ICONARP

ICONARP
International Journal of Architecture & Planning
Received 04 Oct 2019; Accepted 09 Dec 2019
Volume 7, Special Issue, pp:15-36/Published 26 December 2019
Research Article DOI: 10.15320/ICONARP.2019.79-E-ISSN: 2147-9380

Roots of Urban
Morphology
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir*

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the research field of Keywords: Urban morphology, geographical
perspective, architectural perspective,
urban morphology: the study of urban form. Urban morphology is a
Caniggia, Conzen.
growing field of cross-disciplinary research, attracting worldwide
interest among scholars in architecture, geography and planning. It aims *Associate Professor, Director of the Master
program in planning Agricultural University
to decipher the physical form, the urban landscape or townscape of
of Iceland, Keldnaholt, Árleyni 22, IS-112
complex contemporary cities. This paper discusses the evolution of Reykjavík, Iceland
urban morphology, from its conceptual foundations in research on the Email: sigridur@lbhi.is
physical form of urban areas. Interestingly, the roots of urban
morphology can be traced back to different disciplines in different
countries. This discussion will cast light on various research
perspectives of urban morphology, as well as discussing similarities and
differences between the geographical and the architectural approaches
to urban form studies. This is followed by a closer look at the theories
developed by Gianfranco Caniggia and MRG Conzen. Their work has been
an inspiration for many practitioners and researchers, including
Whitehand, Maffei, and Moudon to name a few. Finally, a schematic
diagram is presented, which reflects the heightened activity of research
on physical form that is currently occurring in several disciplines
simultaneously, and showing the relationships between research
traditions and authors. As the formation and development of the urban
landscape becomes ever more diverse, it is necessary to revisit and use
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

the concepts and methods established by Caniggia and Conzen in the

management of urban landscape changes.

URBAN MORPHOLOGY

Urban morphology is a branch of urban studies that deals with the

form and structure of a settlement. It studies complex and intricate
types of forms and how different factors set their mark upon the
whole city. In this way urban morphology examines the
configuration of the urban form as well as the relationship
between the individual forms and the city as a whole, from the
formative years of the city through its subsequent transformations.

(Kristjánsdóttir, 2007, p. 1)

Urban morphological researchers are concerned with the form

and structure of an urban landscape. It was the great poet and
philosopher Goethe (1790) who first expressed the essence of the
idea of morphology in his writings describing internal structure
and the history of variation in form. The word ‘morphology’ was
first used in bioscience to describe form and structure, but now is
increasingly being used in geography, architecture, geology,
philology and other disciplines. The term urban morphology
refers to the study of the physical (or built) fabric of urban form,
and the people and processes shaping it (Larkham & Jones, 1991). 16
According to Larkham and Jones (1991), English usage of the term
dates at least from Leighly’s (1928) study of towns in central
Sweden. Much later, Larkham (2015) re-examined Leighly’s
(1928) study in terms of its background and the influence of Carl
Sauer (1889–1975) (1925), the founder of cultural geography at
the University of California at Berkeley.

However, in urban design, the term is principally used to describe

“... a method of analysis which is basic to find[ing] out principles
or rules of urban design” (according to Gebauer & Samuels, 1983).
However, they also note that the term can be understood as the
study of the physical and spatial characteristics of the whole
urban structure, which is closer to the geographer's usage
DOI: 10.15320/ICONARP.2019.79– E-ISSN: 2147-9380

(Larkham & Jones, 1991).

The roots of urban morphology lie in geography in Britain and

Germany, and architecture in Italy and France.

While the beginnings of the urban morphology ‘discipline’ can be

traced back to the end of the eighteenth century, it did not become
the main research approach to the urban landscape until after the
Second World War. In fact, urban morphology can be viewed as
part of a much wider movement that arose as a reaction against
 Roots of Urban Morphology

Modernism in architecture and urban planning during the period

1959 to 1961. At this time, several studies were published that
represented an attack on the current approach to city planning
and rebuilding, for example Kevin Lynch’s The image of the city
(1960), Gordon Cullen’s Townscape (1961), Jane Jacobs’ The death
and life of great American Cities (1961), Muratori’s study of Venice
(1959), and Conzen’s study of Alnwick (1960), which was
followed up by Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein’s (1977)
study of urban patterns, entitled A Pattern Language.

