“A Crisis in the Urban Landscape,” “The Origins and Theory of Type,” and “Legitimacy and Control”

Earlier readings in this section discuss key concepts and issues related to place and identify the reasons why place-making has become a central concern of the urban design field. Over the last 25 years, practicing urban designers have been grappling with how to achieve a sense of place in contemporary built environments given the array of social and economic forces that seem to work against it. An approach that some designers advocate relies on the use of built form types that derive from typological and morphological study. In the physical design fields, typology is the theory and study of architectural types and, increasingly, also landscape types. Closely related, morphology is the study of urban form patterns (street and block layouts, lot divisions, buildings, and land uses) at a range of related scales (region, city, neighborhood, and site) typically over time. Some theorists have taken to combining the terms into a new term, “typomorphology,” which focuses on larger scale urban form patterns. Others refer to this as “tissue studies.”