Urban Morphology

Urban morphology is the study of the form, physical structure, plan and layout, elements of town-scapes, and functional areas of towns and cities. Traditionally, it focused on the development and the phases of growth of urban areas with different approaches, including physical, socioeconomic, and cultural aspects of urban form. More recent research has focused on the relationship between urban morphology and planning and thus principles of sus-tainability, landscape management and conservation planning, and the recent regeneration of urban areas. These themes have changed the nature of urban morphological investigation to concentrate more on the roles of urban actors like architects, planners, and urban managers in the production of the form and design of urban areas.

The origins of urban morphology can be traced to the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, [Page 895]especially to the early work of Otto Schlüter and the German morphogenetic research tradition. Schlüter's writings presented a morphological analysis of settlement and cultural landscapes (Kulturlandschaft) as the counterpart to geomor-phology in physical geography and supported, at the same time, the strong tradition of German landscape research. The urban landscape (Stadtlandschaft) was one of the major research topics in German universities in the early twentieth century. It was primarily a descriptive research including comprehensive classifications of the sites, town plans, and building types of German towns. Using evidence of the size and shape of plots of land and the layout of streets, this early morphogenetic research aimed to classify urban areas according to their phases of growth; even the historical periods of town planning and sociocul-tural ideals were not a vital part of the research.

Besides its presence in German-speaking countries in Central Europe, the majority of research in urban morphology has come from Great Britain and North America. In the English-speaking world, German émigré M. R. G. Conzen laid the foundations for urban morphogenetics and the Conzenian school of thought. Conzen's major work in the English language was his Alnwick study (first published in 1960), in which he introduced a conceptual and cartographic analysis of the town plan. In this study, he developed a framework of principles for urban morphology. Individual plots were the fundamental units of his town plan analysis, along with the detailed cartographic analysis connecting planning documents with field surveys. Conzen's significant contribution was the conceptualization of townscapes and of the way in which urban forms evolve. This was important for the future development of urban morphological research in which morphogenesis refers to the processes that create and reshape the physical fabric of the city. Over time, physical qualities of the urban environment change, not only as new urban fabric is added but also as existing fabric is modified.

American urban morphology had itself been characterized by two different perspectives, one dealing with cultural aspects, especially in rural settlements, and the other one with socioeconomic aspects emphasizing the changing patterns of urban land use. The latter of these perspectives had a great impact on the research of city structure and connected the concentric zone model of Ernest Burgess (1925), the sector model of Homer Hoyt (1939), and the multiple-nuclei model of Chauncey Harris and Edward Ullman (1945) to urban morphology. Its concern was the socioeconomic perspective of land-use patterns and not so much the historicogeographical view of town plan and building form.

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