Shapers of Urban Form

Explorations in Morphological Agency

Peter J. Larkham, Michael P. Conzen, Peter J. Larkham, Michael P. Conzen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317812500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

People have designed cities long before there were urban designers. In Shapers of Urban Form, Peter Larkham and Michael Conzen have commissioned new scholarship on the forces, people, and institutions that have shaped cities from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Larkham and Conzen collect new essays in "urban morphology, " the people-centered predecessor to contemporary theories of top-down urban design. Shapers of Urban Form focuses on the social processes that create patterns of urban forms in four discrete periods: Pre-modern, early modern, industrial-era and postmodern development. Featuring studies of English, American, Western and Eastern European, and New Zealand urban history and urban form, this collection is invaluable to scholars of urban design and town planning, as well as urban and economic historians.

PART I

Introduction

1

AGENTS, AGENCY, AND URBAN FORM

“The Making of the Urban Landscape”

Peter J. Larkham and Michael P. Conzen

Like all human phenomena, the “look” of cities—their spatial composition and the content of their built environments—has intrigued commentators and philosophers since virtually the beginning of urban life. A vast array of descriptive knowledge of urban forms has accumulated over the centuries, encompassing every region with an urban tradition, but only in comparatively recent times has the drive to understand the complexity of urban forms and their varied paths of intertwined development taken root as a systematic quest. The literature that has emerged, while inherently interdisciplinary by nature, owes much to the disciplinary perspectives of its contributors. This is not a bad thing, but a fuller understanding can come only from continued international and inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas and modes of inquiry.

Specialized branches of knowledge relating to urban morphology have sprung up in the professional disciplines of history, geography, anthropology, sociology, art history, architecture, landscape architecture, and engineering, to name only the most prominent, but the task of interpreting urban form itself, in all its varied physical manifestations, does not lie at the existential core of any of these fields. At the end of the day, historians focus on human decisions and actions; geographers on spatial logics and their resulting place-to-place differences; anthropologists on the shaping influence of cultures; sociologists on the interactions between people, and between individuals and society; art historians on the visualizations of artists and their audiences; architects on the challenge of designing workable and expressive buildings; landscape architects on the functional and decorative aspects of open spaces; and engineers on conforming their infrastructural systems with the laws of physics and chemistry. However, when researchers in any of these fields choose to study the genesis and functioning of the built environment of cities, past or present, they are, in fact, making contributions to the field of urban morphology.

A growing perspective in the study of urban morphology over the last couple of decades has been the increasing concern with the role of the “agent” in creating urban forms. This interest may hardly seem new, in the sense that all urban forms clearly emanate from decisions and actions taken by individuals and groups. Yet that proposition is easy to assert but less easy to demonstrate in the detail called for by the nature of the forms being studied. It is not always simple to ascribe “authorship” to the myriad buildings and environments that have accumulated incrementally over time in any given place and for which the record of multiple “authors” may well be hidden, lost, or at best difficult to reveal and reconstruct. Even where a “plan” is known, it is usually, and often over-simplistically, attached to the name of a “great planner.” So the growing interest in “agency” in urban morphology represents a valuable movement to better account for the ways in which specific urban forms and particular configurations of urban space have come about. It moves beyond the descriptive accounts of evolution and “sedimentation” in space, which too often carry something of an aura of inevitability about them, as if change and (especially) progress were somehow automatic and to be expected. And it moves beyond the sort of structural explanations that suggest agency only indirectly through the composite character and changes that can be measured in the built forms themselves but without the personalized data behind them.

For most people, the built environment is merely a background to their lives. They live, work, relax, and sleep amid a complexity of buildings, infrastructure, and spaces. For many, though, the urban structure is more than a mere container. We are more than mere consumers; and consumption is not merely a passive action. We are curious about, and sometimes actively involved in, our ever-changing built surroundings. For all urban areas do change, in some cases with extreme rapidity. Lack of change often signals a failure to react to changing social and economic trends, demands, and opportunities: it suggests, in a word, stagnation. Even towns whose economy and fame rests to a significant degree on their heritage of iconic built forms—Paris, Rome, Bath—change and adapt all the time.

