Urban Morphology - Some Locked Concepts

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 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:

1. Figure and Ground
2. Linkage theory
3. 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.