The Geographical Perspective

Within geography, Otto Schlüter (1899a; 1899b; 1903; 1906;
1919) played a central role in the development of the morphology
of the “cultural landscape” (g. Kulturlandschaft) as the object of
research in “cultural geography” (g. Kulturgeographie), which for
him was the most important aspect of human geography
(Whitehand, 1981). Schlüter asserted that geographers should
consider the form and spatial structure created by visible
phenomena on the earth’s surface as their unifying theme. In
other words, mountains, rivers, pastures, forests, roads, canals,
gardens, fields, villages and towns become the object of study for
the geographer. Further, Schlüter regarded economic, racial,
psychological and political conditions as not of primary
17 geographical interest, arguing they should be studied only as part
of the explanation of material distributions (Holt-Jensen, 1999).
Therefore, it was not only a descriptive morphology that he
envisaged, but also an explanatory morphology. He was fully
aware of the interdependence in geography of the three aspects of
form, function and development (history) (Whitehand, 1981).

Schlüter systematically divided the cultural landscape according

to the categories –settlements, land utilisation and lines of
communication, thus giving rise to the three subdivisions of
human geography, namely settlement geography, economic
ICONARP - Volume 7, Special Issue / Published: December 2019

geography and transport geography. Settlement geography was

then further subdivided on the basis of rural and urban
settlements. Schlüter regarded the physical forms and appearance
of the town, the “urban landscape” (g. Stadtlandschaft), as the
main object of research within urban geography, viewing it as a
distinct category of cultural landscape and as such, a regional unit
in its own right. As JWR Whitehand (1981) points out, Schlüter’s
work imparted a marked morphological emphasis to human
geography in general and urban geography in particular that was
to become increasingly evident over the first three decades of the
twentieth century.
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

Urban morphology was further developed by a number of

researchers in German speaking countries, including Hassinger,
Schaefer, Geisler, Dörries, Martiny, Fritz, Meier, Gradman,
Rietschel, Frölich, Rörig, Hamm, Scharlau, Klaiber, Meurer,
Siedler, and Louis. This development is documented in JWR
Whitehand (1981, pp. 3-7).

MRG Conzen (1907–2000) was a student at the Geographical

Institute of the University of Berlin from 1926. He was inspired by
pioneers in the field of geography at that time, attending their
seminars and field excursions. He was especially taken with the
ideas of Schlüter and the work of Herbert Louis (1936). He was
also influenced by geomorphology, the line of research within
physical geography that focuses on studies of landform.

Conzen was interested in the man-made landscape and human

settlements and applied ideas from geomorphology in his
research, particularly in terms of the search for process and the
forces underlying them. The development of the history of urban
morphology within geography during the first half of the
twentieth century, and its diverse research traditions, have been
the subject of recent investigation (Slater, 1990; Whitehand, 1981,
1987, 1988) focusing on the urban morphogenetic tradition and
the central role played by MRG Conzen. 18
The Architectural Perspective
In Italy there is a strong link between urban morphology and
urban design, as urban morphology developed as a critique on
modernist doctrines of architecture and planning. Architect
Saverio Muratori (1910–1973) is the seminal figure in the
development of systematic ways of investigating the evolution of
the Italian City. Muratori was an architectural student during a
period of profound renewal of Italian teaching institutions, with
architecture well positioned to bridge the divide between art and
engineering (Cataldi, Maffei, & Vaccaro, 2002). As a student in the
late 1920s, he was inspired by great scholars in contextualised
architecture, especially Gustavo Giovannoni among others such as
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Fasolo, Foschini, Calandra and Piacentini.

