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

Viewpoints

If you would like to respond to a viewpoint, or want to write your own, please contact the editor.

The implications of urban contraction: the Japanese case

E. Ducom,
Départment de Géographie et Aménagement, Université Paris IV Sorbonne, 191 rue Saint Jacques, 75005, Paris, France. E-mail: estelle.ducom@parissorbonne. fr

Urban growth processes and their implications for urban form have been widely analysed. Urban morphologists have given especial attention to fringe belts (Conzen, 1960; Darin, 2000; Ducom, 2003; Whitehand and Morton, 2003). However, relatively little attention has been given to urban contraction, despite its significance at the present time in many parts of the world, including Japan, Korea, Germany, Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States (Oswalt, 2006a). A number of large cities that had been extending their built-up areas over a very long period in those countries are now physically contracting, associated with, for example, industrial decline (Oswalt, 2006b; Pallagst, 2005), population shrinkage (Fujimasa and Furukawa, 2000), sluggish land markets (Aveline and Ling-Hin, 2004) and political changes (Oswalt, 2006b). The forces involved are sometimes acting in concert and sometimes independently. This process of contraction is liable to affect an increasing number of cities in the near future. But, paradoxically, neither its characteristics nor its implications for the physical form of cities have been much considered, studies in Germany being among the exceptions (Oswalt, 2006a, 2006b; Pallagst, 2005). The process awaits detailed consideration by the full range of disciplines and professions concerned with cities, not least urban morphology and planning.

In Japan, the population of the country as a whole is now declining. Urban contraction has already begun in many cities (Flüchter, 2006). Even in Tokyo itself, which is still slowly growing, some areas, especially more distant suburbs, are shrinking (Ducom and Yokohari, 2006). This has a number of ramifications in addition to the most obvious one of loss of population, including vacant buildings, closed schools, abandoned facilities (such as playgrounds and parks). In Tokyo, for example, there are areas of contraction about 50 km from the city centre, in relatively inaccessible places, for instance far from railway stations.

This emerging phenomenon should not be confused with counterurbanization (Berry, 1976), which implies urban contraction at a local scale by the movement of people and employment away from large cities to places outside the cities, including small towns, villages and rural areas. On the contrary, urban shrinkage in Japan tends to involve a transfer of population towards city centres, which are currently being 'densified' by private developers, encouraged by the law on urban renewal of 2002. Several districts, like Shiodome in Minato-Ku (central Tokyo), have recently been transformed from railway terminals to skycraper districts of offices, hotels, restaurants, shops and luxury housing. Such projects, supported by Tokyo metropolitan government, widen the gap between increasingly powerful and compact centres and declining peripheries (Aveline, 2003). Despite the extent of the problem, planning practice continues to concentrate on managing urban renewal and redevelopment of the city centre, thus exacerbating the problems of distant suburbs. There is a curious failure to acknowledge the implications of projections of declining populations.

The traditional Japanese urban model, based on economic and population expansion, and leading to urban sprawl, is in need of transformation. Distant Japanese suburbs, brought into existence relatively recently during mounting pressure on land, are proving to be the first to be abandoned as pressure decreases. The transition from urban sprawl to urban shrinkage raises questions about the sustainability and reversibility of urban developments and about the appropriateness of the traditional urban model and its capacity for adaptation. Here surely are major research tasks for urban morphologists.

References

Bridging the gap: applying urban morphology to successful planning practice

Tony Hall,
Urban Research Program, Griffith University, Nathan Campus, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan, Queensland 4111, Australia. E-mail: tony273@bigpond.net.au

As pointed out in the editorial of the last issue of this journal (Whitehand, 2007), urban morphology ought to have the potential for playing a positive role within planning practice. This includes the day-to-day control of development, as it is through the numerous incremental decisions that the form of urban areas is ultimately determined. Unfortunately, published accounts of its positive use in practice are rare. It is likely that there are many good examples but that practitioners normally do not have the time to write them up. Although policy documents such as development plans and site briefs are published, obtaining, collating and extracting useful content from them can be a tedious task.

