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| A REVIEW ON URBAN MORPHOLOGY STUDIES OF THE WESTERN COUNTRIES AND ITS ENLIGHTENMENT |
| ZHANG Lei |
| Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China |
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Abstract This paper makes a review on urban morphology studies in western world, and analyzes the enlightenment to China. The paper describes the origins, development and characteristics of the three main schools: 1) German-British School, originated from the landscape school of human geography in the German-speaking countries during the 1900~1930s, is developed greatly after the World War II in England by Conzen. Whitehand compiled Conzen's works and developed his ideas, then formed the Urban Morphology Research Group at the University of Birmingham, which became a strong center of urban morphology research nowadays. 2) Italian School, making a reflection of modernist architecture in 1950~1960s, has its seminal instigator as Muratori, who developed his self-termed "operational histories" in the studies of Venice and Rome. In recent decades, Caniggia and Cataldi, taking over the mantle of Muratori, made Italian School also become the mainstream of urban morphology studies. It is characterized as typology-morphology tradition and put theory into design practice. 3) French School also stemmed from the critique of modern architecture in the late 1960s. But with the influence of both the British and Italian schools and some other subjects, such as sociology and art history, French School is more integrated with studies emerged from architecture, urban planning and urban geography. After the 1990s, three schools were coming together, leading to set up the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) which provides the basis for an interdisciplinary field and the opportunity to establish common theoretical foundations for the urban morphologists all over the world. According to the ISUF's official publication Urban Morphology and literature bibliography, some discussions are offered in the recent works in several countries. Finally, regarding the urban form studies in China, this paper argues that more attention is paid to the macro-scale studies. However, the medium and micro scale studies of the built fabric on the block and land parcel scale and its form evolution process for example, which are the main focus of western studies, are still lack of sufficient works in China. The author points out that the concepts, theories and methodology of western urban morphology studies can provide great enlightenment to China.
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Received: 04 June 2009
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2010, Vol. 25 
