ABSTRACT
It is remarkable that in a review of research on urban change in the UK prepared as recently as the late 1980s, Fielding and Halford (1990: 10) should draw attention to how little research had been undertaken on the physical form of cities. Fortunately, as the foregoing chapters have shown, this would be an unduly pessimistic view of the state of research in urban morphology in the early 1990s. The urban landscape is suddenly attracting a great deal of interest among scholars in several different disciplines — in geography, planning and planning history, urban design, architecture and urban history. Among the manifestations of this interest are not only the conference upon which this volume is based but also the publication twice yearly since 1987 of the international Urban Morphology Newsletter, the formation within the international research network URBINNO of a working group on land use, urban morphology and the physical environment (Curdes and Montanari 1990), the publication of a Glossary of Urban Form (Larkham and Jones 1991), a marked increase in the rate of production of scholarly papers on aspects of urban form (Whitehand 1992), and the publication of several books providing conspectuses of the urban landscape (Slater 1990, Vance 1990, Whitehand 1991).