Fortunately, a full account of an example for a whole town (Hall, 2007) is now available. It relates the story of the improvements made to the British town of Chelmsford from 1996 onwards that led to the award by the central government of the quality mark of Beacon Status for the Quality of the Built Environment in 2003. This book sets out a way of building urban design into the local planning process based on practical experience, an approach that was proactive.

Two key elements for achieving such an approach were sound design principles and explicit published policy. The design principles sought to create a sense of place, respect for context and the meeting of functional needs. They required thinking of places and communities at different spatial levels: the town, the neighbourhood, and the street, and taking account of the physical and intangible qualities that go to make a place. Explicit published policy enabled all parties in the development process to know the position of the planning authority at an early stage and to know it clearly. At Chelmsford, it had two components: a clear physically-based spatial strategy and briefs for all significant sites.

One task of the physically-based spatial strategy was to relate the intensity of development to accessibility, in pursuit of the reduction of the need to travel and travel by sustainable modes (Chelmsford Borough Council, 2001a). At Chelmsford, intensity was used in preference to density because it as much about activity, social interaction, as just a quantitative measure. The approach went further than just a policy statement by saying that a plan should link through to more detailed physical design. This was done not just by specifying the location of more intensive development but also by giving guidance on the physical nature of the different levels of intensity that should be permitted in different locations.

The first step was the identification of character areas where the intensity of development was made explicit through three-dimensional physical parameters. These formed a typology that could be used to structure the locational aspects of twodimensional spatial policy, as shown by Table 1.

The physical implications for different levels of intensity of development for use in the development plan were then made explicit by a matrix that specified the expected quantitative and qualitative aspect of urban form for the town centre, for suburban areas and for neighbourhood centres. Planning briefs were the principal vehicle for setting out design expectations at site level. Although they can cover a variety of formats, the approach adopted at Chelmsford was that they should provide unambiguous guidance on physical form, including specification of street blocks and frontages. An example is provided by the Master Plan for the site of Beaulieu Park North (Chelmsford Borough Council, 2001b). The text provided a systematic appraisal of the site and included a new, and strongly prescriptive, masterplan diagram in which street blocks, frontages, pedestrian routes and local open spaces were specified. A further diagram (Figure 1) identified the character areas that were to be provided within the urban form.

The design principles were seen as a useful and creative tool for use in negotiations and not just as 'motherhood' statements or points that are taken for granted. This meant that they needed to be translated into a format for use in the day-to-day control process. The matrix shown in Table 2 was developed by one of the Council's leading urban design officers, Roger Estop, as an experiment. The urban design objectives from the British government publication By design (Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, and Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, 2000) were listed down the left side and the cells of the matrix revealed their physical expression. When considering actual proposals, they enabled the objectives specific to the site to be formulated. When they were turned into negatives, 'the proposal does not ...', they showed how urban design objectives could be expressed in the reasons given for refusal in the development control process.

What was notable in practice was, first, how both the spatial policy and detailed guidance expressed and prescribed the desired physical form and, secondly, how this was pursued through active negotiation. Moreover, a high quality urban environment was delivered in a uniform manner, not merely through isolated examples. In the period 1996-2003 not just the policies but the life and appearance of the town were turned around.

References

Typomorphology and urban design practice

Ivor Samuels,
Urban Morphology Research Group, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. E-mail : ivor.samuels@googlemail.com

The great strength of ISUF lies in its international embrace and, perhaps unique among learned societies, its interdisciplinary inclusiveness. There are few, if any, forums that bring together theoreticians and practitioners from the disciplines of geography, urban history, architecture and town planning. The views I set out here come from one corner of this spectrum, that of the architect and town planner who has different expectations than those of an academic urban geographer or a historian. Practitioners are concerned with the potential of the explanatory powers of urban morphology to be harnessed to the activities of planning and urban design: how its descriptive and cognitive concepts can be applied by practising professionals in those fields. Although typomorphology is essentially about description and explanation, it can be used not just for managing change in our legacy of inherited urban form, but 'in the other direction it can inform innovations with a clear idea of the structure of what is introduced and how it fits into the wider structures and processes' (Kropf, 2006, p. 73).

