Ebook: New Urban Configurations

Since 1988 our faculty, together with the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) and later the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF), has organized an international conference in every Olympic year. Moreover, it is an honour for us that the celebration of the ‘Saverio Muratori Centennial’ chose this year Delft University of Technology for its closing session. In all cases the theme of the conference focused on the connection between research and design. In other words: the field of tension between science, technology and art. The main theme of this conference ‘New Urban Configurations’ fits very well within this series.

Every four years the aim of the conference is to present and discuss the role and critical potential of the architectural project in the transformation process of cities and territories. By doing so, we hope to gain an overview and a comparison between different strategies in architectural design and research on a global scale, in order to target questions on urban transformations worldwide.

Urban areas have been caught up in a turbulent process of transformation over the past 50 years and settlement conditions mutate rapidly. The transformation of the traditional city, as well as modes of peripheral expansion and infrastructures comprises a new landscape for contemporary projects. At the same time, issues such as mobility, nature, water management, energy use and public space are pivotal in each case. In the age of globalization, cities and their territories can no longer be viewed as autonomous identities, but have to be understood as part of larger networks.

As Faculty of Architecture and The Built Environment we are convinced that future architectural projects all over the world are obliged to explore the sustainable development of the city and the territory. Not to copy, but to move with caution between historical knowledge and today's questions in order to envision and construct a bright future. We feel the same urgency for European, American, Asian and African cities. In our opinion such research projects should be included in schools of architecture. We see this conference as an opportunity to explore the themes involved in this kind research. In spite of all distinctive political and cultural positions in a global network, we make an appeal here today to explore together the frontiers of planning, architecture and building sciences in the near future worldwide.

We would like to thank the European Association for Architectural Education, the International Seminar on Urban Form and the Saverio Muratori Centennial for selecting the Delft University of Technology to host the conference. We hope that you had stimulating meetings and debates with all colleagues gathered here in our new ‘old building’ and are already looking forward to welcome you here again in the next Olympic year.

Comparative studies in urban morphology based on systematic methods represent an underdeveloped branch of the field. The challenge is increased when comparisons are attempted not just across different areas within a country or region, but across cultural boundaries and across time. While the field is full of single-city case studies – and surely there remains a multitude of unstudied cities around the globe that deserve in-depth individual analysis – there is also a pressing need for comparative investigations to establish the broad patterns worldwide of similarity and difference, evolution and devolution, convergence and divergence in urban morphological dynamics and character. This paper does not claim to offer a comprehensive program for comparative studies in urban morphology, but it does attempt to demonstrate some systematic methods that can yield useful measures of similarity and difference across selected cultural divides. A possible framework for comparative urban morphology is presented, within which selected issues are explored with reference to personal work done in Italy, Brazil, China, Russian Alaska, and the continental United States.

It is a truism that centuries of historical development across a geographically spread-out world have created a rich variety of urban building traditions that invest cities with complex cultural meanings. This diversity seems at times overwhelming, given the almost endless variety of its specific details in particular places, and yet we must seek to understand all of them at some useful level of generality and, therefore, in some coherent way. The historically recent urbanization of much of the world's population has accelerated urban growth rates to unprecedented levels, which is producing new urban environments on a vast territorial scale that has never been seen before.

These new urban environments worldwide share many characteristics of design – for two compelling reasons. First, we live in an era of instant communications with strong pressures to create uniformly acceptable standards of living (and therefore of design) in the long march towards modernity. And, second, there is an age-old desire to be seen to reproduce what is currently fashionable, particularly in regions playing “catch-up” with more established ones. As a result, immense urban areas are being added to our existing cities that look staggeringly alike in all regions, no matter whether the locations are in New York City, Paris, Dubai, Beijing, or Putrajaya. Most dynamic cities in the world today contain central districts filled with modern highrise towers that, despite the architect-driven quirks of many of their individual buildings, exhibit skylines that are increasingly bland (and even boring) in their predictability and sameness. The resulting perception of geographical identity is often reduced to a handful of signature buildings that themselves could be found almost anywhere.

The spatial structure of the Randstad Holland is strongly related to the policy concerning hydraulic engineering in the Netherlands. Both, Randstad Holland and the large hydraulic works, can be considered as part of the ‘modern project’ of the Netherlands, undertaken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This modern project aimed to upgrade the Netherlands as a modern welfare state, based upon an industrial economy and agricultural autonomy, and fitting in a coherent policy of the nation-state.

These days, the societal as well as the economic and the climate context of the Netherlands are changing. The new Deltaprogram, started in 2008, should be considered in this changing context. The potential meaning of this program is that it should not only be regarded as a provision of a new, proper flood defence infrastructure. It can play a substantial role in the transition to a new spatial, economic and political structure of the Netherlands.

The main aim of this paper is to describe the way urban morphology can be taught in an academic environment so as to address the consequences of the modern way of life imposed by processes of urban development, while presenting an analysis of Portuguese reality. To do that, this paper is structured in four parts. The first part introduces the present situation of the Portuguese academic reality regarding the teaching of urban morphology, while offering a brief portrayal of the Portuguese institutes of higher education that incorporate the study of urban form, based on their curricula. The second part presents a specific case study while describing how urban form has been studied at ISCTE for the past 17 years, allowing it to be included in the national range of significant knowledge of urban morphology. The third part of this paper goes back to the origins of the actual academic situation, while: i) analysing the introduction of ‘urban morphology’ in the Portuguese academic curricula of architecture, by law 34:607 in 1945; and ii) briefly analysing the Portuguese cultural and political context at the time this law was decreed. The fourth part exposes the role of the 1948 National Congress of Architecture in this process, and finally, the influence of the law in the teaching of urban morphology at Portuguese Architecture courses, but also its implications in urban practice.

