Evaluative image of cities: with special reference to the city of Kandy

Abstract

Creating images is fundamental to people. 'Home', 'hometown', 'place of worship', 'grandmother', 'love' etc. provide finest examples. Creating images is also synonymous with evaluating images. This in turn provide for (re) creating images and thereby making physical settings as people's points of references in the process of living. For evaluation, certain environmental features are used. These are based on social, cultural and economic factors, past experiences, ambitions, aspirations, beliefs, attitudes and value systems. While the environmental features vary and root down essentially to individual levels, they in a broader sense become common to certain social groups. City inhabitants, as one such social group, have an image on their city. As Lynch (1960), explains, each city contains an imageability of its own, which has its own attributes that facilitate the process of image creation. Irrespective of the way images are created, people evaluate the image of their city. This too, varies in accordance with the factors cited above and, roots down to individual levels. However, city inhabitants as a distinct social group have common set of environmental features to evaluate their city and they are inherent to each city. When people evaluate the city, using these environmental features they identify certain places, buildings and objects as likeable elements and others as dislikeable elements. The totality or the summation of this likeability and dislikeability provide the 'evaluative image' of the city. Various studies have been made to identify the features of the environment that are used for evaluating city images. For Appleyard (1967), people are known cities for some combination of their form, visibility, use and significance. Nassar (1997) identifies these environmental features as likeable features, which is grouped into such factors as, historical significance, civility, order, natural features and openness. In doing so, these researchers have taken examples from different contexts and have arrived at different frameworks or groupings of such environmental features. While these frameworks show similarities as a whole by the factors that are highlighted, they also reveal identifiable differences, by the specific importance placed on each factor due to the distinct socio, cultural, economic, political backgrounds of the city contexts that are taken as examples. Thus the frameworks have different compositions as people evaluate their cities in different ways, suggesting that evaluative images of cities are essentially location based and need to be identified locally. This provides the premise of this study. It argues that city inhabitants have their own way of evaluating the city image and due to the host of factors cited above, the way the cities are evaluated differ from one place to the other. Taking Kandy as the case study, it reveals that even there could be different environmental features of adding into the already established frame of evaluating city images due to specific characteristics of a city.