Urban morphology
Encyclopedia
Urban morphology is the study of the form of human settlements and the process of their formation and transformation. 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 process of its development. This can involve the analysis of physical structures at different scales as well as patterns of movement, land use, 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 Goethe (1790); the term as such was first used in bioscience. Recently it is being increasingly used in geography
, geology
, philology
and other subjects. In American geography, urban morphology as a particular field of study owes its origins to Lewis Mumford
, James Vance and Sam Bass Warner. Peter Hall of the UK is also a central figure.
Urban morphology is also considered as the study of urban tissue, or fabric, as a means of discerning the underlying structure of the built landscape
. This approach challenges the common perception of unplanned environments as chaotic or vaguely organic through understanding the structures and processes embedded in urbanisation.
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 linguistics
, the focus is placed on an active vocabulary
and its syntax
. There is thus a tendency to use morphological techniques to examine the ordinary, non-monumental areas of the city and to stress the process and its structures over any given state or object, therefore going beyond architecture and looking at the entire built landscape and its internal logic.
The tool for analysis Urban Morphology have some theories like: Space syntax, Figure and Ground
cities
Three Theories of Urban Spatial Design:
Figure and Ground theory is founded on the study of the relationship of land coverage of buildings as solid mass (figure) to open voids (ground) Each urban environment has an existing pattern of solid and voids, and figure and ground approach to spatial design is an attempt to manipulate these relationships by adding to, subtracting from, or changing the physical geometry of the pattern. The objective of these manipulations is to clarify the structure of urban space in a city or district by establishing a hierarchy of spaces of different sizes that are individually enclosed but ordered directionally in relation to each other.(Roger Trancik,1986:97.in Finding the Lost Space)
The linkage theory is derived from "lines" connecting one element to another. These lines are formed by street, pedestrian ways, linear open spaces or other linking elements that physically connect the parts of the city.
The Italian school centres around the work of Saverio Muratori
and dates from the 1940s. Muratori attempted to develop an 'operational history' for the cities he studied (in particular Venice and Rome), which then provided the basis for the integration of new architectural works in the syntax of the urban tissue. Stemming from this view are contributions such as Gianfranco Caniggia's, which conceptualise the city as an organic result of a dynamic procedural typology
, which see political-economic forces as shaping a built landscape already conditioned by a particular logic, set of elements, and characteristic processes.
The British school centres around the work of M.R.G. Conzen, who developed a technique called 'town-plan analysis.' The key aspects for analysis according to Conzen are:
The town plan in turn contains three complexes of plan element:
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.
The French school, based principally at the Versailles School of Architecture, has generated extensive methodological knowledge for the analysis of urbanisation processes and related architectural models. Much emphasis is placed upon the importance of built space for sustaining social practices; the relationship between the built landscape and the social world is dialectical, with both shaping the other.
, attempted to analyse the morphology of Chicago in order to these problems.
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 Central Business District
, an area of transition (invaded by business and migrants), and area of upper class apartments and several commuter zones and suburbs on the edge of the city.
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.
Gilliland, Jason and Pierre Gauthier, The Study of Urban Form in Canada. Urban Morphology 2006 10(1) 51-66.
Malfroy, Sylvain and Gianfranco Caniggia, L'approche morphologique de la ville et du territoire. Zurich: Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Lehrstuhl fur Stadtebaugesichte, October 1986.
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.
Metropolitan area
The term metropolitan area refers to a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing. A metropolitan area usually encompasses multiple jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships,...
, city
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
, town
Town
A town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size a settlement must be in order to be called a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world, so that, for example, many American "small towns" seem to British people to be no more than villages, while...
or village
Village
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand , Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New...
by examining the patterns of its component parts and the process of its development. This can involve the analysis of physical structures at different scales as well as patterns of movement, land use, ownership or control and occupation. Typically, analysis of physical form focuses on street
Street
A street is a paved public thoroughfare in a built environment. It is a public parcel of land adjoining buildings in an urban context, on which people may freely assemble, interact, and move about. A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, but is more often paved with a hard, durable...
pattern, lot (or, in the UK, plot) pattern and building
Building
In architecture, construction, engineering, real estate development and technology the word building may refer to one of the following:...
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 Goethe (1790); the term as such was first used in bioscience. Recently it is being increasingly used in geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
, geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
, philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
and other subjects. In American geography, urban morphology as a particular field of study owes its origins to Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer...
, James Vance and Sam Bass Warner. Peter Hall of the UK is also a central figure.
Urban morphology is also considered as the study of urban tissue, or fabric, as a means of discerning the underlying structure of the built landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
. This approach challenges the common perception of unplanned environments as chaotic or vaguely organic through understanding the structures and processes embedded in urbanisation.
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, infrastructureInfrastructure
Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...
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 linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, the focus is placed on an active vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
and its syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
. There is thus a tendency to use morphological techniques to examine the ordinary, non-monumental areas of the city and to stress the process and its structures over any given state or object, therefore going beyond architecture and looking at the entire built landscape and its internal logic.