This is a concern that has preoccupied many of us for some time, before ISUF was founded. That it is still a concern is confirmed by Camacho- Hübner's (2007) report of the conference of the Nordic Network of urban morphology in which he proposes three main topics as the basis for future debate. These are the practical use of urban morphological theories, the regionalization of urban morphological research and the communication of urban morphological knowledge.

More recently Whitehand (2007a) has discussed similar issues in an editorial in this journal. Although my observations here were drafted before the editorial, in some respects they are a response to Whitehand's concern when he points out how the practitioner representation in ISUF is dominated by architects 'from the Latin world'. This is especially true if one considers the composition of the Council of ISUF, but of course we must take into account the marginal importance of the planning profession in the Latin countries, in contrast to the anglophone world.

A quick count of the 'prescribers' (architects and/or planners) among the anglophone membership of ISUF is informative. In early 2007 there were 172 subscribing private members of ISUF (data supplied by S. M. Whitehand). Eighty-seven of these were based in anglophone countries, of whom around 50 are known to have or appear to have (it is not always clear from the listings) a design profession affiliation. This is a much higher proportion than one might expect. However, of the 149 institutional members worldwide, only twelve seem to be professional offices or government planning agencies. A further five individual members give professional offices as their addresses. This membership analysis is only approximate, and takes no account of the recent large increase in the number of members in South America, but it does show that, while ISUF has a substantial academic presence, there would seem to be a potential for it to gain membership among professional offices.

The extent of typomorphological concepts in practice

At the risk of perpetuating what Jeremy Whitehand (2005) has called anglophone squint, the focus in this paper has to be on the anglophone situation, because it would be presumptuous to consider other contexts from a limited personal experience. In discussing here the extent to which concepts of typomorphology have been used in urban design projects I have been very modest in my aspirations. I have looked for the presence of a lowest common denominator of urban morphology – the systematic application of the essential elements of streets, blocks, plots and buildings and the demonstration of how they interrelate and are affected by the socio-economic context.

Two separate strands of planning and urban design activity can be identified, that of conservation, or managing the inherited townscape, and that of implementing new settlements and major redevelopment schemes in urban areas. In the first strand, currently in Britain we have some work of prominent ISUF members infiltrating in a modest way the world of conservation. These include Peter Larkham et al. (2005) at Stratford upon-Avon and Jeremy and Susan Whitehand at Barnt Green (Whitehand, 2007b). But in the current development climate conservation takes second place to new building, especially new housing.

The planning climate in the UK has changed remarkably over the last three decades in a way that one would expect to be enormously favourable to the introduction of urban morphological concepts in practice. Recent evolving public policy towards new urban development has been marked by a series of official publications such as By design: urban design in the planning system (Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, and Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, 2000) and the Urban design compendium (Llewellyn-Davies, 2000). The big shift in these works was to a reborn interest in the virtues of traditional urban form. It received central government sanction as witnessed by the Deputy Prime Minister's Foreword to the recent Design coding: testing its use in England. To quote his words, 'centuries ago we knew how to achieve the best in urban design, from Roman Chester to Georgian Bath, but today it's almost as if we are having to learn how to build communities again' (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, no date, p. 5).

However, this recognition of the virtues of the inherited urban form of streets, blocks, plots and buildings is hardly matched in practice by an equivalent degree of attention being given to these urban elements, so central to both the Conzenian and Caniggian approaches (see, for example, Caniggia and Maffei, 2001; Conzen, 1975). There is little awareness of the importance of establishing the underlying deep structures that will endure for centuries as opposed to a concern with the relatively ephemeral nature of the architectural superstructure. This is especially disappointing in official publications since it is public agencies that have the responsibility for these deep structures, i.e. the public space system. In this era of privatization this guardianship of the public realm becomes more crucial than ever.

