Council Meetings of ISUF, 2002

Meetings of the Council of ISUF took place on 4 and 7 July 2002 in Cernobbio, Italy, a small town situated on the western shore of Lake Como not far from the city of Como. The meetings coincided with a seminar celebrating the life and work of Gianfranco Caniggia and an exhibition of his projects, studies and drawings.

As in the past, the meetings were structured around reports from the officers of ISUF as well as commissions and working parties. Those attending were Giancarlo Cataldi, Ségolène Cognat, Michael Conzen, Michaël Darin, Elwin Koster, Karl Kropf, Peter Larkham, Gian Luigi Maffei, Sylvain Malfroy, Nicola Marzot, Anne Vernez Moudon, David Prosperi, Attilio Petruccioli, Jean-Michel Roux, Shigeru Satoh and Jeremy Whitehand. Apologies were received from Jean Castex.

President's report

The President, Anne Vernez Moudon, began her report by pointing out that ISUF was fast approaching its tenth birthday. Reflecting on the prospect, she felt that it was timely to consider ISUF's raison d'être. In particular, members of ISUF share a passion or, perhaps, an obsession, with the city, the place where most people live. Such a focus is increasingly important as the environment more generally becomes a central concern. More people are talking about the broader environment at the policy level, but less emphasis seems to be put on its human side - the side in which ISUF is interested. That interest, and the multidisciplinary approach taken by ISUF, put it in a particularly strong position to focus attention on the built environment and offer tools for dealing with the problems faced in urban environments.

Moudon went on to explore what she thought were the `pluses and minuses' of ISUF as it stands at the moment. Overall, on the plus side, ISUF is more mature. There are fewer disagree-ments and more co-operation. On the minus side, ISUF is not as focused as it might be.

Turning to last year's conference, Moudon felt that, on the one hand, there were many good papers and the organization was good. On the other hand, many people with papers in the proceedings did not attend the conference. Asking herself why that was the case, she made some tentative suggestions, mainly concerning the issue of promotion. The conference might have been advertised better; it could have been made clearer what the conference was about; and positive and successful features such as the mini-courses and keynote speakers could have been highlighted. She added that the tour of Chicago was over-subscribed and suggested that more might be made of combining future conferences with field excursions.

The plus side of the ISUF website, in Moudon's view, is that it has improved immensely but, on the minus side, it was still deficient in the number of contributions and the amount of interaction.

With commissions and working parties, there had, in some cases, been progress and projects had been completed. In others cases, the level of activity was so low as to question the value of having a constituted commission or working party. As an organization, ISUF will have to take some decisions about these inactive groups.

Regarding Urban Morphology, Moudon has received feedback from colleagues in America suggesting that some scholars like it but that others find it too Eurocentric and too focused on traditional cities. This needs to be seen in the context of an American audience that tends to polarize on a preservation/contemporary dichotomy and likes to recognize the names of authors as established figures.

Moudon finished with an agenda for the coming year:

ocreate a web monitor or monitoring team with Elwin Koster, the current Webmaster, as executive director;

oimprove oversight of conference and council meetings and clarify lines of responsibility;

oidentify who is to be responsible for the publication of conference proceedings;

oidentify what individual institutions might bring to ISUF in order to distribute responsibilities and provide opportunities for mutual benefit.

In the discussion that followed, Jeremy Whitehand supported Moudon's comments on commissions and working parties, adding that there appeared to be a need for co-ordination and liaison. He also suggested there was a need for better co-ordination and communication between the Council and conference conveners. He put forward the idea of creating additional officers including a conference co-ordinator, a publicity officer, and a co-ordinator of commissions and working parties.

The idea of formally creating more officers and spreading responsibility out from the core of the Council was generally supported. David Prosperi was appointed as an adviser to Council on ISUF's development and strategy.

Secretary-Treasurer's report

Michaël Darin's report was brief. He noted that the number of subscriptions had increased over the past year but was still not as high as he would have liked. Income from subscriptions was sufficient to continue publishing Urban Morphology at its current frequency and size. There was discussion about establishing credit card accounts to permit members to pay subscriptions over the Internet. Registration fees for ISUF 2001 in Cincinnati had been paid by this method and it was the intention that a similar arrangement would exist for the payment of registration fees for ISUF 2003 in Trani.

Editor's report

The Editor, Jeremy Whitehand, began by noting that, as in the previous year, a high proportion of the contents of Urban Morphology in 2001/2 had been authored by native English speakers. The Editorial Board would like to increase the number of contributions from non-native English speakers. The rejection rate for full-length papers remains at about 60 per cent. Given the number of papers submitted, this leaves just enough to fill two issues a year at the current size. In Whitehand's view, the nub of the problem is that the journal is still not widely known, despite continuing efforts to encourage members to persuade libraries to subscribe. Whitehand noted, however, that Urban Morphology is now indexed or abstracted in Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents/ Arts & Humanities, and a number of other publications.

Whitehand reminded the Council that Brenda Scheer would be retiring as Book Review Editor after 4 years in the post. The Council recorded its appreciation of Brenda's contribution, and that of Katharine Arntz, who had been succeeded as Assistant Editor by Michael Hopkins.

Looking to the future, Whitehand noted that the journal is still produced on a low budget. It was still felt that the disadvantages of using a commercial publisher outweighed the potential advantages. On a related matter, Moudon suggested there was a strong case for creating a web-based version of the journal. Attilio Petruccioli mentioned that his experience with the magazine he publishes showed that the web-based version has increased the demand for the printed version. Other issues relating to web publishing were raised and it was agreed that more information about options, costs and benefits, and the experiences of other journals was needed before a decision could be made. Some of the issues were taken up in discussions arising from the Webmaster's report.