The tool for analysis Urban Morphology have some theories like: Space syntax, Figure and Ground
cities
Three Theories of Urban Spatial Design:
- Figure and Ground
- Linkage theory
- Place Theory
Figure and Ground theory is founded on the study of the relationship of land coverage of buildings as solid mass (figure) to open voids (ground) Each urban environment has an existing pattern of solid and voids, and figure and ground approach to spatial design is an attempt to manipulate these relationships by adding to, subtracting from, or changing the physical geometry of the pattern. The objective of these manipulations is to clarify the structure of urban space in a city or district by establishing a hierarchy of spaces of different sizes that are individually enclosed but ordered directionally in relation to each other.(Roger Trancik,1986:97.in Finding the Lost Space)
The linkage theory is derived from "lines" connecting one element to another. These lines are formed by street, pedestrian ways, linear open spaces or other linking elements that physically connect the parts of the city.
Schools of thought
In a broad sense there are three schools of urban morphology: Italian, British, and French.The Italian school centres around the work of Saverio Muratori
Saverio Muratori
Saverio Muratori was an Italian architect, regarded as one of the pioneers of typomorphological investigations of urban form.-Early life and career:...
and dates from the 1940s. Muratori attempted to develop an 'operational history' for the cities he studied (in particular Venice and Rome), which then provided the basis for the integration of new architectural works in the syntax of the urban tissue. Stemming from this view are contributions such as Gianfranco Caniggia's, which conceptualise the city as an organic result of a dynamic procedural typology
Typology (urban planning and architecture)
Typology is the taxonomic classification of characteristics commonly found in buildings and urban places, according to their association with different categories, such as intensity of development , degrees of formality, and school of thought...
, which see political-economic forces as shaping a built landscape already conditioned by a particular logic, set of elements, and characteristic processes.
The British school centres around the work of M.R.G. Conzen, who developed a technique called 'town-plan analysis.' The key aspects for analysis according to Conzen are:
- 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.
The French school, based principally at the Versailles School of Architecture, has generated extensive methodological knowledge for the analysis of urbanisation processes and related architectural models. Much emphasis is placed upon the importance of built space for sustaining social practices; the relationship between the built landscape and the social world is dialectical, with both shaping the other.
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, such as WI Thomas (concerned with migration), Robert E Park and Ernest BurgessErnest Burgess
Ernest Watson Burgess was an urban sociologist born in Tilbury, Ontario. He was educated at Kingfisher College in Oklahoma and continued graduate studies in sociology at the University of Chicago. In 1916, he returned to the University of Chicago, as a faculty member. Burgess was hired as an...
, attempted to analyse the morphology of Chicago in order to these problems.
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 Central Business District
Central business district
A central business district is the commercial and often geographic heart of a city. In North America this part of a city is commonly referred to as "downtown" or "city center"...
, an area of transition (invaded by business and migrants), and area of upper class apartments and several commuter zones and suburbs on the edge of the city.
Morphogenetic School
The scientist Christopher AlexanderChristopher Alexander
Christopher Wolfgang Alexander is a registered architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the world...
and the mathematician Nikos Salingaros
Nikos Salingaros
Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh...
have created a new school of urban morphology based on morphogenesis
Morphogenesis
Morphogenesis , is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape...
and emergence
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....
. In The Nature of Order
The Nature of Order
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe is a four-volume work by Christopher Alexander published in 2003-2004. In his earlier work, Alexander attempted to formulate the principles that lead to a good built environment as patterns, or recurring design...
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 designUrban designUrban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has...
- Urban PlanningUrban planningUrban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....
- Landscape urbanismLandscape urbanismLandscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the last fifteen years...
- New urbanismNew urbanismNew Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use...
- Activity centreActivity centreActivity centre is a term used in urban planning and design for a mixed-use urban area where there is a concentration of commercial and other land uses...
- Transit-oriented developmentTransit-oriented developmentA transit-oriented development is a mixed-use residential or commercial area designed to maximize access to public transport, and often incorporates features to encourage transit ridership...
Selected references
Conzen, M.R.G., Alnwick, Northumberland: A study in town-plan analysis, London, Institute of British Geographers, 1969Gilliland, Jason and Pierre Gauthier, The Study of Urban Form in Canada. Urban Morphology 2006 10(1) 51-66.
Malfroy, Sylvain and Gianfranco Caniggia, L'approche morphologique de la ville et du territoire. Zurich: Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Lehrstuhl fur Stadtebaugesichte, October 1986.
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.
External links
- The Urban Morphology Lab
- Emergent Urbanism
- Laboratoire de recherche: histoire architecturale et urbaine - sociétés
- International Seminar on Urban Form
- Urban Morphology Research Group - University of Birmingham
- Urban Conservation / Design / Form - Research project concerned with Urban Morphology at Birmingham City University
- NewUrbanism.org
- The Dignity of the Profane , Institute of Urban Design Bremen, Germany