Conserving and Managing Historical Urban Landscape An Integrated Morphological Approach

This book focuses on urban morphology and its application to urban conservation and management. The rapid disappearance of historical urban landscapes, especially in developing countries, is largely attributed to the lack of historic awareness and broad-brush demolition and redevelopment in urban development. The book provides a new, integrated morphological approach that enables fine-grained and cross-scale examination of urban form based on both its historicity and socio-economic potential, with the aims of informing more responsive and context-specific conservation and management of historical urban landscapes. The robustness of this new approach and the feasibility of its application to urban conservation practice are tested and demonstrated by three case studies in drastically different cultural contexts, namely Ludlow, a medieval town in the UK, Chinatown in Singapore and a historic quarter in Nanjing, China.

Combining historico-geographical and configurational approaches, the book also makes a significant breakthrough in terms of coordinating and synthesizing different traditions of urban morphology, which has been a key challenge to this field over the past decades. In addition, by using multi-source data, ranging from conventional cartographic maps to computer-generated and open online data, the integrated approach innovatively relates qualitative and quantitative aspects of urban form and links the qualitative and quantitative analyses of formal structure.

As an interdisciplinary study merging geography, urban history, urban planning and design, this book is to be primarily used as a reference book for graduate students and scholars in various fields who are interested in urban form and urban conservation and management. In addition, it offers practitioners in urban planning and design a useful tool for managing changes in historical urban landscapes. Lastly, it contributes to developing a common platform tofacilitate dialogues among various stakeholders and participants in urban conservation practice.

Introduction.- Urban morphology and historical urban landscape conservation and management.- Traditions of urban morphology: opportunities and challenges.- An integrated approach: combining the historico-geographical and the configurational approaches.- Integrated examination of urban form: historicity.- Integrated examination of urban form: historicity and conviviality.- Urban conservation and management practice in China.- An integrated morphological approach to urban conservation and management: The case of Nanjing.- Conclusion: The first step in a journey of a thousand miles.

Dr. Xiaoxi Li is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), China. She received her B.Arch. and M.Arch. from Southeast University, Nanjing, China. She completed her Ph.D. from National University of Singapore in 2019. She has participated in several urban design and conservation projects in China, during which she developed an interest in exploring evidencebased approaches to urban regeneration. Her current research interests include combining different morphological traditions, and applying morphological methods to urban design and landscape management. She has published a number of papers in the journal of Urban Morphology and international conferences. Her Ph.D. thesis was nominated for NUS Wang Gunwu (WGW) Thesis Award in 2019. She holds membership in International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) and serves as Young Ambassador of International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) since 2020.

Dr. Ye Zhang is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (2014) and M.Arch. from Tsinghua University (2008). He was also a visiting academic at The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (2015). Dr Zhang’s principal research interest resides in synergizing different methods for understanding and analysing the built form. He has published widely in the fields of urban form and urban design, and his work has been exhibited in Venice biennale of Architecture, UIA World Congresses, Beijing International Design Week, and many other international exhibitions. Now he serves as the director of Master of Arts in Urban Design programme at the National University of Singapore, and also the Director General of International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU).