President's Report 2009

ISUF President’s Report

As my term of office as President comes to an end, it is a great pleasure to write my final report. I wish to thank the many members of ISUF, especially the members of the Council and the Editorial Board, who have worked with me towards achieving the aims of ISUF and contributed to its activities over the past 4 years. Various objectives have been met and reflect a number of very successful collaborations.

The most important achievement has been the increasing awareness of the activities of ISUF outside Europe and America. The conferences in Brazil in 2007 and in China this year have been important stages in this development. The great success of the conference in Ouro Preto has been translated into increased membership of experts in the academic world of Latin America and has been the stimulus for new projects in that part of the world. The programme for the conference in Guangzhou suggests that this should also be a landmark event. This should be a stimulus to research into urban form in a major part of the world that has hitherto been under-represented in internationally accessible publications in urban morphology.

I should like to take this opportunity to mention two smaller conferences, held in 2006 and in 2008, the first in Stockholm, Sweden and the second in Artimino, near Florence, Italy. The first was hosted by the Nordic Network of Urban Morphology and the second by CISPUT and ISUF Italia. In each case a strong international contribution was made to events organized by groups of experts belonging to a local network of ISUF. This accords with the Council’s policy of developing its international contribution by strengthening national activities. This is an effective means of stimulating the international comparison of research methods that in much of the twentieth century tended to be limited to their application to particular language areas. Also with the aim of improving methodological comparisons, it should soon be possible to publish the results of the planning workshop organized by ISUF Italia in the Spring of 2008 at Aramo, Pistoia, Italy. During one week, about 30 students and professors pursued a theme of architectonic planning for a new project in a historic area: they compared diverse approaches to methods derived from diverse schools of thought in architecture in Italy. The results, emanating from a variety of standpoints, produced an extremely interesting concluding synthesis.

Among the objectives achieved in the past 4 years, I wish to remind you of the importance taken on by our journal, Urban Morphology. This has achieved scientific excellence in our field and is stimulating very interesting debates and comparisons, especially with respect to methodology.

ISUF is undergoing important changes in the members who are principally responsible for running its affairs. By the time that this report is published a new President will have taken office, a new Secretary-General will be elected in the coming year, and we already have a new Treasurer. I hope these new Officers will oversee a further enhancement of ISUF’s activities. I wish all members every success in the next phase of our organization’s development.

Gian Luigi Maffei, Dipartimento di Progettazione dell'Architettura, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Viale Gramsci 42, 50132 Firenze, Italy. E-mail: gianluigimaffei@libero.it