This book is about the relation between scientific research and professional practice on the built environment. The physical form of cities is structured in different elements of urban form. Each of these elements, and the way they are combined into distinct patterns, is shaped by various agents and processes of change. Planning, urban design and architecture are practice-oriented activities that have a significant impact on these elements. Yet, this ‘action’ on the physical form if cities tends to be separated from scientific ‘knowledge’ on this complex object. In fact, none of these activities is strongly related to urban morphology, the science of urban form. There are many reasons for this gap. One of the reasons is the lack of significant examples of how the bridging process can happen. The book addresses this specific issue. It gathers a number of cases, developed in the last years in different geographical contexts – from Latin America to Eastern Asia – that exemplify how tomove from scientific research to professional practice. Each case, or set of cases, is presented in one chapter. The first part of each chapter presents the morphological view of his/her author(s) on the process of city building; the second part exemplifies how this author moves from reading to design.
Table of Content
The relation between research and practice.- Part I: Urban morphology and planning.- Conzenian research in practice.- Conservation and (sub)urban form: Reviewing policy in Stratford upon Avon, 2004-2019.- Part II: Urban morphology and urban design.- Towards an eclectic urban morphology.- Is there a normative science of the built environment?- Part III: Urban morphology and architecture.- Morphology and typology: The village as a cultural and environmental process.
About the author
Vítor Oliveira is the Secretary-General of the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) and the President of the Portuguese-language Network of Urban Morphology (PNUM). He is Principal Researcher at the Research Centre for Territory Transports and Environment (CITTA / FEUP) and ‘Professor Auxiliar’ of Urban Morphology and Urban Planning at ULP. He is an architect (FAUP), has a MSc in Planning and Design of the Built Environment (FAUP/FEUP), and a Ph D in Planning / Civil Engineering (FEUP). He is Associate Editor of ‘Urban Morphology’, Advisory Editor of ‘The Urban Book Series’ (Springer) and Founding Editor of the ‘Revista de Morfologia Urbana’ (2013-18).
His research areas are urban morphology, urban planning, architecture, and cities. In these research areas, he has authored more than 200 publications and communications, including 40 papers in international peer-reviewed journals listed in Scopus or ISI. He has been working in different research projects supportedby national and international founding, and he has been part of several scientific and organizing committees of international conferences, including the 21st International Seminar on Urban Form (Chair of the Conference).
In 2016 he has published ‘Urban morphology. An introduction to the study of the physical form of cities’ (translated to Persian), a textbook on urban morphology taught by the author in courses in 10 universities in Portugal, Brazil, Spain and China – the most recent of which Zhejiang University. In the last two years he has published ‘Teaching urban morphology’ and ‘JWR Whitehand and the historico-geographical approach to urban morphology’.
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