Muratori’s work was based on the Roman interpretation of Italian

rationalism. He believed that urban planning and urban design
theory systematically ceased to be cultural devices deeply rooted
in the history of the place during the first half of the twentieth
century. Accordingly, Muratori saw urban analysis as a form of
operative history, offering both an alternative to and criticism of
the programmes and the methods of Modernist architecture and
planning. His interest was to recover a sense of continuity in
 Roots of Urban Morphology

architectural practice. He devoted his life to the creation of a new

theoretical framework to explain the creation and transformation
of urban form over the centuries in the belief that “only a
systematic understanding of history’s laws of reproduction could
recreate the role previously claimed by urban design” (Cataldi et.
al., 2002, p. 3).

In Vita e storia della citta, Muratori (1950) identifies the need to

determine the characteristics of an urban organism and then to
adapt modern building to it. He emphasises the town as a living
organism and collective work of art, and, for the first time, raises
the idea of planning new buildings in continuity with the building
culture of a place.

During post-war reconstruction in Italian towns, Muratori was

responsible for the Tuscolano district in Rome, where town
planning and building were influenced by the contemporary so-
called Scandinavian empiricism. He also planned four major
public buildings in three different Italian towns: the church of S.
Giovanni al Gatano in Pisa, the Ente Nazionale di Previdenza ed
Assicurazione Sociale office building in Bologna, the headquarters
of the Christian Democratic Party in Rome, and the incomplete
church of Tuscolano in Rome. All four stand out from the
19 international panorama of contemporary architecture because
the themes they embody were decades ahead of their time.
Muratori’s experience as a practising planner and architect led to
his dissatisfaction with the evident conceptual gap between the
plans of entire town quarters and the later designs of modern
architects.

In 1952, Muratori was appointed Chair of the Instituto

Universitario di Architectura of Venice and was one of the first
architects in Italy to openly criticise Modernist doctrines of
architecture and planning (Samuels, 1990). As a professor at the
ICONARP - Volume 7, Special Issue / Published: December 2019

School of Architecture in Venice from 1952 to 1954, Muratori was

able to re-examine the first urban surveys of the city’s hub and the
theoretical assumptions of his 1950 essay, employing the
fundamental concepts of type, fabric, organism and operative
history (Cataldi et. al., 2002).

Venice played a leading role in the development of his ideas,

through lectures and student surveys. He required his students
undertake investigations of the evolution of Venice through direct
observation and examination of documentary evidence, the
results of which were to be published as an ‘operational history’
(Muratori, 1959). Through these studies Muratori wanted his
students to become technicians of the urban fabric, by learning to
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

interpret the influence of societal needs in transforming the

inherited urban fabric. He emphasised to his students that
architects must have detailed knowledge of the medium in which
they conduct their work, and that the proper basis for design was
a thorough understanding of buildings. In Studi per una operante
storia urbana di Venezia, Muratori (1959) re-examined the first
urban surveys of the city’s core and the theoretical assumptions
underpinning the ideas he had put forward in his earlier paper,
Vita e storia delle citta (Muratori 1950). As such, Muratori (1959)
defines and applies the fundamental concepts of building type,
urban fabric, urban organism, and operative history or working
history.

His Venetian experience provided the trigger for his idea of

operative history. Later, as a Professor of Architectural
Composition in Rome from 1954 to 1973, he used it to provide the
basis for students’ plans, despite opposition from other tutors and
students (Kropf 1993; Samuels, 1990). Muratori’s rejection of the
Modern movement before the popular rise of Post-Modernism led
to criticisms that he was favouring the status quo instead of
searching for new forms. His teaching was aimed at
understanding the various values inherent in the phases of urban
formation, ranging from the influences on and implications of
projects involving existing buildings in historic downtown areas, 20
to projects concerned with the creation of suburbs.

