The Evaluative Image of the City

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Summary: Excellent supplementary text for architecture and planning.
Review: I have used this book as a supplementary text for my environmental aesthetics course offered to undergraduate architecture and planning students. I assign pgs 1-78 as required reading. The material is clear and convincing. Even at this level, students can replicate the studies and/use the results in their own projects.

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Summary: At last, a book on city appearance that has substance
Review: The book describes a rigorous approach to the analysis of city appearance. It shows how behavioral science research is relevant to urban design-to identify concerns, clarify purposes, generate ideas, and shape public policy. Theory, case studies, research findings, and methodology are interwoven in a useful way. Future directions for both design and research are suggested. Nasar's book will be required reading in my urban design class.

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Summary: An excellent book about the visual quality of cities.
Review: The Evaluative Image of the City, what a great book! This is a very informative and useful book and I would encourage anyone interested in the visual quality of our cities to read it. I haven't seen any other book that so clearly answers the questions posed by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City - What does the city's form actually mean to the people living there? What can the city planners do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dwellers?

This book is one that will appeal to a broad spectrum of people - e.g., informed citizenry, city councils, city planners, urban designers, urban geographers, landscape architects, architects, as well as other academics/researchers. In fact, anyone interested in the visual form of our cities should read this book. It will give you a new perspective on how the visual form of the city impacts our enjoyment of cities. It also provides some clearly delineated methods for both assessing the image and modifying it. These techniques can be easily utilized by governmental or non-governmental agencies as well as interested citizens groups to better understand the evaluative image of their city, town, village or neighborhood and do something about it.

The author - Jack Nasar - has built upon the seminal work by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City. However, whereas Lynch placed the emphasis of his study on two key aspects of the image - identity and structure - Nasar has taken on the more difficult task of assessing the meaning (or evaluative aspect) of the image. Nasar has been able to go beyond identity and structure to present a very convincing argument that people have a shared evaluative image (which is equated with the likability of the city's visual form) and has made clear the importance of that image for city design.

Through the analysis of the shared evaluative images of two cities - Knoxville and Chattanooga - the author has been able to identify many of the key elements of urban likability - i.e., naturalness, upkeep/civilities, openness, historical significance, and order. But he doesn't merely leave this an academic exercise, he attempts to show how we can shape the evaluative image. He presents possible guidelines for desired outcomes, such as creating a(n) pleasant appearance, exciting appearance, relaxing appearance, or high-status appearance. Furthermore, he suggests how the methods and guidelines can be easily linked into local planning processes and policy.

What a contribution this readable and well-researched book is to the field of urban studies. Nasar has not only answered the questions posed by Lynch, but has also shown us how important our shared evaluative image is to the quality of our everyday life and how we can, not only, take responsibility for the visual quality of our cities, but, more importantly, take action.

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Summary: Eminently useful book
Review: This book is a major contribution to the fields of environmental aesthetics and urban design. Urban designers and architects often assume that they understand how people perceive their environment. Nasar has discovered how they really view their environment and evaluate it through effective practical research methods. Thus, the book gives us all clues to what is important to the user helping us to make design decisions that are meaningful.

Nasar also makes a case for effective empirical research in urban design, a subject that is often ignored by urban designers. He provides designers with a useful set of tools to evaluate perceptions of specific environments and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each giving hints to developing appropriate design research strategies.

The book blends theory, empirical methods with practical advice. Any architect, landscape architect or urban designer interested in creating environments sensitive to the user will find this book useful

Rating:
Summary: Informative book for practitioners and students.
Review: This book is a major contribution to the fields of environmental aesthetics and urban design. Urban designers and architects often assume that they understand how people perceive their environment. Nasar has discovered how they really view their environment and evaluate it through effective practical research methods. Thus, the book gives us all clues to what is important to the user helping us to make design decisions that are meaningful.

Nasar also makes a case for effective empirical research in urban design, a subject that is often ignored by urban designers. He provides designers with a useful set of tools to evaluate perceptions of specific environments and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each giving hints to developing appropriate design research strategies.

The book blends theory, empirical methods with practical advice. Any architect, landscape architect or urban designer interested in creating environments sensitive to the user will find this book useful

Rating:
Summary: Eminently useful book
Review: This is an eminently useful book for the many professionals embarked on civic improvement who also want to consult the larger comuinity. Readers might range from urban design teachers and professionals to public policy groups and planning commissions to downtown chambers of commerce, tourist commissions, and real estate groups. The book not only shows how to solicit information about citizen views and bring this together to form an "evaluative image," but it suggest basic strategies for presentation and effectiveness . . . Nasar brings a rich store of empirical research from the visual assessment field to this work, particularly as it tests the relationship between environmental processes and human spatial behavior . . . Overall, the book is extremely helpful, not only in providing thoughtful interpretaitons of prevailing tastes and brends, but in its wealth of suggestions for new research techniques and new methods of visual presentiation, both derived from his own work and the work of associates. I was informed by Nasar's suggestions for ways to refine and diversify evaluation methods, to make fruitful comparisons between cities, to identify successful city traits for emulation elsewhere, to predicte neighborhood needs from census data, and to research wihtin a low budget. The ultimate usefulness of this book lies in the application of planning strategies to engage the support of public groups for improving the city appearance.