Journal - Abstracts vol.12 nr.1 (2008)

S. Satoh Urban morphology in Japan: researching castle towns

Castle towns are one of the main types of urban settlement in Japan. This paper reviews current research on the castle towns in that country, especially in the fields of historical geography, architectural history, and the history of urban planning. The results of research in each of these three fields are introduced; the building and transformation of traditional private houses termed machiya, in the commercial areas of cities, are described; several morphological approaches to the castle town of today are considered; and finally, the application in urban design of knowledge gained from castle-town research is discussed.
J. Hasegawa The reconstruction of bombed cities in Japan after the Second World War

The reconstruction of bombed cities in Japan after the Second World War has recently attracted much attention and has given rise to important research in English on exceptional cases, such as Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima. This research shows that these cities were forced to retreat from the initial idealistic planning for reconstruction owing to pressure from central government, and that local authorities were not able to incorporate the views of ordinary people under the town planning system at that time. This paper examines the cases of eight provincial cities that were designated by the government in the late 1940s as 'model cities' of war-damage reconstruction, as they were considered to have made remarkable progress. The planned major reconstruction of the eight cities, which brought about substantial changes to their physical forms, was in most cases characterized by a wide street leading to a new square fronting the principal railway station. However, the reaction of ordinary citizens to the official reconstruction proposals often prevented their full implementation.
R. L. Rego and K. S. Meneguetti British urban form in twentieth-century Brazil

A number of new towns were created in northern Paraná State, Brazil, by the British company Parana Plantations as part of a colonization scheme in the first half of the twentieth century. The urban landscapes created by these towns are distinct from those associated more generally with the colonization of Brazil. However, there has been no extended analysis of their origin, organization, conformation and impact. Drawing on contemporary sources, this task is attempted here. Set within a broader context, a systematic colonization is revealed in relation to its British colonial background. The layouts of the towns founded by Parana Plantations show many features of a British colonial town model. The colonization scheme reflects some of the garden city tenets that were circulating widely in the colonial world.
L. Kealy and A. Simms The study of urban form in Ireland

Urban form is studied in a variety of disciplines in Ireland, but it has not, until recently, been central to urban studies. Histories of individual towns have usually been preoccupied with political, socio-economic and cultural issues. Archaeological excavations have made an important contribution to the reconstruction of Viking and Anglo-Norman towns. Map evidence is good for early-modern plantation towns. The Irish historic towns atlas provides detailed cartographic and topographical information for a growing number of towns within a chronological and thematic framework. Urban form is often considered as a container for socio-economic processes or as a marker in the search for cultural identity. Architectural studies have focused by and large on buildings of importance. While no Irish scholar has in a strict sense adopted Conzen’s method of town-plan analysis, there is evidence for the emergence of a new focus on the fabric of the urban area rather than on the special event represented by the particular building. The ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences has favoured discussions on town plans as ideological constructs and on the importance of urban space for civic society. There appears to be an increasingly strong morphological perspective in urban studies which is likely to be a reaction to the loss of historical fabric in the context of large-scale urban renewal schemes.