During his time in Rome, a team of resident assistants formed

around Muratori, some of whom collaborated with him on the
great atlas, Studi per una operante storia urbana di Roma
(Muratori, Bollati, Bollati and Marinucci 1963) (Cataldi et.al.,
2002). Muratori and his wider team got the chance to carry out
his ideas in a design competition for a real town, creating the
winning project for the S. Giuliano Sandbank competition in
Venice in 1959. The idea of design in stages was presented as a
logical result of “reading” the town’s development (Cataldi, 1998).

One can do anything but invent new things: real

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invention lies in not inventing anything (Muratori,

quoted in Cataldi 1998).

Muratori was concerned that modern architecture was in crisis

because architects were more focused on raising monuments
rather than continuing the process of adding to the inherited form,
as realised through history and so expressing the local culture. His
stance on Modernism eventually cost him his post at the
university. Saverio Muratori’s work is documented in detail in a
book dedicated to him, and edited by Cataldi (2013).
 Roots of Urban Morphology

Caniggia was one of Muratori’s assistants, and was similarly

concerned that the thread running through built inheritance had
been broken because of the methods used by modern architects.
As described later in more detail, he carried on Muratori’s ideas,
developing a typo-morphological approach to architecture and
urban design (Cataldi 2003). Cannigia (1997) advocated studying
the steps involved in the creation and evolution of the built
environment in order to understand an urban landscape.

The French perspective

A third perspective on urban morphology was established in
France in the late 1960s. As in Italy, the French school, based
principally at the Versailles School of Architecture, was
established as a rejection of the Modern movement (Moudon
1997). Muratori’s work influenced French architects, along with
that of Aymonino, Brusatin, Fabbri, Lena, Loverro, Lucianetti, &
Rossi (1966)., and Rossi (1964 [1966]; 1982). The French school
took a much broader perspective, aiming to understand the city in
a multidisciplinary context (Moudon, 1994). A connection was
soon established between the French and the Italian schools,
however they differed in two important aspects of their approach
to urban morphology – their approach to the dialectic of urban
form and social action, and the dialectic of modern versus non-
21 modern. As distinct from the Italian method, the social component
is always the primary focus within the French school due to the
influence of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri
Lefebvre (Petruccioli, 1998b). Lefebvre introduced the concept of
the right to the city in the book, Le Droit à la ville (Lefebvre 1968),
after which he published several influential works on cities,
urbanism, and space. The Production of Space (Lefebvre 1974)
became one of the most influential and heavily cited works on
urban theory.

The French school has generated extensive methodological

ICONARP - Volume 7, Special Issue / Published: December 2019

knowledge for the analysis of urbanisation processes and related

architectural models. The focus is the dialectical relationship
between the built landscape and the social world, with each
shaping the other and placing emphasis on the importance of built
space for sustaining social practices. Castex (2013), Levy (1999),
Darin (1998, 2000) and Ducom (2003a, 2003b), as well as
Philippe Panerai and Jean Depaule, are a few representative
members of the French school.

The Conzenian Approach

Conzen’s study of Alnwick, Northumberland (first published in
1960; revised edition published in 1969) is the seminal work in
the field of urban morphology in Britain. The method for town
 Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

plan analysis that Conzen put forward in the Alnwick study, which
is further elaborated in his studies of central Newcastle (Conzen
1962) and Ludlow (Conzen 1966, 1975, 1988), inspired much of
the English-language work on plan analysis in the second half of
the twentieth century, and established a basic framework of
principles for urban morphology. Derived in part from earlier
German work (Whitehand, 1981), concepts and terms developed
by Conzen have become widely used in geography and other
disciplines (Kropf & Larkham, 2000).
Conzen’s approach was historical and evolutionary in looking at
the form of the town as the result of the sequence of events in its
formation. These events are seen as part of the social and
economic development of the local, regional and national context
in which the town lies (Kropf, 1993). The systematic inclusion of
plots as the fundamental units of analysis is one of the major
contributions of Conzen’s method. Before Conzen’s Alnwick study,
plots and plot patterns had received little attention in urban
morphology (Conzen, 1960, p. 4). Conzen’s work generated an
extended technical vocabulary, terminology and procedures for
analysing the town plan, the aim being to explain the geographical
character of towns, which he believed was determined by
significant economic and social factors within the regional
context.
According to Conzen, the townscape is a combination of a town 22
plan, and patterns of building forms and urban land use (Conzen,
1960). Conzen describes the town-plan as the topographical
arrangement of an urban built-up area and all its man-made
features. The town plan itself is subdivided into three constituent
parts or elements (Figure 1):

