1. A concept conceived by the American urbanist Kevin Lynch in his book The Image of the City (1960) to account for the way city residents use landmarks rather than maps to spatially orient themselves. Lynch researched this by stopping people in the street in three different cities---Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles---and asking them to draw impromptu maps of the city. What he found was that residents in dense cities like Boston, which has a great number of well-known and clearly defined landmarks (e.g., the Charles River, Faneuil Hall, and Boston Common), were more readily able to complete this task than residents in dispersed cities like Los Angeles, which at the time had relatively few such landmarks. Landmarks make the city âimageableâ he argued, meaning they enable residents and visitors alike to form images in their mind of the city as a whole. He concluded from this that cities require landmarks, real or artificial, in order to make them habitable. 2. In his essay âPostmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalismâ (1984), Jameson, Fredric adapts this concept to characterize the contribution cultural texts---particularly film and literature---make to our orientation in the world as a whole. Jameson combines Lynch with actant and Althusser, Louis to suggest that contemporary texts, in mapping our place in the world, provide a representation of our imaginary relation to the real conditions of our existence. His principal argument is that since the advent of globalization (which he equates with the enormous expansion of capitalism following the end of World War II), the world has become too complicated to represent by means of standard mimetic forms. This orientation in the world is, for Jameson, a synonym for class consciousness. See also geopolitical aesthetic; national allegory; postmodernism. Further Reading: I. Buchanan Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006). D. Gregory Geographical Imaginations (1994).