President's Report 1998

Emeritus Professor M.R.G. Conzen
2 Oakhurst Drive
Newcastle upon Tyne NE3 4JS
England

Dear Con,

On behalf of ISUF's members, I take the liberty of addressing my 1998 President's Report to you, for the simple pleasure of celebrating the dawn of a new millennium with our most eminent member! You are our best witness of the past and our wisest adviser for shaping the future.

In anticipation of ISUF's second major conference, in Florence, it is important to outline once again ISUF's actual and potential contributions to scholarly and professional endeavours. To reiterate, our field is about human settlements - cities in particular. Urban morphologists seek to develop knowledge and to provide expertise on the form of cities and processes of urbanization. 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.

The urban morphologist works to understand the way in which urban space is created over time - to explain the nature and character of its materiality as well as the forces that produce it. We describe the physical reality of the city - its spatiality and materiality - and explain it in terms of socio-cultural and economic forces and trends. Our interest in urban space ranges from ideas and concepts shaping it, to the way space is used, to specific systems devised to support human life. The methods used in developing this knowledge emphasize scholarly activity - studying a city's history with maps and attendant documents on population, economic activity, use of land, ownership, taxation, building and development, soils conditions and so on. Importantly, however, our work is highly dependent on experiencing the city on a first-hand basis because, as you vividly described, the townscape is the `objectivation of the spirit of society'. Thus being in the city, seeing, feeling, and touching it are as essential

means to capture its genius loci and to grasp its complexity as scholarly work.

Labelling the city `complex' is a cliché only for those who have not studied it! The urban morphologist is consistently humbled by how little his or her research eventually brings to the broader demands of building a knowledge base. As James E. Vance Jr noted, our work must be inductively driven - it is exploratory and slow. Correspondingly, knowledge and theory in urban morphology necessarily derive from studies of individual cities - they are syntopic studies - and rely heavily on idiographic tools (`idio' meaning `proper', `peculiar', and `graphic' indicating the use of symbols, rather than words, to depict an idea). Thankfully, these characteristics of research in urban morphology are no longer ground for dismissing their scholarly value. However, they mean that many studies of many cities need to be carried out to establish a solid database. Further, because a database is only the beginning of building an actual knowledge base, additional comparative work between cities becomes critical for building theory. In this sense, urban morphology will only mature if many people are involved, bringing their local knowledge for others to compare with their own. Since ISUF's inception, we have made significant progress in sharing studies of individual cities. Our first conference in Birmingham brought many people together, and already the Florence conference promises to gather an even larger group of researchers. Our new journal has become an essential and critical vehicle not only to share syntopic studies, but to encourage the dissemination of comparative work, and to spur debates about methodology, all of which have flourished in Urban Morphology. These are substantial achievements considering ISUF's short life. We clearly need to continue these basic aspects of our mission - to accumulate, disseminate, and share knowledge, and to sustain both our journal and our major conferences.

In addition, however, we need to think broadly and strategically in order to enrich the purposes of our association. Inasmuch as we need to be selective, the following are a few actions and issues that may constitute a programme for ISUF's future expansion.

Shared experiential knowledge

First, with respect to methods, you recently suggested that we explore adopting a common philosophy which would help to unify our approach to the analysis of urban form. You proposed that we consider, at least initially, the cultural philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. I trust someone has started work on this and is perhaps already planning to discuss it as we meet in Florence. We should also strengthen a base of shared experiential knowledge: walking in the same cities, and seeing and discussing them in a shared manner, will greatly benefit ISUF's constituents. Further educating ourselves about, and sensitizing ourselves to, the different cultural imprints on urban forms will, I believe, help resolve some of the methodological conflicts that have arisen.

Shared experiential knowledge can be an integral part of our programme of conferences and meetings. Our early meetings in the southwestern part of Switzerland addressed issues of methodology - at once thorny, because they tend to accentuate the differences between the participating disciplines, and `safe', because they are academic and removed from real-world issues. These meetings also concentrated, and rightly so given the youth of the association, on building relations between ISUF's members. To this effect, we organized memorable social events in lovely parts of this Lemanic area. We also took baby steps in approaching the `real' city together - visiting historic Lausanne and Geneva, walking around the Polytechnic School near Lausanne's railway station, and taking a boat ride on Lake Geneva, stopping at the now recreational harbours of the small medieval towns that you already know well. The same approach was taken in our meetings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, although many of the participants not familiar with North America combined personal trips with the conference.

The Birmingham conference helped us to explore, together and in a structured way, strategic parts of the city - visits included Birmingham's much re-formed city centre and the region's suburbs. We thus began to build a common, shared understanding of a city which most participants did not know. And we learned first-hand about the context of the Urban Morphology Research Group's work. The Council meeting in Paris last June continued this exploration, venturing into different grounds as we compared the `old' newtown of Versailles and the `new' newtown of Marne-La-Vallée.

Learning in situ brings people together to understand a phenomenon in often more effective ways than the written word or the drawing. We need to cultivate these shared experiences at every possible opportunity. Let us look forward to the Florence conference to bring yet another dimension to our experience.

Beyond Europe

Secondly, we must look purposefully beyond Europe. Of course, there are good reasons behind the `eurocentric' thrust of ISUF's work. By world standards, European cities are special - at once historic and vernacular, but also utterly modern and worldly. In addition, these cities have generally been well studied - unusually detailed documentation is available which facilitates research. Most urban morphologists, especially those aged over 50, find the concept of `European' cities of limited use beyond the obvious continental reference. They focus on the differences that exist between European cultures. To them, these differences are, or were, very real - so real, in fact, that they brought many of the continent's cities to the ground over the course of this century!

In contrast, eurocentricity expresses the view from the outside and to the future. Under this lens, European cities seem perfectly permanent and solid. They also seem homogeneous, the product of a primarily white, Judeo-Christian society whose differences only refer to subcultures. As such, this sample of cities seems limited, both geographically and in terms of its social history, and certainly not representative of the world as a whole.

Opening ISUF's programme to this latter view will be beneficial, if only because it is new. ISUF has support to do so as it can rely on those of its founding members who come from the different parts of Asia. They can lead us to expand our horizons and possibly sponsor some of the conferences which will be held early in the next millennium. Further, holding a future conference in North America would be a step in the direction of a new continental orientation.

An urban world

Thirdly, we need to acknowledge the rise of a primarily urban society. The world's population has almost tripled since the 1960s. People of my generation have the unique experience of witnessing in the course of their life time a five-fold increase in human population. That this growth will affect primarily non-white populations and will take place outside of Europe and North America is a further, compelling reason for turning our attention to non-Western cultures. Further, and importantly for ISUF, most of these increases in human population will take place in small- and medium-sized towns as well as in very large metropolitan areas. The term `urban' will qualify most human settlements - indeed, we will be building more human habitats over the next few decades than ever in the entire history of mankind.

Although well under way, these trends are only beginning to be recognized as significant. However, research is emerging which investigates the relationships between urbanization, decreases in birth rate and increases in living standards, and their effects on resource consumption and environmental quality. In the USA, a dozen institutions of higher learning are now deliberately rethinking their role: turning away from their original mission to improve economic development based on rural development and agricultural production and, instead, toward serving their increasingly autonomous metropolitan region now dependent on a world economy. They renamed themselves as metropolitan universities. As another example of the growing importance of cities, the prestigious Japan Prize added to its traditional focus on the sciences a category for `city planning' in its year 2000 call for nominations. As well, therefore, ISUF needs to embrace formally the coming `Era of Cities', or even perhaps the new `Urban Millennium'. Our expertise now lies at the heart of world issues and we must contribute accordingly.

The growth of urban population has had and will continue to have profound effects on the form of cities. Consider, for example, how the ways in which we use and understand them are changing. The experience of crowding is no longer confined to Asia. Even in my native Switzerland, a 50 per cent increase in population has been accommodated since the 1950s. Also, even I can remember how Los Angeles felt with 5 million people, half of the city's current population. `New' crowds are found everywhere: in airports, shopping areas, sports arenas, trains, buses and streets.

In addition to crowding, there is the experience of people of different cultures sharing the same cities due to unprecedented migration. In England and France, many cities host large groups of people from the old colonies. Of the additional five million people projected to live in Los Angeles in 20 years' time, the majority will be of Hispanic origin. In many places, existing cities are being reused and adapted by waves of new immigrants, and new ones are being created that welcome different habits, needs and tastes.

In urbanized areas, redevelopment with attendant physical transformations takes place at an astonishingly rapid pace. This is a part of the urbanization process in which morphologists are ahead of other fields. The same transformations which we have documented in historical towns and which, generally, used to take place over long periods of time, now can readily be seen and experienced by each generation of residents. Contemporary versions of the market colonization process which you explained and documented are occurring in a wide range and great number of cities. For example, in the suburban malls of many US metropolitan areas, the semi-permanent warehouse-types of structures built in the 1950s and 1960s are being routinely replaced with multi-storey constructions. Some include residential accommodation above the stores as well as structured parking. These second-generation malls illustrate how cities continue to evolve and mature, but now do so at an increasingly rapid pace. In parts of Asia, entire cities are being rebuilt as we speak, making Haussmann's redevelopment of Paris look like child's play in comparison.

On a more mundane, yet equally important level, the spatial impact of population growth is significant within the context of the world's finite territory. This impact is the greater since population growth has been accompanied by an increase in the standard of living. Families live in houses or apartments that are larger than ever. In Hong Kong, for example, interior residential space standards have increased eight fold since 1950. As the economic status of families improves, the size of the family decreases but its claim on space increases. Many nuclear families now have not one, but two homes. Most now also occupy additional work space, outside of their home. Increases in the production of non-residential urban space continue at a relentless pace for not only work, but recreation, education, and institutional endeavours. With cities more than ever including parks, libraries, schools, theatres, shops, malls, sports facilities, resorts, theme parks, ecological areas and the like, there are further expansions of cities outside cities. The resulting geographical expansion of cities is astounding. With the same population, Los Angeles, a `new city', covers an area three times larger than metropolitan London, an `old' city. Urban expansion due to economic betterment of the population is expected to take place in societies as different as Spain's and India's, independently of population increases.

Paradoxically, technological advances enhancing our ability to bring people together instantly `in time' have not reduced the need to bring people together `in place'. The need to provide access and mobility in both time and space continues to grow. Transportation and communication infrastructure takes up much of the urban environment. We are no longer just humans: spatially speaking, we are mobile creatures encased in the steel frame of our cars. In the USA, there are now as many vehicles as there are people. Vehicles have higher spatial requirements than people. It is estimated that in first-world societies, nearly one-third of urban land is devoted to cars.

Population growth and urbanization are the truly significant phenomena of our times. The tendency is to approach the issues that ensue in separate functional sectors - taking steps, for example, in controlling new births and improving health in general, or in improving the economic base of growing populations, or in addressing mounting transportation and environmental problems. Alternatively, the focus is either on very local issues (for example, endangered species, or water and air pollution) or global issues (for example, global warming), failing to operationalize the relationship between the two and the cumulative impact of small local events. In reality, both problems and solutions related to either health, birth rates, economic development, environmental quality, or transportation, are all linked in one way or another. Only by understanding and working with these linkages will we be able to improve our living conditions.

One effective means of addressing the future in a holistic way is to concentrate on the issues as they appear in urban settlements. You wrote that `urban settlements are areas of maximum concentration of different processes involving three different types of causality: physical, biotic, and social, the latter being the most important one'. Indeed, urban settlements embody the `wholeness of our predicament'. As the locus of human activity, urban settlements necessarily integrate many of the issues arising out of population growth, and only there, in space and in matter, can we begin to understand how these issues play one against the other.

This line of reasoning has been argued before, and elegantly so by such a veteran urbanist as Jane Jacobs. Practical applications exist as well, notably in the Brazilian city of Curitiba, now called the `Ecological Capital of the World'. Over a period of 20 years, Curitiba's Mayor, Jaime Lerner, and his team managed to improve significantly services such as transportation, education, and recreation, as well as levels of resource consumption and environmental quality, by focusing their energies on actual conditions and needs of the people within the realm of the relatively small town. Lerner, who has since become Governor of the State of Paraná (9 million people), is now working on an inter-regional scale, concentrating on the state's primary cities and the relationships between them. Following this logic, urban morphologists can not only make a difference in how living and environmental conditions are improved in future cities, but they indeed have a responsibility to do so.

New tools and first-hand experience

Fourthly, and finally, we can welcome the arrival of new tools to support both future research and practice. Thankfully, the immensity of contemporary and future cities is accompanied by significant advances in mapping technology and information systems. In the Puget Sound region around Seattle, for example, we recently gained access to electronic maps for a region covering almost 3000 km2. Remarkably, these maps' data are available at the parcel level, the very spatial unit used in urban morphological analysis. These data include tax lot, ownership, land use, zoning, slopes, waterways and other environmental conditions, streets and roads. In parts of the region, sidewalks, retaining-walls, trees, as well as sub-parcel data on condominiums and internal land uses, are also available. Other layers, such as utilities, census-based socio-economic data, and business data, can be readily integrated. In addition, data about `events' structuring land use and morphological change, such as building and occupancy permits, and capital improvement projects, are integrated into these databases, allowing us to monitor future change.

These geographical information systems are significant because they allow us to work on urbanized areas covering several thousand square kilometers and to readily identify within them (even to quantify) detailed spatial patterns in ways that used to be prohibitively time-consuming. The `old' techniques of morphological analysis which you and others have developed can be readily applied, to begin to explore the potential of the new technology. Now instead of measuring and counting by hand, the morphologist relies on the machine to do so. Hence all the work done painstakingly on very small cities can now be applied to the very large regions that our contemporary cities cover. Further, these Geographical Information Systems will greatly help in the development of comparative research. Access to the maps will increasingly be available on the `web', allowing researchers from one end of the globe to explore and analyse cities at the other end. These maps are not restricted to first-world societies. Parts of Mexico City, for example, have been digitized at the parcel level.

These are exciting times: ones in which it is increasingly important to work with the young generations of researchers - they will always be ahead of their elders in technological prowess! ISUF is fortunate and smart to have instituted the New Researchers' Forum and will continue to support their network as much as possible. It is worth emphasizing that the advantages of Geographical Information Systems - their capacity to handle large amounts of data very quickly and to perform analyses painlessly - do not diminish, but in fact highlight, the need for maintaining the experiential knowledge of cities discussed earlier. This is not as counter-intuitive as it sounds. For example, as we were studying maps describing the quantities and spatial distribution of apartments in Seattle, we noted that some districts contained many developed parcels that were zoned for residential uses but which had no units on them. We suspected from first-hand know-ledge of some of the districts that those were groups' homes which the assessor (the source of many of the data) had not needed to classify in terms of number of units. To proceed, we shall have to walk the streets again to check our hypothesis for each and everyone of these parcels - an activity which will sound quite familiar to you. First-hand experience of the city will remain invaluable to perform `reality checks' on data. Hence old generations of experienced but technologically inept urban morphologists will continue to be needed!

Let us welcome the coming of the new millennium and get ready to address these trends and turn them into opportunities. Please let us know how you feel about some of these ideas, in Florence if you are able to come, or via Urban Morphology.

With best regards,

Anne Vernez Moudon
President of ISUF

College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Washington, Box 355740, Seattle, WA 91805, USA.
E-mail: moudon@u.washington.edu