Lecture 5 – Musings

The Design of the City

Morphology is a linguistics term to describe words and their structure, therefore, urban morphology is the study of city structure.[1] It probably goes further than that, also covering people and how they inhabit a city over time.

Overtime, different configurations for a city have evolved, based on; a grid, a utopia (a perfect city?), a view or where the powerful people lived, such as a palace. Sometimes you get a city that can encompass several configurations, including the organic “just happen” mode.

Iquique & Law of the Indies
Romanae Castrum
The Spanish “Law of the Indies” and the Roman Castrum Layout[2] was a partly successful attempt to organise the layouts of new towns and cities to take best advantage of the terrain and the environment. York has evidence of this Roman layout and the Chilean city of Iquique, the Law of the Indies.

When I was in the UK, York in particular, a city originally built by the Vikings, was developed further over time through the different eras such as Tudor and Elizabethan, ending up with an organic city centre, with a sprawl from that point. You can see where people once walked everywhere because the streets are narrow and the buildings almost meet above your head. [3]

The Shambles, York
What I found interesting was the way you could determine a certain amount of history from the way a city evolved overtime, i.e. Berlin. The buildings before WWII and what was built after WWII showed there was some major catastrophe sometime in the last 100 years, because of the radical change in building style, in some areas.

What I also found interesting was the way cities “grew up” over time based on where the people went and then later, where vehicles could go, sometimes completely neglecting the inhabitants, US cities like San Francisco or Chicago, with their suburban sprawl. Many Australian cities have suffered the same sprawl.
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