People become involved in many ways, large and small. They may design, construct, or indeed demolish buildings and whole areas. They may promote or control development through mechanisms such as planning regulations and local, regional, and national municipal and political organizations. They may, as individuals or groups, seek to restrict the scale or speed of change. Some, and often this may be a majority, may remain uninvolved. They may never seek to extend their houses, protest at development proposals, or actively welcome innovations. Yet they are, nevertheless, affected by urban change. They will shop in new superstores, although they may regret the passing of the corner shop. They will drive along the new bypass, welcoming its speedier movement, although they may regret its intrusion into the landscape. But questions often arise in the minds of many people, whether they are directly or indirectly, actively or passively, involved. “How did this get built? Why did they demolish that? Who designed that? Why isn’t something done about this?” Answers can be found to all of these types of question, although finding the information can be a lengthy process. In many cases, complete information is unobtainable, and appropriate inferences have to be drawn. When such research is done, it often fascinates locals, informs professionals, and can be revealing at scales from the most local to the national and indeed international.

This book seeks some of these answers by exploring one specific intellectual approach to the study of urban change: that of tracing the stories of development, identifying the agents and agencies involved, and how they influence the outcomes in the urban landscape. In short, this is the process of “making the urban landscape.” In using this phrase, we deliberately paraphrase both Hoskins’s early discursive approach to the broader landscape and Whitehand’s detailed analytical approach to urban landscape development (Hoskins 1955; Whitehand 1992a). A crucial element is awareness of the significance of change over time: for “the landscape we see is not a static arrangement of objects. It has become what it is, and it is usually in the process of becoming something different” (Darby 1953: 7).

Origins of Early Research Approaches

The broad field of research covered by this book is now commonly referred to as “urban morphology.” Literally this means “the study of urban form,” but the academic concerns and approaches of the new millennium have developed far from the roots of this field in late-nineteenth century German-speaking Europe. It is helpful, therefore, to summarize this intellectual development, as it sets the scene for our detailed research agenda and approach and also serves to refute some misconceptions about the whole field of study.

Some of the earliest work on the urban landscape¹ was undertaken in the German academic and intellectual tradition in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century and was principally an extension of wider concerns of landscape evolution within the developing discipline of geography and cognate fields. One of its earliest results was an essay on German town layouts by Johann Fritz (1894), who used visual inspection of town plans as his main source to draw a distinction between eastern and western German medieval towns.

This comparative overview appealed to Otto Schlüter. In his mid-twenties, Schlüter bravely reacted against the emphasis in Volume 1 of Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie, which appeared to align human geography with the investigation of human dependency on nature (Ratzel 1882–99). Schlüter proposed the morphology of the cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft) as the central goal of cultural geography (Kulturgeographie), just as geomorphology was central to physical geography. He was interested in understanding the forms created by human activities, but also, and important for our argument, he considered their origins and their development through the course of time. This was not mere description but an integration of form, function, and historical development. Schlüter applied this framework to studies of settlement geography (1899a), a study of the ground-plans of towns (1899b), and a detailed monograph on the settlements of north-eastern Thuringia (1903). Empirical field-based research underpinned his approach. He felt that the urban landscape (Stadtlandschaft), that is, the physical form of a town, was the main object of research in its own right (Schlüter 1899a).

Schlüter’s influence spread beyond his own publications, especially through the dissertations he supervised at the University of Halle. Prominent among these were studies by Walter Geisler and Rudolph Martiny, who both worked extensively on comparative studies of urban form and the classification of town plans (Geisler 1924; Martiny 1928). The 1920s was a period of intensive work in German-speaking urban morphology (Dörries 1930) but, as Jeremy Whitehand has pointed out, they “allowed themselves to be pushed by the enormous scope of their projects into merely morphographic classification, producing profuse nomenclature with little meaning. Thus, they aggravated a tendency towards mere morphography already apparent in the poorer types of settlement monographs” of the period (Whitehand 1981: 4).

The limitations of this simplistic morphographical approach were noted earlier by Erich Keyser (Keyser 1958). In particular, the small-scale town maps commonly used at the time had insufficient detail to allow recognition of details of street and plot alignments crucial to revealing distinct stages of growth. The use of contemporary plans also tended to obscure developmental stages that might be revealed through comparison of a series of historical maps. Further, the theories and evidence of other disciplines, including urban constitutional, social and economic history, and archaeology, were to add much to the morphographical approach.

