planning, deals with design of the built environment from the municipal and metropolitan perspective. ... Environmental psychology is an interdisciplinary field focused on the interplay between humans and their surroundings. ...