(i) streets and their arrangement in a street system;

(ii) plots and their aggregation in street-blocks; and
(iii) buildings or, more precisely, their block-plans
(Conzen, 1960, p. 5).
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Figure 1. A schematic diagram

showing the three distinct but integral
kinds of town plan elements, based on
Conzen 1960.

The elements which make up any plan or layout are:

Street: a space (street-space) in a built-up area

bounded by street-lines and reserved for the use of
 Roots of Urban Morphology

surface traffic. It is a plan element (Conzen, 1969, p.

130).

Plot: a parcel of land representing a land-use unit

defined by boundaries on the ground. It is a plan
element (Conzen, 1969, p. 128).

Block-plan of a building: the area occupied by a

building and defined on the ground by the lines of its
containing walls. Loosely referred to as the ‘building’.
It is a plan element (Conzen, 1969, p. 123).

A plan-unit is formed by individualised combinations of these

three elements that are unique to their site circumstances,
creating a measure of morphological homogeneity or unity in
some or all respects over the area, in different parts of the town.
Within the town, a geographical group of morphogenetic plan-
units forms a plan-division. The urban plan-divisions arrange
themselves in a hierarchy, with each successive order comprising
a combination of divisions of the next lowest order (Conzen, 1969,
p. 128). Morphogenetic regions are formed of a combination of the
town plan, building fabric, land utilisation pattern and the site
(Kropf, 1993, p. 38). A morphological period represents any
23 period in the history of an area that creates distinctive material
forms in the urban landscape to suit the particular socio-economic
needs of its society (Conzen, 1969, p. 127). The Alnwick research
provided the foundation for further research in urban
morphology, and gave rise to the Conzenian tradition (Whitehand,
1981) and a number of concepts, including the burgage cycle,
morphological frame and fringe belts.

The Caniggian Approach

Gianfranco Caniggia, an assistant of Muratori, continued
Muratori’s work on building types. Caniggia made his own
ICONARP - Volume 7, Special Issue / Published: December 2019

contribution based on his research applying the interpretation

method. Lettura di una citta: Como is a study of Como, a town of
Roman origin in northern Italy (Caniggia, 1963). Caniggia divided
buildings into residential and special buildings. The latter are
buildings whose principal function is not as a dwelling – for
example mosques, convents, or even palaces. This work is the
basis for the material presented in Composizione architettonica e
tipologia ediliza, published in four volumes.

He published the first two volumes with Gian Luigi Maffei

(Caniggia & Maffei, 1979; 1984). The first volume, Composizione
Architettonica e Tipologia Edilizia: 1. Lettura dell’Edilizia di Base,
or The Interpreting basic building, contains a series of lectures,
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

which focus on the residential building as the formative element

of city building. The second, Composizione Architettonica e
Tipologia Edilizia: 2. Il Progetto nell’Edilizia di Base further
demonstrates Caniggia’s ideology with examples from all over the
world and includes exercises for students so that they can master
his methodology. Together they form a manual for the
interpretation and design of basic buildings, principles which are
taught in many architectural courses. The first volume has been
translated into Spanish, French and English. The final two
volumes on the interpretation and design of special buildings
were still in draft form at the time of Caniggia’s death (Cataldi
et.al., 2002).

Caniggia argued against the methods used by modern architects.