German-speaking historians had also become interested in issues of urban form, topography, and development at much the same time as geographers. However, their exploration of documentary sources led, in some cases, to different conclusions. Siegfried Rietschel (1897), for example, showed the ubiquity of deliberate town founding and the characteristic duality of planned market settlement and pre-urban nucleus. Motivating historians such as Rietschel was the fact that many town records were incomplete, and it led to an early recognition that the existing urban landscape could be used as a form of historical data source and the basis for a new research method: urban constitutional topography (städtische Verfassungstopographie; Frölich 1938).

Similarly, German-speaking architects developed a significant research base in historical urban form during the early-twentieth century. Eduard Siedler (1914), for example, reviewed the plan of every medieval town in the Elbe-Oder region, identifying numerous examples of multi-period composite plans, but he did not map plan types. As Whitehand has recognized, “The fact that their professional training produced early awareness and technical understanding of the significance of artifacts on the ground partly explains why architects were interested in the socio-economic context of medieval urban origins and development that urban historians were discovering” (Whitehand 1981: 6).

Despite these complementary research traditions, however, the references in their published work suggest that even the German geographical morphologists paid little heed to this work until near the end of the inter-war period. The classifications of Geisler, Martiny, and others were criticized for being both ends in themselves and being of little value in advancing the discipline. These works were referred to as erschöpfend, a word having the dual meaning of exhaustive and exhausting (Schöller 1953). Hans Bobek was particularly critical, and argued that the study of form per se should not neglect the dynamic forces creating those forms (Bobek 1927). However, in light of these criticisms and notwithstanding the relative disregard for extra-disciplinary contributions, the Geographical Institute at the University of Berlin contained teachers (including Bobek and the geomorphologist Herbert Louis) who spurred an interest in settlement geography and urban morphology on the part of M. R. G. Conzen, who would later advance the field in one particularly important respect. His was an education that placed urban morphology in the rounded context of geology, geomorphology, and urban history (Whitehand 1981: 8–9). Significantly, Conzen left Germany in the very year that Walter Christaller’s ground-breaking study introducing central place theory was published (Christaller 1933), which would spark a strong disciplinary reaction against morphological topics for decades, both in Germany and in English-speaking countries, and which still influences research today (c.f. Parr 2002; Meijers 2007).

In the English-speaking academic world, approaches were very different, and there was little contact with the German literature. There is a long tradition of study of British medieval towns, which has long included descriptions of regular street patterns; some of this work included detailed archaeological and historical data on origins (e.g. Hope 1909, on Ludlow); others were more general and comparative (Tout 1917; Hughes and Lamborn 1923: chapter 2; Fleure 1931; Dickinson 1934). Probably the first use of the term “urban morphology” in English is the study of some Swedish towns by an American, John Leighly (1928). Ironically, Leighly was a product of an intellectual tradition, the Berkeley school of cultural geography, established by Carl Sauer, that harked back directly to German geographical roots. However, the lasting impact of this school lay in rural landscape study rather than on towns, with Leighly’s study a conspicuous exception (M. P. Conzen 1993: 30–31).

The most direct British link with German ideas on town formation came through the publications of R. E. Dickinson in the 1940s (Dickinson 1945, 1951), although his emulation of the earlier German literature brought no advance in theory or method and therefore garnered little influence. It is perhaps a telling factor that M. R. G. Conzen, after his arrival in England, found little familiar or challenging work in English with which to engage.

Postwar Developments

Progress in urban morphology in the postwar period was slow in any discipline or language area.² During these years both publications, whether merely descriptive or more analytical, and serious scholars, in any discipline or profession, with a focus on urban morphology were rare. Geographical urban morphologists in the United Kingdom were less interested in conceptualizations of process than in ideographic description and classification, exemplified by Arthur Smailes’s general review of contemporary townscapes based on rapid reconnaissance surveys (Smailes 1955) and Maurice Stedman’s (1958) characterization of Birmingham’s urban landscape. Urban landscapes were seen almost solely in terms of the land uses they contained (e.g. House and Fullerton 1955). American land-use models pioneered by Ernest Burgess, Homer Hoyt, and others of the Chicago School had come to dominate much research and teaching in the name of urban morphology in the English language,³ despite the fact that this work has little explicit concern for physical form. This led to contemporary criticism...