Urban legibility is never innocent. A city can become readable to its inhabitants, but it can also become readable to landlords, platforms, police systems, speculative finance, welfare algorithms and administrative extraction. SyntheticLegibility names this double condition: the production of readability through technical, spatial and symbolic systems that may either support civic orientation or intensify exclusion. This reader studies the threshold where legibility becomes expulsion, where digital objects participate in urban sorting, and where the city’s visibility must be politically questioned.

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City remains foundational because it gives urban form a vocabulary of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Legibility, in Lynch, supports orientation, memory and environmental confidence. The readable city helps inhabitants locate themselves within a meaningful spatial structure. Yet contemporary urbanism complicates this promise. The legible city is not always democratic. When systems of power read neighbourhoods, bodies and behaviours, legibility may become a mechanism of capture. SyntheticLegibility therefore extends Lynch into a critical digital condition: who reads, through which device, for what purpose, and with what consequences?