Real Estate: Urban Planning - Book Report/Review Example

To do so, he focused on the immediate mental image that a particular city would create to the people residing in the city1. This review highlights some of the main highlights of Lynch ideas pertaining to the understanding of the urban environment. Moreover, this review also points out some of the flaws and strong points of Lynch’s approach in addressing the issues. To allow for easy comprehension of the text, Lynch organizes his ideas in a structured chapter pattern. There are four main chapters in the book, with each chapter dealing with a particular aspect of city landscapes.

The first chapter dubbed The image of the environment begins by portraying a typical layout of modern cities. Lynch description of the how to appreciate and understand a modern environment is remarkable. He contends that most modern cities are laid out such that appreciating and experiencing the true layout will require relating a particular aspect with the surrounding. One of the major aspects of a city that enables people to create, easily, mental image is legibility of the city landscape. The first chapter elaborates on legibility of a city terming it as a crucial factor that allows for easy recognition of parts and subsequent organization of the parts into a logical pattern2.

On the other hand, the ability for people living within urban environments to form the mental cues about their surrounding is a natural phenomenon that develops along other natural senses such as that of smell and color among other sensations. Lynch explains that a unique landscape provides a skeleton upon which individuals can erect their socially important cues. Furthermore, he argues that the urge for individuals to understand and form a mental picture of their surrounding stems from deep within a person.

This is evident based on the fact that when an individual loses his sense of direction, he tends to become