This paper will treat two issues regarding innovative/ creative morphological analysis of spatial artefacts in relation to their Form, Operation and Performance. One will be about precedents and their usage in the design process, analogically; the second will be an example of a comparative architectural precedent analysis of two buildings by the same architecture firm.

Learning by analogy is a powerful method, in general. Analogy has two domains basically; one is source and the other is target; thus, the design domain will be target domain and that of analysis, source. I will try to show how we can use structured-analogical source knowledge in the spatial design process; target domain. This paper will go into the creative analogy in depth, in terms of constraints of similarity, structure, and purpose as Holyoak and Thagard (1996) put it. A schematic paradigm will also be presented about creativity through analogical and other creative mental behaviours such as defamiliarization, circumscribing, mental leaps, metaphor, simile, mimesis and aesthetical judgment.

Each spatial artefact has a form, operation (working of the function so not function alone) and a performance, most of which is normative. Form will be analysed and represented in terms of its spatial relationships, organizations, its physical properties (structure, daylight quality, geometry, mass and abstraction of these properties as parti (dominant underlying characteristics of the artefact, in terms of form, at hand), and its topological, non-metric, properties; accessibility of its constituent building blocks and spaces. The operation will basically represent how spatial divisions and blocks could possibly be used best and see if their working of the function matches with the actual ends of the artefact at hand. Performance will represent performative properties in relation to operation and form; how good/ bad it operates and also evaluating how the form has emerged in relation to its context, spatial quality and aesthetics. A schematic diagram of form, operation and performance can be shown as: F(m)-O-P. In the process of analysis we can observe whether the form will afford operation or not, and operation performance; in the design process, performance will ask for affordances from operation and operation from form (morph). This mutual working of design and analysis will be explained at some levels of design phases; concept, pre-parametric sketch, parti (preparametric design), parametric alternatives and eventually the definitive design. Finally, the analyses of these two buildings will be compared with each other and a conclusion will be inferred, respectively.

The definition of urban typomorphologies is fundamental both for the description as well as for the prescription of urban form. However, urban typomorphologies are traditionally defined through time-consuming analytical procedures, which are based mainly on the personal knowledge and ability of the analyst and on ad-hoc generalizations. Such generalizations are also usually context dependent and apparently not fit to deal with contemporary metropolitan and suburban forms, whose emergent and very different morphologies have until now eluded stringent classifications. In this paper we explore the possibility of defining urban typomorphologies through the use of nonsupervised hierarchical and non-hierarchical classification techniques, focusing on urban street patterns.

After 150 years of urban development, Shanghai's inner city has become a hybrid pattern of different building types. These different building types reflect their own social, economic, cultural and technical background in history and play various roles in forming urban space,and influencing citizens' lives in contemporary Shanghai.

Although a great deal of attention has been given to the social and spatial urban development history of Shanghai, few studies have been conducted from a typomorphological perspective. In order to fill this gap, this paper adapts the typomorphological analysis approach to analyze three main building models – traditional shophouse, colonial Linong, and modern building – in Shanghai Old Town, which is the original settlement of Shanghai. This paper aims to help us understand Shanghai Old Town's urban spatial regeneration development not only through time, but also from other perspectives, such as the comparison of forms, uses, and configurations found in different building types. Furthermore, it aims at revealing the way in which these three building models together shape the city in the urban growth and transformation process.

The influence of foreign culture is often reflected in the form of settlements, and some of that influence appears to be significant, as is the case of the Majianglong Villages, China. To understand the current form of the vernacular buildings in Majianglong Villages, this research has traced its typological process. It is found that the Western-style vernacular buildings inherited the local traditional plan, Sanjianlianglang. The hierarchy of morphological changes under the influence of foreign culture is also examined. The lower levels of the hierarchy such as materials and structures were influenced greatly, while higher levels such as the organization of the buildings and the villages still followed traditional form, in accordance respectively with the family structure and clan structure reflecting local culture. The Sanjianlianglang plan, the scale of the site and finally the plot arrangement, combine to create the hierarchy of the morphological frame, which seems to be stable and unlikely to change.

This paper aims to present Tehran Grand Bazaar as a critical form-place, or, as Kenneth Frampton describes, an “arriére-garde” (Frampton, 1983, P. 20). It attempts to form a plea for a debate on the persistency of Tehran Grand Bazaar through its present-day condition.

The bazaar is rooted in the Persian city. It later became an intrinsic part of the Islamic city and a basic part of its morphology. It has always played an intermediate role between residential, religious and governmental parts. The older bazaar is not simply an economic institution; rather it is an amalgam of different activities such as coffee shops, public baths, ‘Tekye's

Tekye is the gathering place for religious ceremonies.

Tehran Grand Bazaar is a challenging piece of urban fabric to study the relationship cited behind the socio-economic and cultural forces within the city and the subsequent transformation of existing structure and its settlements.