In his view, the crisis in modern architecture arose out of a
disparity between the products of building and the intentions of
those using them. He addressed the tendency for modern
buildings to be an expression of individual architects’ personal
language of forms, rather than an expression of common concerns
or desires using a common local language of forms. If the common
form is lost, the knowledge, experience and memories connected
to it are not transmitted between generations. The aim of
Gianfranco Caniggia’s theoretical approach is to understand the
built form by examining the historical process of its formation. He 24
studied the steps involved in the creation and evolution of the
built environment in order to understand the continuity of
cultural inheritance. Then in order to understand the built
environment, he reconstructed the city. Through examination of
existing buildings and documents, he retraced the steps in its
formation to learn how the components are put together.

The past is the key to the present and therefore by studying

buildings, their rules of construction and development can be
uncovered through systematic interpretation of the built form.
Caniggia’s approach can be compared to research in linguistic
structuralism (Kristjánsdóttir, 2005). In the hierarchy of linguistic
structuralism, the smallest element is the letter. Letters then
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combine to form words, and words are arranged into sentences,

which in turn are grouped into paragraphs. Language is a living
form that changes through the centuries with collective use, while
reflecting the time and place that formed it. Architecture, as
language, is a living form, through which people have achieved a
sort of unwritten building codification by identifying history and
structure (Kristjánsdóttir, 2005).

According to Caniggia, each society has unwritten rules on certain

things (e.g., behaviour, language). Such rules are built on the
 Roots of Urban Morphology

common knowledge held by a society, which is based on its

culture, and what is considered right or wrong – or what Caniggia
and Maffei (2001, p. 43) refer to as spontaneous consciousness.
These rules include the concept of a house. This concept is so well
embedded within the society that when people refer to a house,
they have the same picture in mind. This picture is called a leading
type (i. tipo portante), and is the ideal to which everyone refers
when building a house (Caniggia, 1997).

Within many cultural areas, the origins of the leading type can be
traced all the way back to the first settlement within the area. The
evolutionary process for building types across the world is
documented in Cataldi (2015).

However, when a society undergoes major change, it loses

connections to its roots. The commonly held picture of the house
is lost, and the question what a house should look like remains.
Critical consciousness takes over when the a priori type vanishes
and a new type can be formed (Caniggia & Maffei, 2001, pp. 45-7).
When people act with critical consciousness they are able to
choose what they are doing, but, let us be clear, they do not choose
having acquired greater maturity. In the absence of a community
codifying what is right or wrong, there will be uncertainty.
25 According to Caniggia, “…they have to deliberate because they
have no firmly established way of acting, i.e. they have ‘to think
about it’ because their behaviour in a certain state of need has a
margin of possibility which ends up by turning into a margin of
indifference as to whether to act in one way or another, evidently
induced by a codification crisis of the community´s response to
that state of need” (Caniggia & Maffei, 2001, p. 45).

Caniggia and Maffei (2001) define type (typo) in the following

way:
ICONARP - Volume 7, Special Issue / Published: December 2019

During a moment of greater civil continuity, builders,

guided by their spontaneous consciousness, can
produce an object “without thinking twice”, only
unconsciously conditioned by their cultural
background. That object will be determined out of
previous experiences in their civil surroundings,
transformed into a system of integrated cognitions,
assumed unitarily to satisfy the particular need to
which that object has to correspond (Caniggia &
Maffei, 2001, p. 50).
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

And further:

The term building type was used in the past and still
is today to indicate any group of buildings, with some
characteristics, or a series of characteristics, in
common (Caniggia & Maffei, 2001, p. 50).

In his analysis, Caniggia starts by making a distinction between

the spatial correlation of built objects (copresence) and their
temporal correlation (derivation), or the typological process. He
looks at the form (type) and studies how individual forms are put
together in time and space over the development of the city.

Notions of the form in space and time, i.e. copresence and

derivation, are the fundamental ‘conceptual tools’ necessary for
reconstructing a town.

