About ISUF

The organization and staff

The activities of ISUF are governed by its Council, composed of Officers and elected members, which meets once a year to review the association's business. These meetings coincide with annual conferences, alternating between large one year and small the next, during which a general meeting is held that brings Councillors, Officers, and members together to discuss the interests, projects, developments, and direction of the field and the association, and to elect new Councillors as vacancies arise. The general activities of the association are coordinated by its Secretary-General, its Treasurer, and its Webmaster. The publication of the association's journal is in the hands of an Editor, two Associate Editors, an Assistant Editor, an Editorial Assistant and an Editorial Board. Special projects are coordinated by the chairs and secretaries of various Commissions and Working Parties. All administrative positions in the organization are honorary and unpaid.

All members are encouraged to participate in the governance of the association, through attendance at the international conferences, submission of manuscripts for possible publication in the journal, volunteering for positions of responsibility in the association, and any other suggestions they may wish to make to Council directed through the Secretary-General.

The Council comprises the President, the Secretary-General, the Treasurer, the Editor of Urban Morphology, six ordinary members and one co-opted member. Please address any general queries regarding the functioning of ISUF to the Secretary-General.

History

Here are a selection of articles on the history of ISUF and the study of urban form from different countries and schools. These articles were all published in Urban Morphology, the journal of the International Seminar on Urban Form.

Projects

International urban form study

Kwang-Joong Kim, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University, 599 Gwanak-so Gwanak-gu, 151-742 Seoul, South Korea
E-mail: kjkim@snu.ac.kr

Leading thinkers in urban morphology have long been calling for greater comparative study at the international level. This note highlights a current project that, though not a direct response to that call in that it stems from the perceived needs of a particular metropolitan authority, promises to provide valuable comparative data across an international range of 'world cities'.

In its advisory role to the City of Seoul on land use policy, the Seoul Development Institute commissioned from ISUF an investigation to enable Seoul's development pattern and density to be compared with those of other world cities of equivalent size. With some 10 million people within an area of 605 km², Seoul is one of the most heavily populated cities in the world. There has been much debate about the intensity of its city building: arguments for efficient land use have been ranged against those emphasizing the problems of overcrowding. With its fine-grained plot patterns, Seoul's building coverage appears very high. Yet it is not clear whether the city's floor-space concentration is higher than that of other world cities as Seoul has large areas of low-rise development. The 'compact city' has been touted as a promising way to achieve sustainable urban form in Western countries, but it is a questionable notion in Asian cities, where dense development has for long been sustained.

The research undertaken by ISUF involved case studies of six cities in Asia, Europe and North America: Seoul, Tokyo, London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. In formulating this project, the Seoul Development Institute was fortunate to have Anne Vernez Moudon and Jeremy Whitehand as Project Advisers, providing pivotal and timely guidance from research design through to project execution. The Principal Investigators for individual cities were Shigeru Satoh (Tokyo), Peter Larkham (London), Catherine Maumi (Paris), Paul Hess (New York), Chanam Lee (Los Angeles) and Kwang-Joong Kim (Seoul).

Revisiting Conzen’s Alnwick data

Elwin A. Koster, Instituut voor Kunst- en Architectuurgeschiedenis, Faculteit der Letteren, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Oude Boteringstraat 34, Postbus 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands.
E-mail: elwink@gmail.com

As interest in the work of M.R.G. Conzen has broadened (Evenden, 2004; Koster, 2001; Marzot, 2005), stimulated in part by the publication of many of his previously unpublished writings (Conzen, 2004; Samuels, 2005), so have questions arisen about his data and methods of working. Records of the field surveys that Conzen undertook in his classic study of Alnwick are held in the M.R.G. Conzen Collection in the University of Birmingham. This project explores these.

Alnwick's Middle Fringe Belt (representation below in Google Maps by Phil Jones)