Form and urban change : an urban morphometric study of five gentrified neighbourhoods in London

Research in Urban Morphology has long been exploring the form of cities and their changes over time, especially by establishing links with the parallel dynamics of these cities’ social, economic and political environments. The capacity of an adaptable and resilient urban form for ensuring a fertile environment for economic prosperity and social cohesion is at the forefront of discussion. Gentrification has emerged in the past few decades as an important topic of research in urban sociology, geography and economy, addressing the social impact of some forms of urban evolution; to some extent, these studies emphasise the form of the environment in which gentrification takes place, however, a systematic and quantitative method for a detailed characterization of this type of urban form is still far from being achieved. With this paper, we make a first step towards the establishment of an approach based on “urban morphometrics”. To this end, we measure and compare key morphological features of five London neighbourhoods that have undergone a process of piecemeal gentrification. Findings suggest that these five case studies display similar and recognisable morphological patterns in terms of their built form, geographical location of main and local roads and physical relationships between street fronts and street types. These initial results, while not implying any causal or universal relationship between morphological and social dynamics, nevertheless contribute to; a) highlight the benefits of a rigorous quantitative approach towards interpreting urban form beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Urban Morphology and b) define the statistical recurrence of a few, specific morphological features amongst the five cases of gentrified areas in London

Encoding Good Urban Form : the Use of Urban MorphoMetrics in the Elaboration of Local Design Codes for Asian Cities

In September 2019 UNICITI launched the "A Third Way of Building Asian Cities" initiative at the 55th ISOCARP World Planning Congress in Jakarta, Indonesia. UNICITI is an international consultancy and think tank, with the mission of "helping Asian cities become sustainable, climate resilient, economically competitive, socially inclusive and culturally vibrant by reactivating their unique cultural and natural assets". The "Third way" aims to overcome the a-contextual mass-produced practices of the "Business as Usual" (BAU) model as well as to provide a more influential and impactful alternative to the niche sustainable and local context that represent a tiny share of a city's urban fabric. In between these two ways, UNICITI's Third Way to urbanisation has called to action a network of international experts in several areas of the built environment to build on break-through practices and assemble new knowledge and methods to combine large scale of development and design quality (place-specific – or "unique" – places at neighbourhood scale)

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

[Book Review] : The Block. A guide for urban designers, architects and town planners

Book review of The Block. A guide for urban designers, architects and town planners by J. Tarbatt and C. S. Tarbatt, London, RIBA, 2020, £40, 154 pp., ISBN 978 1 85946874 6 The Block is one of those books you never knew you needed until you have it. In theory, as design professionals, we shouldn't need it. We should all know what blocks are, we should be able to trace their history and declinations at least summarily, and we should all know that it is through them that people move from the privacy of their homes and enter the social scene

Urban design as a specialised, evidence-based, coordinated educational and professional endeavour

Urban environments are complex, impacting on climate change, social justice and health globally and locally. Their spatial, social, economic, environmental dimensions are interlinked and must be studied from a complexity viewpoint. Yet, whilst complexity has successfully entered urban scholarship and practice in many fields, urban form, a key component of urban environments, is not yet studied in these terms and consequently they are not yet designed as complex. This paper argues that the discipline of urban design should be (re)defined as the understanding and design of urban environments as places of organised complexity. It can become the discipline best placed to manage a useful global overview of sustainable placemaking. It does so by tracing urban design's historical relationships and attitudes towards the evolution of the city, contrasting definitions of complexity in science, with the deterministic way in which the early urban design practitioners viewed design. It then looks at urban design's relationship with other design professions in the UK and suggest its lack of clarity and efficiency is an enduring consequence of this historic trajectory. Finally, it proposes urban design as the discipline concerned with the understanding and design of complex-adaptive urban environments and advocate its establishment as an independent profession

Building beauty : a new program teaching students to help heal the world

The beauty of buildings and places is not a luxury, it is a necessity if buildings are to be cared for over generations and therefore sustainable in the long term. Building Beauty is a new one-year postgraduate program teaching an integrated process of design and making. Its ultimate goal is learning to create wholeness, beauty, and life in the world. This program, based on Christopher Alexander's theoretical and practical work, explores the new convergence of sciences and the arts in the direct practice of making. Its syllabus revolves around three major axes of learning experience: cultivation and construction, theoretical seminars, and the exploration of self. Gaining knowledge is continuously activated across the cognitive-intellectual, the affective, and the embodied— and occurs mostly on the building site. The program, now in its second year, is homed at the Sant'Anna Institute in Sorrento (IT). The curriculum offers direct working with the community, engaging in crafts, and construction on-site. It terminates with a "Summer School" set up every year in a different location in Italy, for 10 days of intensive direct practice of different building traditions. This presentation will describe the theoretical foundations of the course, combining Alexander's theories with recent advances in systems thinking, network analysis, ecological awareness, and body-mind experience. It will describe the curriculum, combining seminars, design, and physical making at various scales: from an ornament to small building projects. It will conclude with assessing the achievements and challenges of the program, its relevance to a deeply sustainable building future for the twenty-first century, and our vision for creating a worldwide network of universities that will together develop its themes