Webmaster's report

The ISUF web site includes a number of new items, as reported by Elwin Koster. There is a bibliography and a list of current research. The problems experienced editing the list have now been resolved. Hidden on the site are PDF versions of all back issues of Urban Morphology. They could be made available for reading, but not for printing, if this was felt appropriate. Making them available has implications for the sale of back issues and it was agreed that the PDF versions should not be made available yet and the implications and alternatives should be investigated. Also hidden on the site is the Glossary of Urban Form by A.N. Jones and P.J. Larkham. Copyright issues relating to the making of this more widely available are being investigated, and a Dutch translation is being produced under Koster's direction.

Koster made a plea for more contributions to the site and also asked whether it would be valuable to translate some of the main pages into other languages, such as German, Italian, French and Spanish. Similarly, he noted that the list-server discussions were relatively inactive. As a technical aside, Koster agreed to ensure that messages from the list servers include an indicator in the subject line of their source in order to avoid confusion. On the matter of the content of the site, it was agreed that an Editorial Board for the site be formed to co-ordinate its content. It was agreed that Peter Larkham would be a member of the Board: he would liaise with the Editorial Board of Urban Morphology. The other member would be Nicola Marzot, whose responsibilities would include conference announcements on the site.

Commissions and working parties

The Working Party on Legislation and Urban Form reported that it had progressed to the point of having papers published or in preparation on France, Italy, Germany and the UK. A decision had been made to extend the historical scope of the papers to include periods prior to the nineteenth century, which had not been in the original plan, and this has increased the time required to compile reports. The next steps are to complete the reports on the countries so far investigated, add more countries to those already covered, and begin comparative studies.

The Working Party on GIS and Cartography is recruiting new members and is aiming to produce a course book on the use of computers in urban morphology.

The Working Party on Architectural Composition and Building Typology, having successfully completed the translation into English of Caniggia and Maffei's Lettura, is engaged in producing a glossary of the Italian school of urban morphology and building typology. The aim is to compile the most important terms and definitions from various sources and present them in Italian and English.

Discussion of the progress and activity of the commissions and working parties more generally revealed a shared sense that, in some cases, there had been a loss of direction. Koster suggested that, from the point of view of commission and working party members, it would be useful if the Council could produce some kind of contract so

that the members' institutions could see that the work had support and was taken seriously. Moudon emphasized the importance of commissions and working parties submitting proposals setting out their objectives and programmes. It was agreed that the secretaries of commissions and working parties would report directly to the President during 2002/3.

ISUF 2003

It had been decided at the meeting of the Council in Cincinnati that the ISUF conference in 2003 should be held in Trani, Italy. One of the main items on the agenda of the Council meeting this year was to finalize the arrangements. It was agreed that the conference should be entitled `The planned city?', and would take place from 3 to 6 July 2003.

The main themes of the conference are to be:

o the planned city in history

o cultural contexts and variations

o theories of the ideal city

The timetable for preparing the programme was agreed as follows. A call for abstracts of proposed papers will be sent out by Attilio Petruccioli in September 2002 and will appear simultaneously on the web site. It will be published in Urban Morphology (see pp. 93-4). The deadline for the submission of abstracts will be 31 December 2002. Proposers of papers will be notified whether their papers have been accepted or rejected by 15 February 2003. Submission of the text of an accepted paper and the full conference registration fee will be required by 15 April 2003. The proceedings will be published prior to the conference by the Polytechnic of Bari under the direction of Attilio Petruccioli and Giuseppe Strappa.

ISUF 2004

Whitehand recalled that, at the meeting of ISUF in Cincinnati in September 2001, the suggestion had been made of organizing a meeting that would take as its central theme the work of M.R.G. Conzen. In the meantime discussions had taken place, especially between the officers of ISUF, and the idea had emerged of making this a symposium, with a sizable field seminar component, based in North-East England. This would mark the fortieth anniversary of the symposium organized by M.R.G. Conzen in the same location, following the International Geographical Congress (IGC) in London in 1964. Michael Barke of the University of Northumbria had agreed to co-ordinate the meeting, which would include field seminars in Alnwick and Newcastle upon Tyne.

Whitehand reported that the organizers of the International Geographical Congress to be held in Glasgow in August 2004 had received with enthusiasm the proposal that the meeting in North-East England, organized by ISUF, should be a post-IGC symposium. They had also invited ISUF to organize five urban morphology sessions at the IGC itself, in Glasgow. This invitation had been accepted by the officers of ISUF: the sessions would be on 19 and 20 August 2004. It was proposed that the post-Congress symposium should be from 21 to 24 August 2004, followed by the annual business meetings of ISUF on 24 and 25 August.

It was further proposed by Whitehand that this combination of Congress sessions and post-Congress symposium should be taken as a major opportunity for retrospective and prospective views on urban morphology as a field of knowledge and practice, broadening the field of discussion from the work of M.R.G. Conzen to wider questions, including both other urban morphological work by geographers and the development of other schools of thought within ISUF. A provisional programme of themes to be addressed, both at the IGC in Glasgow and at the post-Congress symposium in North-East England, was tabled (see p. 58). This suite of proposals was approved by the Council.

Karl S. Kropf, Roger Evans Associates, Kidlington, UK and Urban Morphology Research Group, School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK