Write a 6 pages paper on the image of the city by kevin lynch and the world in a shopping mall by margaret crawford. These two texts make the reader think about, imagine, and analyze his own experience of moving around the city and shopping in its malls-those things that are done almost automatically in our lives. Lync and Crawford try to bring more awareness into everyday living, that is what unites them as writers but they do it in their own ways.

“The Image of the City” which at first glance looks like a book written for professionals turns out to be exciting reading for both city planners and city dwellers. It is an incredible capacity of the author who received education on the faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at MIT to tell complicated things in a simple manner (Andrade, 2005, 74). It is Einstein himself who remarked that “if you can`t explain it simply then you don`t understand it well enough”. Needless to say that Lynch not only knew and adored what he was writing about he also could make other readers fall in love with such a strange and distant thing as city planning (The Image of the City, 2011). It is no doubt that books on architecture were written before but Lynch was an innovator in a certain sense that is why his work became a significant event for the reader. What was so peculiar about “The Image of the City?” Lynch reflected on the way in which cities are perceived by dwellers and elaborated a certain methodology in this sphere comprehended by both architectures and local inhabitants. The author did not try to invent anything new, he used his professional knowledge of terminology to create a comprehensible concept of urban planning (De Lang, 2009, 13). Though his narrative manner may seem repetitive to a certain extent, it was utilized in order to explain the nuances of urban planning to an inexperienced reader in this sphere. Lynch was probably one of the first professionals who allowed himself to see the city as an ordinary man and that vision permitted the author to think of urban planning in terms of wayfinding (Tate, 2013, 78). The author contributed immensely to the understanding of the concept of mental mapping (Derek et al., 2009, 89). Lynch introduced the concept of “imageability” of a city- the possibility to create complicated virtual maps or images of the places they live (Gould & White, 1993, 22).

“We must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants”(Lynch, 1960, 45).