J W R Whitehand And The Historico Geographical Approach To Urban Morphology

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J.W.R. Whitehand and the Historico-geographical Approach to Urban Morphology

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.
ISUF, Urban Morphology and Human Settlements

This book offers insight into the most important scientific society on urban morphology worldwide: the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF). After addressing the three-decade history of ISUF, the book analyses the present and future of this scientific society, of urban morphology, and of human settlements. This timely and fundamental reflection gathers contributions from present and past leadership of ISUF since its inception in 1994. Over the last three decades, the urban world has undergone major changes: the urban population is now higher than the rural population; more than half of the world's population lives on a single continent—Asia, home to almost three billion people in China and India alone—so geographical imbalance is considerable; and while half of the urban population still lives in small cities of fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, the number of megacities has increased significantly. How does the physical form of cities in different parts of the world respond to these dynamics? Can cities preserve fundamental elements of humankind's urban heritage while accommodating changes driven by the main socioeconomic and environmental needs of today? The field of urban morphology has been continuously adjusting to the essential dynamics of its object of study. While developing and strengthening its most robust theories, concepts, and methods designed after the mid-twentieth century, urban morphology has been able to integrate innovative approaches for describing and explaining the emerging dynamics and patterns of urban form—often incorporating groundbreaking technologies for data collection, analysis, modelling, and simulation. But what is the role of urban morphology in science and society today? How effective is it in communicating a rigorous understanding of the urban landscape both to academics and researchers in other fields and to citizens in general? How successful is it in providing practitioners with relevant and useful knowledge that informs their action on cities' form and structure through spatial planning, urban design, and architecture? This book addresses these fundamental questions, offering academics, researchers, and practitioners comprehensive knowledge on human settlements, the field of urban morphology, and the role of ISUF in promoting groundbreaking morphological thought.
Urban Morphology

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.