Urban morphology or townscape? wholes made of many parts

Abstract

Early fieldwork in a number of cities showed that townscapes—street patterns, plot sizes and building styles—rarely developed as planned wholes but rather as a congeries of mini-regions with separate characteristics inserted within the pre-urban cadaster, such as filed boundaries. Research led by Conzen, Ward, Whitehand and Larkham has developed this argument in considerable detail but there remain many lacunae for studies of emerging urban forms that could be undertaken using modern tchnology.