Of course the extent to which typomorphological methods can be adopted has much to do with the structure of the planning system in different contexts. Tony Hall, in both his academic work (Hall, 2000) and in his role as chair of a local authority planning committee (Hall, 2007), has pointed out that the British planning system, with its focus on two-dimensional land use was not likely to be a fruitful field for the introduction of these methods. It was also unlikely to deliver the design quality that was being sought after in the documents referred to previously.

Pilot coding projects in Britain

The enthusiastic promotion of urban design codes by central government in the UK would seem to offer an opportunity for the introduction of typomorphological concepts into planning. In England, over the last 5 years, these codes have been enthusiastically grasped as a way of ensuring a high quality for the massive housing programme proposed in 2003 by the 'sustainable communities plan' (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2003).

A programme of seven pilot coding projects was started for sites, predominantly for new housing, ranging in size from 7 ha to over 300 ha. Together with six other locations where codes had already been used they form a body of work which was evaluated in a series of publications and workshops run by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and other bodies (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2006). The codes vary enormously in the extent to which they employ typomorphological concepts or methods. The most systematic is that by Roger Evans Associates (2005) for Rotherham, which rigorously applies a scheme of levels of resolution.

Most have some sort of regulating plan that defines street types: in this they follow US form-based codes. They vary in the extent to which they specify the detailed architectural language they require. Some simply have photographs of acceptable exemplars but they do not spell out the minimum qualities an acceptable building must have. Others are much more restrictive and, under the cover of achieving local character, insist on a lot of local vernacular detail (John Simpson and Partners, 2005) – this very much follows the US pattern book approach.

A major criticism of the evaluation of the pilot studies is that their ease of use was never considered – it may have been too early, for some had not yet been legally adopted at the time of the evaluation. Indeed a tracing of the impact of codes on built form as implemented would seem to be an essential investigation, but no government agency is likely to pursue this type of study, which would need to be extended beyond the life of any elected body. A related criticism of the evaluation process is that it did not include those very protagonists who will be its principal users – developers and the local government officers concerned with administering the code.

The English codes are mainly concerned with housing. One of the challenges of coding is making rules that will achieve a diversity of form. It is relatively easy to create a varied streetscape given the range of widths of housing plots. However, the extent to which volume house builders will follow the codes, which require slight and perhaps arbitrary variations in height, is doubtful, as suggested by their use in Hastings (Urban Initiatives, 2005). It is much more difficult to achieve variety with big-box commercial development. For instance, the same code specifies entrances to commercial buildings every 15 m and this is simply wishful thinking. The danger of proposing forms that do not acknowledge the realities of the market is demonstrated in Camborne, which has one of the few codes that is in an advanced stage of implementation. Here the masterplan proposed a traditional street of shops at the heart of the community. The reality as implemented is a free-standing big-box supermarket sited in the centre of a surface car park.

Form-based codes in the United States

The renewed willingness to learn from older urban forms owes a lot to the New Urbanist movement in the United States. This is the latest transatlantic idea to be imported to Britain and is another example of anglophone squint since typomorphological codes or their equivalent have been the basis of much planning in Italy and France for some decades (see, for example, Cataldi, 1984; Steinebach et al., 1992). One of the of the tenets of the New Urbanism has been the introduction of form-based codes to replace those based on quantitative and land-use controls by 'addressing the relationship between building façades and the public realm, the form and mass of the buildings in relation to one another and the scale and types of streets and blocks' (Form Based Codes Institute, 2006).

These codes often use the 'transect', a system of classification that groups, in a progressive scale, from rural to urban core, the various elements of urban form. While drastically reductive of urban form, it does offer a very easy to understand approach. Indeed it is this user friendliness that is the most positive attribute of the US codes. Unlike their complex European counterparts, they are designed for application by a local government office rather than being intended primarily for an audience of academic peers.

However, some US codes are much less concerned with the deeper levels of structure and much more with architectural style. Certainly the authors of Seaside (Bressi, 2002) would argue that their code allows a wide range of styles and that there are few modern-style buildings because the owners do not want them. This freedom may be possible in developments where the houses are bespoke but less relevant where houses are being built speculatively for sale.

