President's Report 2000

Though history is continuously produced, it is remembered via landmark events and dates. Interestingly, ISUF celebrated the new millennium with a definite change in ambience: at the Council meeting in Groningen in July 2000, discussions and exchanges revealed a level of serenity not reached before.

In previous meetings, ISUF's leadership struggled with reaching agreement on what constituted the roots of our organization - identifying the three schools, accepting the differences and similarities between them, assessing what lay beyond them, and recognizing the organization's disciplinary and geographic contexts. Outlining the long-term goals and the overall mission of ISUF was another concern that loomed high, as was discussed in my previous reports. In contrast, the Groningen meeting focused on the tasks ahead, catching up with ISUF's various activities and identifying ways to consolidate them. As suddenly as the century closed, ISUF appeared to become home.

ISUF's newly-found maturity could be explained as only a passing moment, a simple reflection of short-term circumstances and location. Indeed, Elwin Koster had put together a superb programme. Weather co-operated as well, with North Sea winds and July rains demanding only three or four layers of clothing. The City of Groningen itself offered a splendid array of morphological periods, which we naturally sampled. ISUF's Council members noted Groningen's surprisingly diverse, geographically mixed employment base. Given limited time, however, we focused our studies on eating establishments (performing detailed typological analysis of their production outputs in both solid and liquid forms), but could only execute preliminary visual surveys of the sex industry quarters. Yet, for all of the good times, I am quite certain that the Groningen meeting only facilitated ISUF's turning point. My premonition -is that ISUF had left its formative period and moved squarely into an operational phase.

The report summarizes the activities that members have been engaged in. First, many ISUF members are hard at work consolidating and disseminating some of the classic works of urban morphology. The working party on Architectural Composition and Building Typology is finalizing an English edition of Composizione architettonica e tipologia edilizia 1: lettura dell'edilizia di base by Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei. Also, our colleagues in Italy have added a new book to the series of publications on urban house types and related tessuti. La casa romana (Bascià et al., 2000) fills yet another column of the chart that Caniggia began in the 1970s, showing the differences in types across a dozen Italian cities. The casa romana includes gorgeous maps of Roman tessuti.

In England, the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham is now the fortunate choice of location for M.R.G. Conzen's archives. These will undoubtedly attract numerous scholars to the British Midlands and bring many visitors to the Urban Morphology Research Group. Michael P. Conzen compiled the material for the archives following his father's death and, in doing so, encountered a substantial number of essays neatly filed in Con's drawers, including some previously unknown. This was impetus for him to edit a new collection of the master's writings (Conzen, 2001), many of which are on subjects that have heretofore only been discussed orally. Both Caniggia and Maffei's and Conzen's books will be available at the ISUF Conference in Cincinnati in September - they will indeed be welcome complements to the presentations made at the conference.

Secondly, ISUF's theorists are working to specify the philosophical and ideological roots of urban morphology. Following M.R.G. Conzen's probing at the 1997 Birmingham conference, and as noted in Urban Morphology (Conzen, 1998), the interest includes grounding the principles of urban morphological research in the general history of theories of evolution. Further, the Commission on Theory and Methodology has officially embraced the daunting task of assembling a much-needed multilingual thesaurus of terms used in urban morphology. This will undoubtedly be put to test as American morphologists join our group in greater numbers this coming summer.

Thirdly, understanding of the geographical and disciplinary contexts of urban morphology continues to expand as members reflect on the work that has been carried out in their home area. Articles in Urban Morphology have already reported on research in Spain, France and Germany. In addition, we need to hear accounts and discussion of research activity in other parts of the world. This is especially true as far as our colleagues in Japan and Korea are concerned. Several publications recently came out of Asia that are of interest to urban morphologists. The book edited by Fukui and Jinnae (2000) on the reconstruction and rebirth of urban environments contains comparative cases in Japan, China, Germany, and Italy (the book is in Japanese, English, and Italian) (see also Jinnae, 1995). Kwan-Joong Kim's team has produced a second book on Seoul (Development Institute and Institute of Seoul Studies, 2000). Piper Gaubatz is in the process of publishing articles on urban redevelopment strategies in China and Japan. All of this material adds in useful ways to the landmark issue of Built Environment edited by Peter Larkham (1999) and to Asano's (1998), viewpoint' in Urban Morphology. I wish that someone would now translate Shigeru Satoh's book on housing and neighbourhood types in Tokyo (the exact reference is not available to those of us who do not read or speak Japanese!).

In the western World, work on suburban morphologies, such as the volume edited by Harris and Larkham (1999), continues with the imminent publication of a book by Whitehand and Carr (2001) based on several years of empirical research on inter-war suburban housing development. A review of the scholarly contributions of the Urban Morphology Research Group's programme seems appropriate at this point in the history of the group. It certainly would provide an important perspective to ISUF's membership. Similarly, a recent volume edited in Switzerland by Malfroy (2000) needs review to keep the non-French-speaking audience abreast of teaching and research programmes in Lausanne.

