The Kevin Lynch Award was established to honor the memory of Kevin Lynch, an MIT alumnus, urban designer, author and member of the faculty of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning for thirty years. Through his practice, research and writing, Lynch encouraged planning and design professionals and students to adopt approaches to planning that are sensitive to the importance of place as well as the importance of people’s experience of place and to the importance of balancing physical interventions with consideration for the natural environment. As someone who accepted the reality of climate change early on, Lynch understood the delicate relationship between humans and their environment, and he worked to develop methods of practice to better integrate individuals’ perceptions into professional recommendations and theories to better explain the complex relationships among people and the built environment. Since its establishment in 1988, the MIT department of urban studies and planning has granted Kevin Lynch Awards to individuals or organizations whose work embodies and advances Kevin Lynch’s research, as developed in his seminal works, Image of the City (1960), What Time is this Place? (1972), Good City Form (1981) and Site Planning (1984). Nominees have been selected for their plans, books, research, designed projects, media productions, public processes, or similar contributions to merit the award. 

This year's awardee will be Kofi Boone, FASLA. Kofi Boone is a Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor and University Faculty Scholar at NC State University. Kofi is a Detroit native and a graduate of the University of Michigan. His work is in the overlap between landscape architecture and environmental justice with specializations in democratic design and interpreting cultural landscapes. He is the founder of the Just Communities Lab, Immediate Past President of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, and serves on the boards of Black Landscape Architects Network and the Land Loss Prevention Project.

This year’s Lynch Award nominations and deliberations were done in collaboration between the City Design and Development faculty at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the Urbanism faculty at the Department of Architecture at MIT.