ISUF Projects
International urban form study
Kwang-Joong Kim,
Seoul Development Institute, 391 Seocho-dong, Seocho-ku, Seoul
137-071, Korea. E-mail: kjkim@sdi.re.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 has commissioned from ISUF an investigation that will 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 being undertaken by ISUF involves 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 are Shigeru Satoh (Tokyo), Peter Larkham (London), Catherine Maumi (Paris), Paul Hess (New York), Chanam Lee (Los Angeles) and Kwang-Joong Kim (Seoul). Seven areas are being sampled from each city to serve as a basis for comparisons. Two sample areas in each city are within the central business district and five within residential areas. The project employs traditional morphological methods for detailed comparison of urban form. The sample areas, each 500 by 500 metres, are being investigated in terms of street network, lot division, and buildings. Analyses will be made of building coverage, floor-space concentration, street-space concentration, building height, and household density.
This spring, the participating members are scheduled to take part in a three-day workshop in Seoul. The results of the project will be presented during ISUF 2003 in Trani, Italy.
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: e.a.koster@rug.nl
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. Exploration of these, and some reworking of them, has prompted my own reflections on what they reveal.
In addition to the survey undertaken in 1953, in preparation for the publication of the Alnwick monograph (Conzen, 1960), a similar survey was undertaken in 1964. I shall confine my attention here to these two surveys, comprising two fieldbooks.
In each field-book, plot-by-plot data on land use and building fabric are provided in columns. The notation system used consists mainly of two-letter codes in combination of upper- and lower-case characters. To process the data myself I converted them to a database. The structure of this database strongly resembles the tables in the field-books.
Columns have been added to link the database to a map in a Geographical Information System (GIS). The handwritten entries in the field-books are not always entirely clear so the process of transferring the data from the field-books to a database could not be automated – everything had to be re-typed.
Conzen developed his own notation. The first key dates from his student days in Berlin in the early 1930s. References to a very basic key can be found in his Staatsexamen dissertation (Conzen, 1932). It is not completely clear how many different keys have been created, but the key Conzen used in the 1953 survey is noted by him as being the fifth. There are also a number of undated keys in the M.R.G. Conzen Collection. Some were clearly designed to be used for educational purposes; some are unfinished. I shall concentrate here on the keys numbered as fifth and sixth. It is known that the sixth key was designed for use in the survey of Alnwick undertaken in 1964.
I have remapped the two surveys on the Ordnance Survey 1:2500 plan surveyed in 1961, digitizing the plots on this plan by hand. All buildings, other than minor outbuildings, have been included as separate objects. Other features, such as gardens and parks, have been added in a more generalized way. The database has been added to this plan using unique values that link the polygons to the data.
During the process of analysis notations have been grouped based on a system that Conzen used in his keys. In the case of land use, for example, shops were divided into seven groups, of which food, household, clothing and miscellaneous were the main categories. The combinations have been mapped using a GIS, both for 1953 and 1964. Between those two dates there was an increase in the number of shops that Conzen listed as ‘miscellaneous’ and a decrease in the number selling ‘food’. There was also a decrease in the total number of shops – a trend that was probably common in European small towns in the early 1960s.
The maps that Conzen constructed of the various townscape features – for example roofing materials, wall materials and period of construction – were similar to those used by him later as the basis for producing maps of morphological regions in Ludlow (Conzen, 1975). The published maps of Alnwick’s land use and building fabric in the Festschrift for G.H.J. Daysh (Conzen, 1966) are highly generalized, but it is evident from comparison with the GIS based on the data from the field-books that the field survey undertaken in 1964 has been used to produce these maps.
Apart from being able to add his glossary of technical terms to the second edition of the Alnwick study, Conzen was severely limited in the revisions he was able to make in that publication. The survey undertaken in 1964 could not be incorporated.
In 2004 I was able to carry out my own survey of Alnwick, following the rules and guidelines Conzen set out half a century earlier. Alnwick underwent many changes during the intervening period. The results of this third survey are in the course of preparation.
References
Conzen, M.R.G. (1932) ‘Die Havelstädte’, unpublished Staatsexamen dissertation, University of Berlin.
Conzen, M.R.G. (1960) Alnwick, Northumberland: a study in town-plan analysis Institute of British Geographers Publication 27 (George Philip, London).
Conzen, M.R.G. (1966) ‘Historical townscapes in Britain: a problem in applied geography’, in House, J.W. (ed.) Northern geographical essays in honour of G.H.J. Daysh (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne) 56-78.
Conzen, M.R.G. (1975) ‘Geography and townscape conservation’, in Uhlig, H. and Lienau, C. (eds) Anglo-German Symposium in Applied Geography, Giessen-Würzburg-München (Lenz, Giessen) 95-102.
Conzen, M.R.G. (2004) Thinking about urban form: papers on urban morphology, 1932-1998 (Lang, Oxford).
Evenden, L. (2004) ‘International Geographical Congress Symposium in Urban Morphology, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 21-24 August 2004’, Urban Morphology 8, 107-10.
Koster, E.A. (2001) Stadsmorfologie: een proeve van vormgericht onderzoek ten behoeve van stedenbouwhistorisch onderzoek (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen).
Marzot, N. (2005) ‘Typological analysis and hermeneutics in the Conzenian and Caniggian Schools: overlaps and differences’, Urban Morphology 9, 48- 50.
Samuels, I. (2005) ‘Conzen’s last bolt: reflections on thinking about urban form: papers on urban morphology, 1932-1998’, Urban Morphology 9, 136- 44.
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