President's Report 1997

Assessment and prospect: President's Report, 1997

ISUF's first official conference, held at the University of Birmingham, England in July 1997, attracted a surprisingly large number of participants from many different parts of the world. The high quality of the presentations promises a very productive future for the organization. The success of the conference demonstrates the need for an umbrella organization uniting those researching on urban form and development in an intellectual atmosphere that is free from the constraints of traditional disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Scholars and practitioners of city building come together in ISUF to exchange theories and empirical knowledge. These exchanges have emphasized that linking research and action facilitates learning about how cities are made, and how they can be managed or structured to better respond to emerging societal needs. The cross-cultural reaches of ISUF encourage the recognition of distinctions between the general principles and theories of city building and the particulars of applying these theories in different contexts.

Il faut tourner la page

The salient obligation for ISUF as an association is to progress into the future without forgetting the past: to build on the wealth of existing theory and practice and to push ahead with the exciting, though daunting, prospects that today's explosive urbanization rates present.

ISUF's mission and activities are solidly grounded in the long-standing work produced by the three schools of urban morphology which have been operational in England, Italy, and France. The many common threads in the histories of the three schools which can be detected in spite of their past geographical and disciplinarian isolation evoke an emotional response on the part of ISUF's older generation. Yet water - mixed with blood and tears - has run under the bridge. Given the strength of the new generations emerging, it becomes clear that the three schools are now more traditions than schools - traditions to be nurtured and studied, rather than models within which to train future scholars.

The Birmingham conference attracted a critical mass of researchers who, though knowledgeable and at ease with ISUF's history, are determined to explore beyond the channels established by the schools. As Michaël Darin noted, `il faut tourner la page'. The intellectual battles fought by M.R.G. Conzen and Saverio Muratori no longer prevail in today's world. Modernism has become a historical movement, just as the quantitative revolution in the social sciences has settled into a less dominant mode in the wake of post-modern thinking. Also, ISUF's members today can enjoy and build upon a world that has shrunk, where national and cultural boundaries no longer limit research; a world that highlights both commonalties and particularities of individual cultures. For example, the increased importance of preserving and celebrating the historical basis of cities has become a widely-accepted political priority worldwide, to the benefit of both indigenous and foreign populations. ISUF's role in documenting and actively conserving heritage is clear and of the utmost importance. The experience that Italian-, English- and French-speaking countries have had in this arena can now serve the rest of the world, even if the problems will be different and hence the solutions will need to be new. Current and future generations of morphologists must necessarily contribute inventive and creative responses.

Challenges

ISUF's birth corresponds, not accidentally, to levels and rates of urbanization never before encountered. The world's population has more than doubled since 1960, and is projected to double again in the next few decades. Most of these new people will live in new cities. The largest body of theories ever produced about cities emerged when urban populations began to grow rapidly in the late-nineteenth century: not only the garden city movement, modern urbanism, and the planning of new towns, but also numerous models of, and analytical approaches to, urban and neighbourhood structure. Looking at the figures, incentives to work in this arena are even greater today than 100 years ago. For urban morphologists, the task ahead is as exciting as it is daunting. The world economy and associated socio-technological developments render further urbanization of unprecedented magnitude inevitable. There are at least three challenges ahead.

"Mega-city-regions entail housing, transportation, food supply, and environmental problems that demand not only economic and political resources, but also data collection and analytical powers of a new magnitude and complexity.

"Unprecedented rates of urban growth demand corresponding agility in managing urban agglomerations.

"Older urban environments are quickly becoming a rare commodity. The city as palimpsest now refers to things built before 1945. Tourism in these environments has become so popular that it is one of the largest sources of trade revenue.

These challenges may require substantial modifications to the conceptual basis and tools of urban morphology.

Diversity and richness

To face these challenges, the diversity of thought and approaches within ISUF must be preserved. First, as Muratori and Conzen have already demonstrated, the city has been, and is, an integral part of humanity: ordered and continuous, as well as varied and unique. Both men's genius, and, I believe, the reason for their continuing legacy, lay in their comprehensive approach to the city. Both were at once scientists and phenomenologists, anticipating the eventual limits of science as all-encompassing. They mixed intuition and rationality. They experienced the city on a first-hand basis, hailing its genius loci, and they analyzed it objectively, not in the sense of being neutral, but in the sense of making the parameters of the study explicit and limited. This multi-level approach to the city must be cultivated to retain and maintain the richness and complexity of the object of our study. In short, we must remember to balance the analytical discipline that Muratori and Conzen displayed, with the openness and richness of the way in which they gained insights on the city.

