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Figure 1. Michael Conzen and Giancarlo Cataldi are introduced by Paul Sanders at the plenarysession on traditions, techniques and trends in urban morphology.

Twentieth International Seminar on Urban Form, Brisbane, Australia,17-20 July 2013

For its 20th annual gathering, ISUF made its firstincursion into Oceania. ISUF 2013 was held atQueensland University of Technology (QUT) inBrisbane, Australia. The participants convened onthe QUT campus, located next to the BrisbaneRiver and the city’s luxurious botanical garden, onthe edge of the business and administrative district. The flawless organization and the quality of thesetting contributed greatly to the success of aconference attended by over 100 participants andmarked by a collegial atmosphere. In addition to aguided tour of Brisbane, many attendees seized theopportunity to attend pre-conference tours inAuckland, New Zealand with Kai Gu (University ofAuckland) as well as post-conference tours inMelbourne with Rosemary Kennedy (QUT) and inSydney with Marco Pompili (University of NewSouth Wales). ISUF participants also had thepossibility to attend the one-day pre-conference‘City-making superforum’, organized with theUrban Design Alliance (UDAL) and devoted torecent urban design and city-making practices in

Queensland. With the theme ‘Urban form at the edge’, the

conference programme included 25 paper sessionsand five interspersed plenary sessions, including ajoint ISUF-UDAL plenary session on urban designand research in Australia. The other plenarysessions were on the origins of Brisbane’s urbanform (Paul Sanders, QUT) and the evolution of itsnewer suburban developments (Tony Hall, GriffithUniversity); the planning of informality, asexemplified by the city of Maputo (Jose Forjaz);the relationship between research and practice inurban morphology, in the context of the ISUF TaskForce on this topic (Vítor Oliveira, Universidade doPorto); and finally, traditions, techniques and trendsin urban morphology, a session in which theretiring President, Michael Conzen and the newPresident, Giancarlo Cataldi offered inspiringreflections on the discipline and its evolution(Figure 1).

For his part, Cataldi introduced a schematicmodel designed to summarize the Italian approach

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to urban morphology. He first set about identifyingfive dialectic pairs: building types and buildingorganism; project and construction; environmentalinsertion and reading; building materials andenvironment; and finally, time cycles and spatialscales. Such pairs allow, for instance, for adistinction to be drawn between the materiality ofthe architectural object (labelled the ‘buildingorganism’) and its internalized mental represen-tation (that is, the ‘building type’), and between the‘raw’ resources offered by the ‘environment’ andthe ‘building materials’ that nature could supplywhen the said resources are fecundated by culture. By laying out the first four dialectic pairs to createa diamond-shaped figure, Cataldi then proceeded toillustrate a feedback loop – running along the foursides of the figure – that synthesized the oscillationbetween the concrete reality and its mentalrepresentations and between the inherited environ-ment and its transformation through cognitive andembodied practices. In the last part of hispresentation, Cataldi developed the schematicmodel further by incorporating time cycles andspatial scales. In doing so, he illustrated how, whenaggregated, buildings create villages that would, insome cases, develop into towns and cities. Inassociation with other artefacts deposited byhistory, such buildings, villages and cities form a‘whole’, a cultural landscape that testifies to thegeographical and cultural experience of the localpopulation.

Conzen began his talk by defining urbanmorphology as ‘the study of the built form of cities[which] seeks to explain the layout and spatialcomposition of urban structures and open spaces,their material character and symbolic meaning, inlight of the forces that have created, expanded,diversified, and transformed them’. After brieflyevoking early attempts at developing a systematicapproach to the study of urban form during thenineteenth century and presenting a summary ofgenealogies of modern urban morphology indifferent national contexts, Conzen delivered hisown attempt at synthesizing the multifaceted natureof the discipline. He did so in particular byproducing interesting tables meant to chart how anarray of physical and spatial objects have beenstudied with varying levels of intensity by usingmorphological approaches that have stemmed from,and borrowed from, a variety of disciplines. Conzen suggested that we should acknowledge theemerging geo-ecological approach in addition tothe four initially identified by Karl Kropf, namelythe process-typological approach of the Italianschool, the historico-geographical approach

developed by the British school, the configurationalapproach of the Space Syntax school, and finally,the spatial-modelling methods based on mathe-matical simulation.

The ideas put forward by Conzen and Cataldidemonstrate the breadth and depth of morph-ological studies while shedding critical light onsome of the complexities associated with any effortto define the scope of the discipline, leaving asideestablishing what would constitute the coretheoretical assumptions of a unified researchprogramme.

