What new insights can the combination of the historico- geographical and configurational approaches to urban morphology offer?

摘要

One of the key challenges facing urban morphology today is to coordinate and combine different approaches (Whitehand, 2012, 2015, 2017). Larkham (2006) has suggested that considerable opportunity exists for exploring the complementarity of the historico-geographical approach and the configurational approach (space syntax). However, establishing a dialogue between them has proved neither easy nor straightforward, and this has been largely hindered by their different disciplinary traditions and theoretical propositions. In the past decade there have been some efforts to combine these two approaches (Griffiths et al., 2010; Kropf, 2017; Oliveira et al, 2015; Pinho and Oliveira, 2009). Our knowledge as to what new insights that the combination of these two perspectives could engender remains unclear. This is despite the understanding of the shared theoretical focus that the structure of the urban grain embodies and explains, its socio-economic and cultural process (Griffiths et al., 2010), and the common object that the street as one of the built form elements is essential for both the recognition of morphological regions and accessibility distribution identification (Kropf, 2017; Oliveira et al., 2015). This Viewpoint contributes to this debate by beginning to map out some possible ways in which the two approaches can be used comple-mentarily in research and practice.