The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 20 January 2010
by Kevin Lynch
"The aim of this book is modest," Kevin Lynch writes, " ... to discuss how the form of the external environment can encourage a present-enlarging and flexible image of time, how this knowledge may be used to improve the management of environmental change, and whether the sense of environmental time may have any bearing on social or psychological change."
Time is the medium through which our lives move. The landscape around us reflects how time has altered our lives, our social structures, our expectations of the future, and our understanding of the past. In America, there is a strong movement for the preservation of landmarks in our history. In some regions, even the most modest of structures obtain landmark status. Europeans more often adapt older structures for modern use, perhaps because European culture is more accustomed to the artefacts of the distant past. How we live in time, however, is also very much a question of the present. Our lives and social structures have strong cultural biases on the divisions of time (the eight-hour day, train schedules, lunchtime and bed time) and our physical environment reflects these biases. But it doesn't have to be any particular way, and perhaps there is a more organic and flexible way in which our environment can reflect our perceptions, and accomodate individual experiences of time. This is what Kevin Lynch's short but dense book is about. Not a lot of really accessible literature is available on the human perception of one of our most basic realities, our life in time. Lynch, writing in 1972, tries to pull out the threads of time from the landscape and to address the complex nature of our relationship with our built environment. We are shocked when old neighborhoods are bulldozed for new developments, we cling to old buildings and preserve them in an artificially arrested time period. How can we relate to our built environment so that there is a more organic movement of our living space through time? Lynch suggests a moving and flexible view of time in our environment, say two generations back and one generation forward, so that our built environment reflects our immediate experience of time and some generally knowable sense of the past and future. He writes from a time in which the 24-hour culture hasn't quite grown into what it is today, so some of his arguments have become moot in the interim. But some of what he suggests is pretty radical. He envisions nothing less than a social shift that allows us a more flexible sense of our lives in time, which includes a reduced attachment to the things of the past, unless those things are truly adaptable to a present and a future. He lays out some practical approaches to legislating a new vision of time, the new social structures that would be required, all of which serve a sort of liberation from the strictures of our time-based society. The book is well-written, but dense and a bit of a slow read. Still, it is also densely thoughtful and intensely thought-provoking. A refreshing (if somewhat dated) vision of a world transformed.