Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban design considers 'bigger picture' issues of economic, social and environmental value and social design. The scope of a project can range from a local street or public space to an entire city and surrounding areas. Urban designers connect the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning to better organize physical space and community environments.
Space syntax is a set of theories and techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations. It was conceived by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, and colleagues at The Bartlett, University College London in the late 1970s to early 1980s to develop insights into the mutually constructive relation between society and space. As space syntax has evolved, certain measures have been found to correlate with human spatial behavior, and space syntax has thus come to be used to forecast likely effects of architectural and urban space on users.
Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy. Concisely, landscape ecology can be described as the science of "landscape diversity" as the synergetic result of biodiversity and geodiversity.
Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have participated in, studied, and critiqued flows of economic and natural resources, human and non-human bodies, patterns of development and infrastructure, political and institutional activities, governance, decay and renewal, and notions of socio-spatial inclusions, exclusions, and everyday life. Urban geography includes different other fields in geography such as the physical, social, and economic aspects of urban geography. The physical geography of urban environments is essential to understand why a town is placed in a specific area, and how the conditions in the environment play an important role with regards to whether or not the city successfully develops. Social geography examines societal and cultural values, diversity, and other conditions that relate to people in the cities. Economic geography is important to examine the economic and job flow within the urban population. These various aspects involved in studying urban geography are necessary to better understand the layout and planning involved in the development of urban environments worldwide.
In geometry, an isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point. It is a geometric concept coined by Clifford Tandy in 1967 and further refined by the architect Michael Benedikt.
Sustainable landscape architecture is a category of sustainable design concerned with the planning and design of the built and natural environments.
Nikos Angelos 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 Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.
A site plan or a plot plan is a type of drawing used by architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and engineers which shows existing and proposed conditions for a given area, typically a parcel of land which is to be modified. Sites plan typically show buildings, roads, sidewalks and paths/trails, parking, drainage facilities, sanitary sewer lines, water lines, lighting, and landscaping and garden elements.
A figure-ground diagram is a two-dimensional map of an urban space that shows the relationship between built and unbuilt space. It is used in analysis of urban design and planning. It is akin to but not the same as a Nolli map which denotes public space both within and outside buildings and also akin to a block pattern diagram that records public and private property as simple rectangular blocks. The earliest advocates of its use were Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter.
Saverio Muratori was an Italian architect, regarded as one of the pioneers of typomorphological investigations of urban form.
Patrick Alasdair Fionn Turner (19 October 1969 – 6 October 2011) was a British-born scientist, who played a major role in the VR Centre for the Built Environment and the Space group at the University College London. His contribution had a great impact on the development of space syntax theory. This goes in parallel to his research into introducing a dynamic agent model that derives aggregate spatial analysis from the visual affordances of the built environment. Based on the principles of Turner's theory on Embodied space, his agent model proves to correlate well with natural movement behavior in architectural and urban environments. Turner was born on 19 October 1969, in London. He earned an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Turner was last appointed a reader in Urban and Architectural Computing at the University College London in 2011. Turner died on 6 October 2011 after a long struggle with stomach cancer.
Settlement geography is a branch of human geography that investigates the Earth's surface's part settled by humans. According to the United Nations' Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements (1976), "human settlements means the totality of the human community – whether city, town or village – with all the social, material, organizational, spiritual and cultural elements that sustain it."
Integrated modification methodology (IMM) is a procedure encompassing an open set of scientific techniques for morphologically analyzing the built environment in a multiscale manner and evaluating its performance in actual states or under specific design scenarios.
'Negative Approach to Urban Planning', also known as "reversed planning" or simply "negative planning" is a landscape urbanism approach to urban planning. It is a new concept and terminology introduced by Chinese landscape architect, Professor of Peking University YU Kongjian. Yu argued that among other issues, the degrading environmental and ecological situations, low performance scrambled city form, and the loss of cultural identity in Beijing have proved that the conventional "population projection-urban infrastructure-land use" approach and the architectural urbanism approach to urban growth planning failed to meet the challenges of swift urbanisation and sustainability issues in China in general, and Beijing in particular. The negative approach defines an urban growth and urban form based on Ecological Infrastructure (EI). This approach has evolved from the pre-scientific model of Feng-shui as the sacred landscape setting for human settlement, the nineteenth century notion of greenways as urban recreational infrastructure, the early twentieth century idea of green belts as urban form makers, and the late twentieth century notion of ecological networks and EI as a biological preservation framework. EI is composed of critical landscape elements and structure that are strategically identified as Landscape Security Patterns to safeguard natural assets and ecosystems services, essential for sustaining human society. EI is strategically planned and developed using less land but more efficiently preserving the Ecosystem service. It distinguishes itself from other theories as it is practical way of solving urban and rural planning problems in quickly developing regions.
Michael Robert Günter Conzen was a geographer, founder of the Anglo-German school of urban morphology. Conzen's most influential work is a detailed morphological study of the English market town of Alnwick. His work is noted among others for the micro-scale study of the evolution of plots.
Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning in specific contexts, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks, and their accessibility. Traditionally, urban planning followed a top-down approach in master planning the physical layout of human settlements. The primary concern was the public welfare, which included considerations of efficiency, sanitation, protection and use of the environment, as well as effects of the master plans on the social and economic activities. Over time, urban planning has adopted a focus on the social and environmental bottom lines that focus on planning as a tool to improve the health and well-being of people, maintaining sustainability standards. Sustainable development was added as one of the main goals of all planning endeavors in the late 20th century when the detrimental economic and the environmental impacts of the previous models of planning had become apparent. Similarly, in the early 21st century, Jane Jacobs's writings on legal and political perspectives to emphasize the interests of residents, businesses and communities effectively influenced urban planners to take into broader consideration of resident experiences and needs while planning.
Morphology in architecture is the study of the evolution of form within the built environment. Often used in reference to a particular vernacular language of building, this concept describes changes in the formal syntax of buildings and cities as their relationship to people evolves and changes. Often morphology describes processes, such as in the evolution of a design concept from first conception to production, but can also be understood as the categorical study in the change of buildings and their use from a historical perspective. Similar to genres of music, morphology concertizes 'movements' and arrives at definitions of architectural 'styles' or typologies. Paradoxically morphology can also be understood to be the qualities of a built space which are style-less or irreducible in quality.
Building typology refers to building and documenting buildings according to their essential characteristics. In architectural discourse, typological classification tends to focus on building function (use), building form, or architectural style. A functional typology collects buildings into groups such as houses, hospitals, schools, shopping centers, etc. A formal typology groups buildings according to their shape, scale, and site placement, etc. Lastly, a stylistic typology borrows from art history and identifies building types by their expressive traits, e.g. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, baroque, rococo, gothic, arts and crafts, international, post-modern, etc.
Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design is an architecture book by Roger Trancik, an educator and practitioner of urban design. The book has been translated into "simple" as well as "orthodox" Chinese translations. This book introduces the theory, vocabulary and issues of urban spatial design. It identifies and introduces the issue of ‘Lost Spaces’ that had emerged in the cities with the modern urban development and growth. The book was intended primarily for designers and students of the city. The book includes theoretical and critical discussion along with practical applications and strategies for correcting the problems of spatial structure.