On the subject of expanding horizons, I had the opportunity to visit the city of Vienna for the first time this summer, after leaving Groningen. Encountering a great city for the first time brings great pleasure. I was particularly fortunate to have Elisabeth Lichtenberger guide me through Vienna, which I came to understand as the great urban meeting point between eastern and western Europe. M.P. Conzen (1999) correctly stated that Lichtenberger is herself a school of urban morphology - I venture to suggest that both she and her husband, Josep, be referred to as the Viennese School... They led me on a tour of carefully selected (and of course diachronically presented) neighbourhood forms. Elisabeth's already impressive energy peaked when, contrary to her earlier warning that 'nowadays, every building is locked for security reasons', we were able to enter most of the private courtyards and meander the corridors of a great many types of apartment houses. I marvelled at a city that had such a long history of urban rental housing, spanning all incomes and, it seems, many cultures. The comparative historical study of apartment forms and living in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin came to mind as a worthy topic 'of future morphological research. The wealth of material that Lichtenberger has already accumulated should make such study particularly attractive.

Fourthly, tangible progress is being made on the relationships between research and practice, or what Whitehand (2000) called the need for fundamental thinking in architecture and planning as related to urban morphology. The theme has been developed by McGlynn and Samuels (2000) in their new work in England. They take the important step of generalizing their approach to residential neighbourhood design first developed in Asni6res, France. The approach recognizes the needs and limitations of the contemporary building and development industry in respect of building materials and financing. Also of note in this regard is the award of the prestigious SOM Foundation prize to Brenda Scheer for a paper, soon to be published, on an approach to analyzing urban form that caters specifically for designers.

Linking research and knowledge of urban morphology to practice invites reaching out to a couple of design theories that have currency and could potentially benefit from a knowledge base in urban morphology. First, Christopher Alexander's pattern language, though less popular now than a decade ago, remains a favourite for both professional and lay people: it offers guidelines based on vernacular forms and constructions. More recently, however, the work of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) has taken front seat in the realm of design theory, receiving good press coverage and enjoying a high, though controversial, profile in professional organizations.' CNU's theory of 'good' city form has been the subject of several publications in the course of the past decade, with the latest and most synthetic being its, Charter (Congress for the New Urbanism, 2000). In the United States, the New. Urbanism has a large constituency of policy makers, developers, economists, transportation engineers, architects, and urban planners. Its approach has been embraced by federal and local housing programmes. The journal Places (with a circulation of 10 000) recently reviewed CNU's achievements (Moudon, 2000). In it, I suggested that the morphological approach could serve as a theoretical framework and provide methods to measure and evaluate the performance of environments designed by New Urbanists. In short, urban morphology could help structure research on the characteristics and impacts of CNU design and planning. An expanded version of this article will be published in a future book, indicating that interest is at last growing in having research actually inform practice.

Linkages are also being made with Hillier and Hanson's work on space syntax, as briefly reported by Roux (1999, p. 94). Further discussions on the comparisons with urban morphological analysis will take place during a conference this spring organized by followers of Hillier's methods at the Georgia Institute of- Technology in Atlanta.

Last November, Brenda Scheer, Kiril Stanilov, Joe Nasr and I held a round table on ISUF at the Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). This yearly conference (and its corresponding equivalents in architecture and landscape architecture) gathers most American and many European and Asian educators in our fields. Well attended in spite of its early Sunday morning schedule, the round table confirmed the growing interest in urban morphology in education. Academics are keen to have access to and share course material - lecture topics, exercises, and references. ISUF is well placed and organized to act as a repository of such course material, periodically surveying and reviewing offerings from its members. I would be happy to co-ordinate such an activity in its initial stages, and I invite ISUF members, and readers of this journal in general, to send me their course syllabi. I will inventory what I receive and follow up by organizing a group of interested parties to meet in Cincinnati.

Finally, I must bring up the issue of the Web. ISUF's site has recently been updated, contains considerable new material and now has a link to our conference site. Clearly, however, more needs to be done to make the site useful to ISUF members, and to attract new members. Designing our Web site is an opportunity to think practically about how we communicate and disseminate information. Our Web strategy with regard to our site's contents, design, and interactive features should have a priority on a par with our conferences, Council meetings, and journal. It is especially important as a way of building on the success of our journal. Co-ordination with Urban Morphology can also save precious space in the journal.

Discussions about ISUF's Web strategy in Groningen pointed to several specific issues. One is the need for members to submit material that would be used on the Web: posting, for example, lists of new publications, other conferences organized by ISUF members or parallel organizations, course syllabi, and links to other organizations and individuals would add to the value of the site. Another is support and personal commitment. Elwin Koster has generously provided his expertise and served as ISUF's Webmaster. He will need assistance to increase the contents of the site. A third issue is to obtain our own named site - isuf.org, or such like. Our next Council meeting will revisit these issues. At that time, the Editorial Board of Urban Morphology and potential web assistants can begin to structure a strategy integrating ISUF's dissemination policies using both the Web and the journal. In the meantime, suggestions from ISUF's members are welcome.

As I write, abstracts of papers and presentation proposals for Cincinnati 2001 are clogging fax machines and e-mail boxes. September is around the comer, especially for those organizing the conference!

Note: The New Urbanism is a popular national movement to rethink and alter the development patterns used in creating suburbs since the 1950s. The movement is affecting such diverse fields-as public policy, real estate development, transportation planning, architecture, and urban planning. The New Urbanism's claims are dauntingly broad: to make better living places in social, economic, functional, and aesthetic terms, and to recapture the qualities of urban life perceived to have existed prior to the great suburbanization of US cities. At the same time, however, these claims point to and embrace the, inherent complexity of urban life and cities.