Secondly, ISUF must retain the three schools' different purposes behind the use of urban morphology: elaborating at the same time the development of descriptive and explanatory theories of city building and prescriptive theories to support new city design, as well as continuing to evaluate critically past theories of design.

Diversity and conflict

Diversity inevitably brings conflict. Conflict will and should be relished, accepted, or at least tolerated, with good humour, as another form of creative strength. Here again, the lives of Muratori and Conzen serve as examples. They were both unusual and non-conforming men. Both worked in an inhospitable intellectual context - their peers tried hard to ignore them. Conzen persisted in using his inductive approach in a world of geography largely seduced by the magic of numbers and theoretical deduction. Muratori, on the other hand, painstakingly recorded the old city in a world that had rejected history books and promoted a tabula rasa. In the long run, sustaining conflict with their peers strengthened the legacies of both Conzen and Muratori. ISUF needs to go one step further and sustain conflict within its own ranks.

M.P. Conzen has counselled against forming a new discipline and creating a tight and controlled framework. A productive future for ISUF will be non-sectarian, taking advantage of the richness of interests and research, ranging from preserving historic city centres to understanding and managing sprawling city-regions, and continuing to make bridges between seemingly different concerns, never forgetting that they have in common people's great and continuing efforts to construct their habitat. This stand is not to everyone's taste, and heated discussions promise to continue as to whether contemporary city building has any relation to the cities built in the past. ISUF will, as it should, address this controversy.

Similarly, the range of foci, from regional form to the structure of individual buildings, creates difficulties in communication between participants. The concerns of architects and those of regional scientists may seem to have little in common until it is realized that these are `only' two sides of the same coin. ISUF's participants span the entire range of scales at which urban form can be understood, and tensions necessarily emerge because the languages used by the various participating disciplines differ, sometimes greatly. But again, ISUF will cultivate these tensions rather than suppress them.

ISUF's agenda

Members of ISUF can share a number of goals.

"To improve and consolidate knowledge of urbanization and city-building and development processes. This general, all-encompassing goal will help to accumulate a body of knowledge that can be readily accessible to newcomers in the field and help to sustain currency for more experienced researchers and practitioners.

"To develop both theory and pedagogy concerning the study of the city. New theory will reflect contemporary issues in city building. Without effective pedagogy, however, this new theory will remain within the tight walls of academia, the privilege of a few, rather than the tool of many.

"To emphasize the value of empirical knowledge of the city for the design and planning professions. ISUF stands apart from most research and practice in urban design and planning in that it relies on detailed empirical data of both the socio-economic and the physical characteristics of the city to perform analyses and to develop theory. Though often difficult and costly to acquire, these data are essential to bridge the gap between large-scale city and regional planning efforts and small-scale, punctual activities performed to build the city. The large number of factors involved in defining these activities and the complexity that characterizes their interrelationships demand inductive reasoning based on detailed empirical data. The lack of such approaches has been the primary reason behind the difficulties encountered in successfully managing urban development.

"To work cross-culturally so as to highlight commonalties and differences in the city building process. Much can be learned from the experience of others. Also, however, globalization is helping ideas to diffuse rapidly, making cross-cultural work inevitable.

"To address and respond to the needs of the architecture, urban design, and planning professions, as well as the development industry, in the provision of theory, pedagogy and tools. ISUF will keep close ties with these groups and serve them appropriately, for the general betterment of urban environments as well as for maintaining ISUF's relevance.

"To help to preserve the existing city as an essential element of continuity in people's lives.

"To help to manage the existing city as a complementary task to planning the future city. A successful future cannot be attained unless the past is known and the present is handled harmoniously. Managing the existing city is the only way that the future city will be of better quality than the present one.

In keeping with these goals, there are tasks that can benefit from the interdisciplinary and inter-cultural strengths of ISUF members. Specifically, work is already progressing on the following matters.

"To improve access to monographs on, and studies of, cities throughout the world for comparative purposes and for improved pedagogy. This work involves translation, and the explicit definition of concepts and technical terms for use by an international audience.

"To develop a lexicon to facilitate general comprehension of multi-lingual material, to support translation and to sustain inter-cultural, inter-lingual approaches.

"To expand comparative analyses of existing theories developed by the different schools in order to build a common basis for future theory.

Past experience indicates that this ambitious agenda can be met; each new year since ISUF's first meeting in 1994 has brought challenging new scholarship and practice in urban morphology. The future is all the more promising now that new ideas can be expected from the large number of talented young urban morphologists who attended the conference in Birmingham last summer.

Anne Vernez Moudon, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Washington, Box 355740, Seattle, WA 98105, USA. E-mail: moudon@u. washington. edu