A Glossary Of Urban Form

This book explores various ways of identifying and understanding the character of historic townscapes from a systematic and comparative perspective. It outlines several genetic approaches to the study of urban form, grounded in the traditions of geographical analysis but wholly interdisciplinary in their content and implications. It develops a philosophical and methodological basis for the field of urban morphology, stressing the reciprocal relations between town plan, building fabric and land and building utilisation. It views these elements as spatially variable accumulations and selective survivals of forms regulated by shifting patterns of corporate and individual decisions made from one historical period to another - in perpetual tension between resistance and change. Several of the essays in this collection establish and exemplify conceptual principles and axioms of urban morphological development in historic towns, and introduce numerous specific processes by which built forms are created and juxtaposed in urban space. Other essays apply these precepts by interpreting a number of case studies of historic towns in Britain, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and elsewhere. The closing essay offers a unique interpretation of the regional varieties to be found in medieval European urbanism, based on differing traditions of social formation and morphological outcomes.

This book is a critiqued collection of over 200 terms regularly used to name the urban void, from the terrain vague to the buffer zone. As the landscape architect James Corner has pointed out, a void cannot be labeled because "to name it is to claim it in some way." By listing existing terms, A Glossary of Urban Voids is an attempt to name the unnamable, to define that which should have no precise definition. It records terms, names, and labels used to designate leftover spaces resulting from processes of urban abandonment that originate from some kind of obsolescence or loss. Besides obvious consequences, these processes of abandonment open up the space, liberating it from existing ideological frameworks (such as financial, capital, or cultural frameworks), allowing for divergent spatialities to emerge, and ultimately offering opportunities for the imagination and conceptualization of an alternative type of public space. Using the glossary as a theoretical tool, this book presents the most relevant questions on the issue of the urban void and its potential role as public space.

Over recent decades, the historico-geographical approach to urban morphology has been prominent in the debate on the physical form of our cities and on the agents and processes shaping that form over time. With origins in the work of the geographer M.R.G. Conzen, this approach has been systematically developed by researchers in different parts of the world since the 1960s. This book argues that J.W.R. Whitehand structured an innovative and comprehensive school of urban morphological thought grounded in the invaluable basis provided by Conzen. It identifies the development of several dimensions of the concepts of “fringe belt” and “morphological region” and the systematic exploration of the themes of “agents of change,” “comparative studies” and “research and practice” as key contributions by Whitehand to this school of thought. The book presents contributions from leading international experts in the field addressing these major issues.

People have designed cities long before there were urban designers. In Shapers of Urban Form, Peter Larkham and Michael Conzen have commissioned new scholarship on the forces, people, and institutions that have shaped cities from the Middle Ages to the present day. Larkham and Conzen collect new essays in "urban morphology," the people-centered predecessor to contemporary theories of top-down urban design. Shapers of Urban Form focuses on the social processes that create patterns of urban forms in four discrete periods: Pre-modern, early modern, industrial-era and postmodern development. Featuring studies of English, American, Western and Eastern European, and New Zealand urban history and urban form, this collection is invaluable to scholars of urban design and town planning, as well as urban and economic historians.

This book brings together contributions from some of the foremost international experts in the field of urban morphology and addresses major questions such as: What exactly is urban morphology? Why teach it? What contents should be taught in an urban morphology course? And how can it be taught most effectively? Over the past few decades there has been a growing awareness of the importance of urban form in connection with the many dimensions – social, economic, and environmental – of our lives in cities. As a result, urban morphology – the science of urban form, and now over a century old – has taken on a key role in the debate on the past, present and future of cities. And yet it remains unclear how urban morphologists should convey the main morphological theories, concepts and techniques to our students – the potential researchers of, and practitioners in, the urban landscapes of tomorrow. This book is the first to address that gap, providing concrete guidelines on how to teach urban morphology, complemented by EXAMPLES OF EXERCISES FROM THE AUTHORS’ LESSONS.

It is necessary to explore the scale of urban planning with the subject matter of architecture, which does not stop at building designs. Neither does it become urban just because architects design blocks of buildings and the outdoors space between. The urban space must be a pre-existence with respect to building projects, which shall successively interpret and carry it out. Knowledge and means at our disposal must also be determined in terms of physical planning as to define, establish, and/or issue standards for an urban space. The creation of this architectural object - urban space - requires a reformulation of understanding methods and transmitting the outdoors space's form independently from the building project, which shall interpret the latter and carry it out. Those subjects send us to different kinds of problems: To clarify the town concepts of designers and citizens; To know the relation between the town concept and its physical expression; To define the formal expression of urban planning; To discuss the morphology characteristics that translate the town concept to be implemented; To adapt professional practices to new architectonic responsibilities. In this paper we develop an approach to the relation between the town concept and its physical expression, as well as the form characteristics that will be established in urban plans.