The Morphology Of Urban Landscapes

The urban morphology investigates settlement and urban forms. These do not change overnight, but in a process that follows certain principles. There is hardly anything more complex and contradictory than a city. Precisely because of this complexity, there is little agreement on definitions and procedural methods. This applies in particular to urban planning, which is not only concerned with analysis, but also with the design and transformation of cities. A variety of different urban morphological approaches exist today. The authors from the areas of research and practice investigate the relevance of the morphological perspective in the field of contemporary urban landscapes. They link historical roots and current approaches and explain the relationship between analysis and design.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach this addresses the academic and practical issues concerning the present and future of the built environment, arguing for its enlightened management in the future of our present-day environment.

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.

This book focuses on urban morphology and its application to urban conservation and management. The rapid disappearance of historical urban landscapes, especially in developing countries, is largely attributed to the lack of historic awareness and broad-brush demolition and redevelopment in urban development. The book provides a new, integrated morphological approach that enables fine-grained and cross-scale examination of urban form based on both its historicity and socio-economic potential, with the aims of informing more responsive and context-specific conservation and management of historical urban landscapes. The robustness of this new approach and the feasibility of its application to urban conservation practice are tested and demonstrated by three case studies in drastically different cultural contexts, namely Ludlow, a medieval town in the UK, Chinatown in Singapore and a historic quarter in Nanjing, China. Combining historico-geographical and configurational approaches, the book also makes a significant breakthrough in terms of coordinating and synthesizing different traditions of urban morphology, which has been a key challenge to this field over the past decades. In addition, by using multi-source data, ranging from conventional cartographic maps to computer-generated and open online data, the integrated approach innovatively relates qualitative and quantitative aspects of urban form and links the qualitative and quantitative analyses of formal structure. As an interdisciplinary study merging geography, urban history, urban planning and design, this book is to be primarily used as a reference book for graduate students and scholars in various fields who are interested in urban form and urban conservation and management. In addition, it offers practitioners in urban planning and design a useful tool for managing changes in historical urban landscapes. Lastly, it contributes to developing a common platform to facilitate dialogues among various stakeholders and participants in urban conservation practice.

'This is a textbook about cities or, more precisely, about the physical form of cities. It provides an overview of the main elements of urban form—streets, street blocks, plots and buildings—structuring our cities and the fundamental agents and processes of transformation shaping these elements. It applies this analytical framework to describe the evolution of cities over history as well as to explain the functioning of contemporary cities. After the initial focus on the 'object' (cities), the book introduces how different schools of thought have been dealing with this object since the emergence of Urban Morphology, as the science of urban form, in the turning to the twentieth century. Finally, the book identifies the main contributions of urban morphology to cities, societies and economies. This second edition of the book offers updated and more accurate knowledge on several morphological issues, presents expanded contents, and it has a more explicit didactic nature, including a set of exercises in the end of each chapter, that will help teachers and students (in architecture, geography, planning, history, sociology and urban studies) in acquiring and consolidating their urban morphological knowledge.

This is a book about cities or, more precisely, about the physical form of cities. It starts presenting the main elements of urban form – streets, urban blocks, plots and buildings – structuring our cities and the fundamental actors and processes of transformation shaping these elements. It then applies this analytical framework to describe the evolution of cities over history as well as to explain the functioning of contemporary cities. After the initial focus on the ‘object’ (cities) the book describes how different researchers and different schools of thought have been dealing with this object since the emergence of Urban Morphology, as the science of urban form, in the turning to the twentieth century. Finally, the book tries to identify what are the most important (and specific) contributions that Urban Morphology has to offer to contemporary cities, societies and economies.