Book review: Teaching urban morphology

Abstract

Even though interest in urban form grew from the 1980s onwards, it is still relatively little known on how to teach it. This book, edited by Vitor Oliveira, presents a second book in the Urban Book Series of Oliveira’s significant contribution and effort to highlight the importance of the Urban Morphology as a discipline (Urban morphology: An introduction to the study of the physical form of cities (Oliviera, 2016) and J .W. R. Whitehand and the historico-geographical approach to urban morphology (Oliviera, 2019)). The book series was intended to contribute to the general understanding of the urban morphology, to reveal teaching methods and clarify the reasons why and what should be taught, and eventually to highlight the lifelong contribution of individual scholars such as Jeremy Whitehand. Jointly, these three book give a holistic picture of urban morphology but raise a series of new questions and challenges that are left to be addressed in time to come.

This book gives close insights to different approaches undertaken by eighteen contributing authors according to their area of academic expertise and a variety of morphological schools that shaped their academic and professional practice. As explained by the editor, the selection of contributors was conducted according to the diversity of morphological approaches, geographical provenance, disciplinary background, and age/generation (p. 3). The book launching was organized at the 2018 International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) conference in Krasnoyarsk, where book editor Vitor Oliveira presented the book content, while prominent chapter authors (Giuseppe Strappa, Kai Gu and Ivor Samuels) explained their individual approaches....