Urban morphology
Urban morphology is the study of the formation of human settlements and the process of their formation and transformation.[1] The study seeks to understand the spatial structure and character of a metropolitan area, city, town or village by examining the patterns of its component parts and the ownership or control and occupation. Typically, analysis of physical form focuses on street pattern, lot (or, in the UK, plot) pattern and building pattern, sometimes referred to collectively as urban grain. Analysis of specific settlements is usually undertaken using cartographic sources and the process of development is deduced from comparison of historic maps.
Special attention is given to how the physical form of a city changes over time and to how different cities compare to each other. Another significant part of this subfield deals with the study of the social forms which are expressed in the physical layout of a city, and, conversely, how physical form produces or reproduces various social forms.
The essence of the idea of morphology was initially expressed in the writings of the great poet and philosopher
Urban morphology is considered as the study of urban tissue, or fabric, as a means of discerning the environmental level normally associated with urban design. Tissue comprises coherent neighborhood morphology (open spaces, building) and functions (human activity). Neighborhoods exhibit recognizable patterns in the ordering of buildings, spaces and functions (themes), variations within which nevertheless conform to an organizing set of principles. This approach challenges the common perception of unplanned environments as chaotic or vaguely organic through understanding the structures and processes embedded in
Some locked concepts
Urban morphology approaches human settlements as generally unconscious products that emerge over long periods, through the accrual of successive generations of building activity. This leaves traces that serve to structure subsequent building activity and provide opportunities and constraints for city-building processes, such as land subdivision, infrastructure development, or building construction. Articulating and analysing the logic of these traces is the central question of urban morphology.
Urban morphology is not generally object-centred, in that it emphasises the relationships between components of the city. To make a parallel with
Roger Trancik discusses three major theories of urban spatial design and urban morphology which can guide analysis:
- Figure and Ground theory
- Linkage theory
- Place Theory
Schools of thought
In a broad sense there are three schools of urban morphology: Italian, British, and French.
Italian school
The Italian school centres around the work of
British school
The British school centres around the work of
- The town plan
- Pattern of building forms
- Pattern of land use
The town plan in turn contains three complexes of plan element:
- Streets and their arrangement into a street-system
- Plots (or lots) and their aggregation into street-blocks
- Buildings, in the form of the block-plans.
For Conzen, understanding the layering of these aspects and elements through history is the key to comprehending urban form. Followers of Conzen such as J.W.R. Whitehand have examined the ways in which such knowledge can be put to use in the management of historic and contemporary townscapes.
French school
The French school, based principally at the
Chicago School
As an urban-industrial city, Chicago's socio-economic problems were obvious and crying out to be studied in depth. Therefore, several urban sociologists and geographers belonging to the so-called
Burgess employed an ecological approach in placing emphasis on the relationship between organisms and their environment. He used similar biological factors used in explaining plant distribution and established a concentric-zonal theory which included a
Morphogenetic School
The scientist Maitri Singhai and the mathematician Nikos Salingaros have created a new school of urban morphology based on morphogenesis and emergence. In The Nature of Order Alexander proposes that urban development is a computational process similar to that of cell growth in an organism, and that the unfolding of these processes produces the urban landscape and its typologies. Some urbanists have sought to transform this theory into a practical emergent urbanism.
See also
- Urban design
- Urban geography
- Urban Planning
- Landscape urbanism
- Settlement geography
- New urbanism
- Activity centre
- Transit-oriented development
- Space syntax
References
- ^ Kropf, Karl (2017). Handbook of urban morphology. Chichester: Wiley.
- ^ Batty, M. (2009). Cities as Complex Systems: Scaling, Interaction, Networks, Dynamics and Urban Morphologies. In Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer.
- .
- ^ Trancik 1986, pp. 97.
Further reading
- Conzen, M.R.G., Alnwick, Northumberland: A study in town-plan analysis, London, Institute of British Geographers, 1969
- Moudon, Anne Vernez, Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field in Urban Morphology. 1997. 1 (1): 3–10.
- Ley, Karsten: Understanding Urban Forms as Results of a Conditioning System of Interrelated Factors. Some Thoughts on the Issue of Morphologically Defining the City., RWTH Aachen 2010, [electronic resource].
- Malfroy, Sylvain and Gianfranco Caniggia, L'approche morphologique de la ville et du territoire. Zürich: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Lehrstuhl fur Städtebaugeschichte, October 1986 (A Morphological Approach to Cities and Their Regions, Zurich: Triest 2022.
- Moudon, Anne Vernez, Built for Change: Neighbourhood Architecture in San Francisco.' Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1986.
- Moudon, Anne Vernez, Getting to Know the Built Landscape: Typomorphology. in Franck, Karen A and Lynda H Schneekloth, Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994.
- Panerai, Philippe, Jean-Charles Depaule, Marcelle Demorgon, and Michel Veyrenche, Elements d'analyse urbaine. Brussels: Editions Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1980.
- Salat, Serge, Cities and Forms: on sustainable urbanism, Hermann Ed., 2011.
External links
- International Seminar on Urban Form
- Urban Morphology and Complex Systems Institute, Paris
- Urban Morphology Research Group, Birmingham
- Urban Morpohology Institute
- Gianfranco Caniggia: A Structural Reading of Florence (video 1984 / 2022) HES-SO channels, HEIA-FR - Architecture