This focusing on the superstructure as opposed to the deeper levels of urban form leads to an easy perversion of New Urbanist ideas. While the Charter for the New Urbanism advocates walkability, mixed use and other estimable qualities, it is too easy for a house builder to simply put a porch on a house, put the car parking round the back, and claim it is New Urbanist development. And a New Urbanism tag helps sell houses.

Conclusion

This review has been sketchy because we need more systematic evaluation of how typomorphological methods have been applied in design, how easy have they been to use and what were the outcomes. Such an evaluation should focus more on the products and less on the process.

This research will need to be done independently of government agencies, which always have an agenda to fulfil – it is important that research results are not edited to meet political ends. Research also needs to take place in different contexts and investigate the extent to which positive experiences can be transferred from one context to another. In this respect the broad spread of ISUF membership is well suited. But we need more accounts in our journal of how urban morphological concepts have been used in design. Until now the emphasis in Urban Morphology has been on the descriptive and explanatory use of urban morphology. Those excellent papers that for 10 years have discussed the use of typomorphology in different national contexts only barely touch on issues of application to design. From Darin (1998) writing about France to Heineberg (2007) on Germany, this facet has been neglected. For example, Darin notes that Panerai and Huet went on to practise after doing their important academic work on morphology. It would be interesting to know how that practice reflected their earlier work and what the outcomes were.

If Urban Morphology can turn some attention to these issues, then perhaps we can broaden our membership in the direction of the design professions. As Evans (2005) has observed, 'urban morphology is not a user friendly term' and often where it has been used its terms have been modified. Thus plan units become character areas (Larkham et al., 2005) and levels of resolution become scale levels (Stratford-on-Avon District Council, 2001).

However, the use of such terms as areas of 'homogeneous directness' and 'global legibility analysis' have not seemed to be an obstacle to the diffusion or usefulness of that 'microsoft' of urban morphology, space syntax (Space Syntax, 2006). Any consideration of urban morphology in design in Britain cannot ignore space syntax. Although it has an approach to urban form different to the Conzenian or Caniggian tradition (Larkham, 2006), it is perhaps the most successful of any branch of urban morphology in the way that it has been taken up.

Perhaps the use of special language has the power of a magic spell; an abracadabra which people believe will get results. It may be that our urban morphology language has not yet demonstrated its efficacy or perhaps it is too close to everyday speech and really needs to be made more specialized.

Given the strength of the planning profession in anglophone countries it is perhaps in this direction that we should be giving our attention, for it will be much more difficult to make an impact on the architectural profession. The whole of the culture of architecture is focused on innovation and image. In Habraken's succinct formulation, 'the demands of the everyday environment are vastly different from what is required to create the extraordinary. Nevertheless the profession's self-image, publications and ways of working still cling to its roots in monumental architecture' (Habraken, 2005, p. ix).

To conclude, why should we be concerned to introduce urban morphology into design practice? There are two reasons. First, if we are to believe the politicians, the UK is at the start of a housebuilding boom with 3 million new homes to be built by 2020 (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2007). The last time the UK had an amount of new building comparable to that now envisaged was 40 years ago and we know what a mess was made of that. The proper application of typomorphological concepts to the design process can help avoid repeating these mistakes.

Secondly, we seem to be entering an era of single-issue design. There is great pressure to design and build projects that save energy. While the importance of low-energy design cannot be denied, design solutions are emerging that, in their obsession to confront one issue, ignore all the rest – a sort of environmental fundamentalism. It is only by emphasizing the broader implications of urban form at all its levels of resolution and the complexity and longevity of urban tissues that this danger can be avoided. As the first President of ISUF wrote, 'ISUF's interdisciplinary focus stresses the importance of interrelating scholarly endeavour and professional intervention, playing one against the other to provide a body of knowledge which is at once relevant to contemporary social issues and useful for professional practice' (Moudon, 1999).

References

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