Transport infrastructure seems to have a repelling nature when it enters the heart of a city, yielding voids in the adjacent urban fabric. The scale and speed of the regional connections it prioritizes are in opposition to the immediate needs and desires of the local scale that it severs. Air pollution, noise pollution, visual and physical barriers often lead to entire areas being neglected.

When these transport lines double as municipal boundaries that delineate one neighbourhood from another, the severity of their impact is intensified and inherently brings to light any nesting socio-cultural divide. “By emphasizing the question of transport, contemporary urbanism isolates people from each other, preventing them from using their energy for genuine participation. […] ‘For in fact one doesn’t live somwhere in the city; one lives somewhere in the hierarchy.’”(Heynen 1999)

But infrastructures can also be flexible and anticipatory, as Stan Allen explains, “they [can] work with time and [be] open to change.” “What seems crucial is the degree of play designed into the system, slots left unoccupied, space left free for unanticipated development.” (Allen 1999) The use of viaducts not only allows roads and railways to adapt to irregularities in terrain and accommodate existing conditions but also provides a useable ground plane where exactly this type of ‘unanticipated development’ can be realized.

The 1950s presented a time of necessary critique- both of urban form and urban culture. Central to the debate was the functionalism that had been the school of thought of the Bauhaus and ‘good design’ for so many years. (Heynen) Coupled with the domination of the automobile, cities were transformed by new infrastructural systems at the urban scale that recognized the automobile as a priority, namely highways and boulevards.

The repercussions of such initiatives are what define the form and feel of the American cities that Kevin Lynch investigates in The Image of The City. Residents of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles had been surveyed and Lynch attempts to analyze their stories in terms of 5 elements: Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks. (Lynch, 47)

While Lynch’s systematic approach is useful in identifying the puzzle pieces of a city, one gets the impression that qualities of the experiences themselves get lost in his functionalist translation. But what gets lost in Lynch, can be recovered in the Situationist International, whose social critique of the urban experience emphasizes a means of action. I propose that for each of the 5 elements that outline a city’s imageability (Lynch, 9), there is a Situationists’ response. Together, their opposing perspectives and differing goals form a dialectic on the psychogeographic experience of the city.