ABSTRACT

We began this book with the claim that mapping plays a key role in the production of spatial knowledge; here we discuss the use of mapping in the propagation of knowledge, in helping students to explore, to see and to understand cities, as a tool in urban design pedagogy. While the potential of film (Strickland 2006), video (Lim et al. 2015) and GIS (Moudon 2015) in urban design teaching has received attention, the potential of morphological mapping remains relatively unexplored. This chapter is based on our experience of teaching the subject Morphological Mapping for third-year undergraduate students at the University of Melbourne. The key aim of the subject is to introduce students to multiple ways of seeing, observing and analysing complex urban environments, to raise their interest and curiosity as a starting point to a lifelong process of learning from cities. Direct observation is the basic method that enabled urban thinkers like Cerdá, Sitte, Lynch and Jacobs to gain their seminal insights on how cities work. Mapping can be a framework for structuring direct observation as well as focusing it on socio-spatial relations. We seek to defamiliarise the city for students in a manner that enables them to discover the less obvious dimensions of urbanity, to draw connections between morphologies and streetlife, between the measureable and the unmeasureable.