Examining the Urban Identity in Planned Versus Organically Grown Cities Part 2 Dissertation 2024 Conrad Daly University College Dublin | Ireland This essay developed out of a keen interest and fascination with cities and how the world of architecture impacts and is at play with the city at a large scale. The work grew out of an initial question of how architecture influences our perception and the identity of a city.What stemmed from this was a piece of work that aimed at carefully analysing multiple cities through comparing the factors that contributed to their current identity as well as the resulting effects of such factors.Urban planner and author Kevin Lynch wrote extensively about urban identity and its importance in creating a legible city which can in turn define the ‘image of the city’. Lynch believed that in order for a city to become legible, it must incorporate a cohesive network of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. While this framework alone, as Lynch notes himself later in his career, does not offer an optimum and complete framework for city design, it can however aid in improving its legibility and further, its identity.The essay seeks to examine this framework within two planned cities and two cities of predominantly organic growth and to study how, in each case, it influences their respective identity in an attempt to propose how this theory can be applied to urban design today in order to achieve cities of stronger identity. Tutor(s) Daniel Pathmanathan Sudhershan