Urban Morphology - Schools of Thought

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 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:

1. The town plan
   
2. Pattern of building forms
   
3. Pattern of land use
   

The town plan in turn contains three complexes of plan element:

1. Streets and their arrangement into a street-system
   
2. Plots (or lots) and their aggregation into street-blocks
   
3. 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.