To conclude his address, Conzen revisitedJeremy Whitehand’s list of ‘issues in urbanmorphology’ for the benefit of ISUF 2013participants. It is interesting to note how some ofthese issues permeated the conference, even if theywere not formally addressed from a theoretical orepistemological standpoint, although a notableexception was the relationship between researchand practice to which a plenary session wasdevoted. I have in mind in particular Euro-American myopia, the need for comparativestudies, and, to a lesser extent, the over-reliance onurban morphological classics, if this theme can beunderstood to include ‘a tendency to focus ontraditional topical matter’.

The conference comprised 84 presentations,grouped according to six sub-themes: Cities on theedge; Off centre; On the edge of the city; Edgecities; Regional centres; and Pushing the edge. Theplay with the word ‘edge’ is amusing andendearing. However, the notion relates to a numberof subjects that have been addressed recurrently atISUF meetings, in particular in recent years. It isinteresting to note, for instance, that the emergenceand evolution of new urban forms at the peripheryof seemingly ever-expanding metropolises appearsto catch the attention of a growing number ofmorphologists. Such issues, which depart from thediscipline’s canonical work on multi-secular urbansettlements, allow urban morphology to engagewith conditions that are at the heart of thecontemporary city’s struggle to trace a path towardsa more sustainable future with renewed relevance. The question of how new technologies andtechniques are pushing at the edges of the empiricalfront while pointing to yet uncharted theoreticalterritories is similarly stimulating.

But the notion of ‘edge’ resonated in yet otherways in a conference held in Australia. I cannotresist the impulse of relaying a nice anecdote here. Conference organizer Paul Sanders had graciouslyaccepted to share his impressions of ISUF 2013immediately after the closing session. While

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discussing over a coffee, he scribbled a world mapin which the longitudinal central axis was meant tobisect Australia. Seen from such an unusualvantage point, UK and Continental Europe as wellas the north-eastern part of North America appearin peripheral positions, whereas Australia and partsof Asia occupy a central location, while beingsurrounded by Africa and the Persian Gulf as wellas South America. As expected by the organizingcommittee, due to its location the Brisbaneconference attracted a very large percentage ofcontributions devoted to Australian and Asian citiesand more broadly to urban realities in the southernhemisphere, taking into account in particular theBrazilian contributions. As usual, the Africancontinent remained under-represented, although theparticipants had the privilege of hearing retiredprofessor and planner Jose Forjaz speak at lengthabout the planning challenges faced by Maputo inMozambique.

By drawing attention to so-called geographicaledges, ISUF 2013 did indeed spotlight parts of theworld that are experiencing rapid and unbridledurbanization – urbanization that produces complexurban configurations in which the informal cohabitswith the deliberately planned and where infra-structures that could instill a new spatial order inotherwise amorphous conurbations seem to lingera few steps behind urban development. As some ofthe papers illustrated, there might be more thanstrictly fortuitous resemblances between Chineseunregulated urban villages and Indian or Brazilianinformal settlements; for similar conditions mightwell produce similar effects. Beyond theobservation of the dramatic, yet predictable, social

and environmental problems that arise when therapidity of development coincides with a paucity ofmeans, such a juxtaposition of studies points toexciting prospects for urban morphology. First,these studies engage with urban realities thatconstitute a new terrain for the discipline, whichtranslates into opportunities for methodological andtheoretical advances. Secondly, they shed light onthe potential fertility of conducting comparativestudies of new spatial configurations produced byrapid urbanization in the different cultural andgeographical contexts of the southern hemisphere. Thirdly, these studies generally aim to contribute tobetter understanding of the morphogeneticprocesses at play as well as to articulate proposalsto remedy their shortcomings. Such a commoninterest in both fundamental and applied researchcalls for a further exchange of these reciprocalperspectives. It is also perfectly congruent withISUF’s often-repeated objective to favour thetransfer of morphological knowledge into practice.

Let us thank the ISUF 2013 organizingcommittee for a very pleasant, well organized andmost stimulating conference and, above all, foremphasizing problems and considerations thatmight very well move from the edges of ourdiscipline to its core in the coming years.

Pierre Gauthier, Department of Geography,Planning and Environment, Concordia University,1455 de Maisonneuve Boulevard West, Montréal,Québec H3G 1M8, Canada. E-mail:pierre.gauthier@concordia.ca