President's Report 2002

ISUF's fourth major conference will take place in Trani, near the city of Bari, Puglia, Italy. The setting itself promises to be spectacular and all conference attendees should plan to take extra time to visit the numerous significant cities of the peninsula. The region has been the setting of numerous commercial and cultural exchanges over the history of its urbanization, and it continues to serve as a centre of migratory trends, linking eastern, western, northern and southern Europe, and people of many ethnicities and beliefs. In ISUF's tradition, special opportunities will be provided for conference attendees to visit the region under the guidance of experts. Trani will bring an international array of distinguished keynote speakers, expanding and broadening ISUF's reach, and promising challenging exchanges between Asian, European and American perspectives.

One of ISUF's important contributions is the provision of in-depth study and field reconnaissance of cities and parts of cities that are not within the main stream of tourist attractions. These include both contemporary and historic environments, places that are lived in and vibrant. Since these field studies are frequently led by people who have devoted a good part of their lives to the areas under investigation, they present unique opportunities.

ISUF has added quite a few places to its inventory of study sites. Starting with Lausanne and Geneva in Switzerland in 1994-6, it then focused on Birmingham, in the English Midlands, in 1997, Versailles, France in 1998, Florence, Italy in 1999, Groningen, the Netherlands in 2000, Cincinnati and Chicago, USA in 2001, and Como, Italy in 2002. The visit to Chicago became a landmark event, as many of the participants were stranded in the city in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September. I hasten to say that we do not plan to match this performance in the future. The Como meeting last summer thankfully took place in relative normality with respect to world events. It coincided with a spectacular exhibition of Gianfranco Caniggia's work during the 1960s in that city as well as a conference that gathered most of Caniggia's collaborators and family. ISUF's members also benefited from an examination of Como on the ground, which used Caniggia's publication on the city. The Como event reinforced the value of visiting places that have been at the core of the development of research and theory in urban morphology. It has given impetus to organize, in 2004, a symposium in Newcastle upon Tyne, England that will include visits to towns in Northern England that were the subject of M.R.G. Conzen's research. This event will follow the Thirtieth International Geographical Congress, in Glasgow, Scotland, at which ISUF is organizing five urban morphology sessions.

This summer, we shall decide on a site for ISUF's fifth major conference, in 2005. We should like to add cities and places outside of Europe. We therefore call for our faithful colleagues in Australia, South America, and Asia to come forth with proposals to host that conference. Proposals for 2007 and 2009 will also be entertained. Whatever place is selected for 2005, it will be `new' to the roster of ISUF's conference venues.

These recent years also mark the consolidation of important collections of works by Conzen and Muratori. A repository of Conzen's work is now accessible to researchers at the University of Birmingham, England. A collection of Muratori's thus far unpublished research on world urbanization processes is also available on CDRom. These provide an enormously rich set of documents for future research.

Another project marks a first step for ISUF, that of comparing urban forms at an international scale. The Seoul Development Institute is sponsoring this effort, which involves ISUF members in Korea, Japan, France, Canada, the UK, and the USA. A seminar is scheduled to take place in Seoul this spring and the progress of the project will be reported in Trani. An increasing number of such projects can be anticipated as the world's urban populations continue to grow, propelling us further into the `century of cities', and forcing us to balance quality of life with resource consumption.

Shaping the future of ISUF constitutes our prime concern as we continue to consolidate our organization's institutional structure. We are working on a mission statement that defines the heart of where our efforts will focus over the next 5 to 10 years. So far, we have concentrated on establishing an intellectual basis for interdisciplinary urban morphology. ISUF's intellectual foundation has theoretical and methodological roots that span over a century. Geographers first developed morphological approaches to understanding the city. Theirs was primarily a historico-geographical perspective, shedding light on the evolution of cities as organisms. Architects and town planners followed in their steps, looking for a historically grounded approach to the design of new cities or parts of cities. The usefulness and efficacy of urban morphological approaches in both urban research and planning and design practice are now recognized, and it is ISUF's role to continue enhancing these activities with the empirical and theoretical depth that will further the ability to manage urban environments.

Yet at the same time, the reach and impact of urban morphology has not been fully realized. It goes beyond urban historical research and planning and design. It is recognized in many areas of urban policy that urban form affects much human behaviour. The foundation of the Italian and the French schools' work in urban morphology lay in what they saw as the shortcomings of modern environments in supporting human activity. Somewhat ironically today (more than 50 years after Muratori's first attempts to teach the value of traditional cities), housing policy experts, transportation planners and health professionals, among others, are turning critical attention to modern urban development practices. The pendulum has swung, once more, as mainstream policy makers address the obvious: they accept the simplistic formula attributed to Winston Churchill, that `we shape our environments and then they in turn shape us'. They see current car-dominated environments as inimical to sustainable and healthy living, detrimental to social interactions (those of the young and old particularly), travel patterns and environmental quality. The transportation and public health sectors are, at least in the West, allocating large sums of money not only to research the environment-behaviour nexus, but also to remedy those aspects of the environment that are known to affect quality of life - limiting access to automobiles to reduce fossil fuel consumption in urbanized areas, and increasing open space to improve urban environmental quality and recreational opportunities in cities.

Urban morphologists have much to contribute to this new struggle. We know how cities develop, what forces shape transformation processes and how they do so, and we know how to measure and model urban environments to shed light on their associations with behaviour. ISUF members figure prominently around the world in such activities as shaping development plans for large metropolitan areas, building exemplary housing projects and entire new neighbourhoods, leading efforts to preserve historic cities, organizing neighbourhood groups and teaching them to lead necessary redevelopment schemes, and modelling urban form for active living. Many, if not most, of us also inform and train new generations of urbanists about the nature and processes of urban form, preparing them for careers in urban policy, planning, and design. ISUF has a major role in offering leadership on how urban form affects everyday life and how it can be defined to improve life at many different levels. ISUF is a forum for determining the future of urban habitats.

The fact is that while we do define our environments, once in place, these environments only shape us to the extent that we do not modify them. Policies on transportation, and urban infrastructure in general, housing, education, recreation and public health, for example, shape environments directly and indirectly. Financing the large capital investments associated with city building shapes how environments are managed over time. Regulatory practices affecting urban form deploy an astoundingly broad web of determinants of urban environments, defining all elements of urban form from the micro scale of materials to the macro scale of metropolitan footprints. As societies are increasingly convinced that urban environments are directly linked to quality of life, urban morphologists have increasing opportunities to contribute to revisiting a host of policies and regulations that will shape new, and reshape old, urban environments. If we do not do it, others will surely take our place, quickly acquiring expertise in urban form and development processes.

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