Co-ordination of local policies for urban development and public transportation in four Swiss cities

The present article aims at assessing the possibility for urban areas to coordinate local policies of urban development and public transportation and at explaining the differences in this achievement between urban regions. In order to do so, the study draws support from two empirical sources: a historical analysis of the "mass-production" generated by the public service sectors in the field of transport and urban development in the cities of Basel, Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne since 1950, and a series of six case studies in these four cities. The study identifies factors located both at context level regarding morphological and geographical conditions as well as institutional settings and case-specific idiosyncrasies regarding organizational structure, past policy decisions, as well as vocational cultures that determine the possibility for urban areas to meet the need for policy coordination

On the origin of spaces: morphometric foundations of urban form evolution

The modern discipline of urban morphology gives us a ground for the comparative analysis of cities, which increasingly includes specific quantitative elements. In this paper, we make a further step forward towards the definition of a general method for the classification of urban form. We draw from morphometrics and taxonomy in life sciences to propose such method, which we name ‘urban morphometrics’. We then test it on a unit of the urban landscape named ‘Sanctuary Area’ (SA), explored in 45 cities whose origins span four historic time periods: Historic (medieval), Industrial (19th century), New Towns (post-WWII, high-rise) and Sprawl (post-WWII, low-rise). We describe each SA through 207 physical dimensions and then use these to discover features that discriminate them among the four temporal groups. Nine dimensions emerge as sufficient to correctly classify 90% of the urban settings by their historic origins. These nine attributes largely identify an area's ‘visible identity’ as reflected by three characteristics: (1) block perimeterness, or the way buildings define the street-edge; (2) building coverage, or the way buildings cover the land and (3) regular plot coverage, or the extent to which blocks are made of plots that have main access from a street. Hierarchical cluster analysis utilising only the nine key variables nearly perfectly clusters each SA according to its historic origin; moreover, the resulting dendrogram shows, just after WWII, the first ‘bifurcation’ of urban history, with the emergence of the modern city as a new ‘species’ of urban form. With ‘urban morphometrics’ we hope to extend urban morphological research and contribute to understanding the way cities evolve

The Principles of Campus Conception: A Spatial and Organizational Genealogy.What knowledge Can We Use from a Historical Study in Order to Analyse the Design Processes of a New Campus?

International audienceThis chapter participates to the interest of scholars concerning the relationship between spatial structure and organisational practice. Most researches analyse this relationship through built-up spaces and few studies are focusing on design phase. The study of design processes – organisational and spatial – raises methodological challenges and interrogate how the relationship between these processes could be analysed. In order to discuss the nature of the relationship between both designs: organisational and spatial, this contribution relies on an analysis of the conception processes of a campus.The hypothesis is that a genealogical approach of the history of campus architecture could reveal some specific properties of the campus and could generate a tool – an analytical framework – in order to explore the campus design project processes

Mind the gaps! A research agenda for urban interstices

Processes of urbanisation can hardly be considered without reference to the spaces that lie between developments. However, the literature on such interstitial spaces is fragmentary. In this paper we draw together insights from the extant literature into a research agenda on urban interstices. We propose a research agenda centred on four themes: the multiple geographic scales at which the interstitial spaces of urban sprawl might be analysed; the pending nature of such spaces; their planned or unplanned character and their relational properties. We develop these themes, briefly illustrating them with reference to the case of metropolitan area of Santiago de Chile. In conclusion, we emphasise some of the implications of interstitial spaces for theories of urban politics and their value in forcing inter-disciplinarity in urban studies

O território paulista na iconografia oitocentista: mapas, desenhos e fotografias. análise de uma herança cotidiana

This paper presents a study about the cartography elaborated to represent São Paulos territory during the 19th century. The author seeks to show the permanence of cultural values related to the colonial period by analyzing some cartographical models, which are not necessarily linked to a cartographic school. In this context, the author seeks to identify the formative values of the regional territorial space, the cultural identity of the common Man and the specific needs of his or her daily life