Rethinking Kevin Lynch's Lesson in Mapping Today's City

The paper reflects about the new technologies impact on the city, on changing of social relations, giving a special space to a new reading of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960): the book, written in the age of Kennedy’s democratic policy for racial integration had as major result that still today, in the north American cities, it cannot decide any public plan of urban redevelopment without consulting people about crucial issues like identity, the possibility of communicating a sense, the readability, etc., all issues that Lynch put at the core of his research. As result of these experiences and practices it came out an idea about urban design that is impossible to restrict in the hands of few technicians or public administrators, but it has rather to refer to communities consultancy practices and to projects to be shared, in other words to projects are closely related to the field of democracy processes. So the drawing language proposed by Lynch in mapping assumes a specific care for the communicative not spoken codes, in any case codes able to convey information toward a wide range of people. It seems clear enough, that the crucial point of communicating information allows us to get in touch nowadays to the internet age trends and put thus the question: are digital tools useful to approach a growing multitude of people to decision democracy processes about transformation of parts of cities, both central or periphery areas? The multimedia communication is able in fact to convey not only not spoken contents but iconic ones too: in other words, the images language can reach a wider number of people rather the written information can do. From this point of view, the “internet revolution” concerns both the capacity to connect huge quantities of citizens and the possibility to use a language that can be simplified even applying to media easy for their approachability. Inside then the relationship among information and communication techniques and social groups, it may be appropriate to reflect not only on a theoretical point of view but also showing some meaningful examples.