The typological process is the reconstruction of the changes a type

has undergone over time in significant intervals that are called
phases. A phase is defined as a reasonable distance in time that
allows distinctive and consistent differences between two
consecutive types to emerge. The exception to the rule is always
around the corner, as evidenced by all the exceptions that are
realised under less optimal conditions, or synchronic variations
due to topographical problems, or problems with placement in a
26
block or in an incongruous tissue. The typological process is as
complicated as the urban landscape it lies within (Petruccioli,
1998a).

Caniggia starts by looking at the smallest elements of construction

– the individual stones, examining how these are grouped
together to form walls, rooms and houses. The stones, walls and
rooms of a particular house can be units formed centuries apart.

Caniggia’s examination of the spatial correlation of built objects is

based on a set of subdivisions that forms a hierarchy (Figure 2).
The components are: elements, a structure of elements, a system
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of structures, and an organism of systems.

 Roots of Urban Morphology

Figure 2. A schematic diagram

demonstrating the spatial correlation
of a building and a town according to
Caniggia (1997).

Figure 2 shows a hierarchy of spatial arrangement. Elements are

the smallest units of the system studied. Grouped together, the
elements form structures that are the building blocks of the
system itself. These building blocks can be different, but they are
all formed by grouping together in some way a number of
elements of the smallest type. A number of particular structures

27 grouped together in a similar manner form a unit of a higher

order, i.e. the system. The same idea can be taken further,
whereby a grouping of systems forms a unit of an even higher
order. In Caniggia’s terminology, this is known as an organism of
systems. To provide further clarification, it is useful to consider
examples of how Caniggia used these concepts in his work.

Caniggia applied this schema to individual buildings. An element

could be a brick, timber, tile etc. A structure of elements is formed
through the combination of building materials, for example walls,
interior floors, roofs etc. Arrangements of the latter into rooms,
stairs, corridors, etc. is the system of structure, with the organism
ICONARP - Volume 7, Special Issue / Published: December 2019

being the building (Caniggia, 1997).

He applies the same schema to the town, where a building is the

element and the structure of elements is an aggregate of the
buildings, referred to as urban tissue. Urban tissue is defined as
the ‘aggregation of building type, surrounding space and access
ways’. The combination of tissues forms regions or districts (i.e.,
the system of structures (Figure 2), which together form the
organism of the town (Caniggia, 1997).
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

Caniggia defines urban tissue as follows:

Formative laws and categories that are as typological as the

“building type” can be summed up in one single term, urban
tissue. A tissue is to an aggregate what building type is to
building: tissue is the concept of the coexistence of several
buildings existing in the minds of builders before the act of
building, at the level of spontaneous consciousness, as a civil
result of the experience of putting together several
buildings and summing up all interesting aspects, including
aggregation. Briefly, it is “a priori synthesis” of “building
type”; we can then transfer to the term “tissue” the
characteristics of both “building type” and “type” in its more
general accepted meaning (Caniggia, 1979, pp. 118-119).

In Italy, universities such as Florence University, the University of

Ferrara and Bari Polytechnic have followed in the footsteps of
Muratori and Caniggia, teaching their theories and approaches. In
recent years, there has been growing interest in the work of
Gianfranco Caniggia. A major conference on his work, followed by
an exhibition, was held in the city of Como in 2002 (Samuels,
2002). Further, a recent volume by Strappa, Ieva, and Dimatteo
(2003), La cittàcome organismo. Lettura di Trani alle diverse scale,
is a useful addition to research on Muratori and Caniggia in Italy. 28
Whitehand’s Urban Morphology Research Group
Today urban morphology is a growing subject, with research
taking place all over the world. JWR Whitehand has played a
central role in this development. He has not only extended MRG
Conzen’s work, but also encouraged academics from other fields
to conduct urban morphology research. His knowledge and
enthusiasm have provided the spark necessary to convince others
to apply the principles of urban morphology and test the concept
around the world. As a result, the concept is now firmly
established in a global context.

Founded by Professor Whitehand in 1974, the Urban Morphology

DOI: 10.15320/ICONARP.2019.79– E-ISSN: 2147-9380

Research Group (UMRG) at the University of Birmingham is the

major centre in the United Kingdom for the study of the
geographical aspects of urban form. In 2000, the MRG Conzen
Collection was opened at the School of Geography and
Environmental Sciences at Birmingham University by Conzen’s
son, Professor Michael P Conzen. It comprises MRG Conzen’s
extensive archives.

JWR Whitehand has supervised several doctoral and postdoctoral

students who have carried on with his line of thought, including
Peter Larkham, Kai Gu, Karl Kropf, and Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir to
 Roots of Urban Morphology

name a few. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, a book was

published to honour his contribution to urban morphology
(Oliveira, 2019). Earlier, Larkham and Conzen (2014) had
dedicated their book, Shapers of Urban Form Explorations in
Morphological Agency, to Whitehand.

Kristjánsdóttir (2001) discusses a possible integration of

Caniggia’s theory on typological process with the fringe-belt
concept put forward by Conzen. She introduced the concepts of
fringe belts and leading type in Iceland (Kristjánsdóttir 2003,
2005, 2006). In her recent research Kristjánsdóttir (2015, 2018)
& (Kristjánsdóttir & Sveinsson 2016) continues the exploration of
how concepts from urban morphology can be applied and
integrated in research on the urban landscape, analysing how
town elements correspond to economic boom and bust in Iceland.

Kai Gu (2001), followed by Whitehand and Gu (2003), applied the

concepts of urban morphology to study the Chinese city of
Pingyao. Subsequently, an edited book of key papers on urban
morphology (Tim, Gu, & Tao, 2014) introduced the topic in China
and inspired new interpretations, such as Manfredini (2017). Guʼs
resent research involve analysis on Chinies cities (Wang and Gu
2020) and applying these approaches in to planning (Gu, Li and
29 Zheng 2019), and teaching urban design (Gu 2018).

ISUF

The formation of the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF)

in 1994 provided a stage for debate and diffusion and comparison
of knowledge on the urban form around the world. ISUF seeks to
advance research and practice in fields concerned with the built
environment, drawing members from several disciplines
including architecture, geography, history, sociology and town
planning. In fact it has spread it seeds and several subgroups have
be formed. ISUF publishes the journal Urban Morphology and
ICONARP - Volume 7, Special Issue / Published: December 2019

holds conferences every year, providing an international

framework for communication between members. There is not
room here to list all the articles published in the journal, but safe
to say it has been a major influence in communicating the results
of research on urban morphology (figure 3). Hitherto, it is
necessary to acknowledge all the work that Professor Whitehand
and his wife Susan have put into editing the journal, which
publishes manuscripts by authors for whom English is a second
language.
 Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

Figure 2. A schematic diagram

depicting the heightened research
activity on physical form that is
currently occurring in several
disciplines simultaneously, and
showing the relationships between
the various research traditions and
authors.

In association with ISUF, several research groups that focus on

specific cultural areas that often share the same language have
formed, and teaching of urban morphology approaches has also
grown worldwide (Oliveira 2016, 2018).

The contemporary city is a complex phenomenon. It is necessary

to revisit and use the concepts and methods established by
Caniggia and Conzen in order to understand it and better manage
urban landscape changes.
30
ACKNOWLEGDEMENT

This paper benefited from the graphical expertise of Anna

Kristín Guðmundsdóttir.

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Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir

Resume
Sigríður Kristjánsdóttir is an Associate Professor and the Director of
the Master program in Planning at the Agricultural University of
Iceland. Kristjánsdóttir is an active contributor to international
research projects, particularly collaboration between the Nordic
countries and has written reports, book chapters and journal
articles on various aspects of Icelandic planning, sustainability and
the urban landscape.

36

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