Anne Vernez Moudon

Urban form in which way?

The architect and landscape architect Anne Vernez Moudon is adored by her graduate students at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, US. Her sympathy, professor patience and provocative insights are certainly the main reasons among those students who valued attend their classes since 1981. And behind her good humor, she is a researcher of high caliber, whose interest focuses on the investigation of the physical space and the built environment. In recent years, always with the support of urban morphology, she has been undertaking various interdisciplinary studies, especially focused on issues of urban mobility and health. And her contributions to urban morphology can also be felt in her positions as president of ISUF (1) between 1997 and 2005, and as coordinator of the Urban Form Lab (College of Architecture and Urban Planning at UW).

In Brazil, the urban morphology as an investigative method has lately arisen great interest among researchers. Perhaps the greatest measure was the massive participation of Brazilian scholars in the 14th ISUF of Ouro Preto, in 2007, whose success was highlighted in the ISUF’s publications. In fact, the research possibilities within this approach are numerous and promising. However, the challenges for the consolidation of research lines in this area are still exist because of the methodologies used, originally created for other contexts (2).

The urban morphology is established as a field of study in mid-twentieth century, reasoned from the contribution of European scholars committed to building a methodology that supports the study of physical and spatial structure of cities. However, during the nineteenth century, significant movements were already starting to propel for subsequent structuring, with the founding reason focused on the topographic maps as history source (3). First, in France, Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy (1755 - 1849) identified the usefulness of maps in the interpretation of the history of cities, monitoring the progress and changes in their physical structure. On the other hand, in Germany, the pioneer scholar to understand this possibility was the historian Johannes Fritz, whose work "Deutsche Stadtanlagen" (1894) would exert a profound influence on other authors, especially in Germany itself (Kretzschmar, Keyser, Schlüter) and France (Lavedan, Poet). Thus, by mid-century, the foundations of urban morphology were gradually being built, a fact that facilitated the subsequent, independent and almost simultaneous development of different "schools” of thought: Italian, English and French.

However, despite some inappropriate interpretations, such linguistic diversity and also a disciplinary diversity addressed cultural and methodological issues that still affect decisively the construction of a competing approach (4). The urban morphology could be seen as "the study of the physical (or built) fabric of urban form, and the people and processes shaping it" (5), generally accepted definition for ISUF that, however, provides greater detailing.

In fact, regarding the relevance of subfields "micromorphology" and "macromorphology", the approach of urban morphology "make explicit that elements in the built landscape are organized hierarchically in space" (6). The same author, when presenting in detail the construction of interdisciplinary theoretical base in the field, whose basic premise is that "the city can be read and analyzed for its physical form”, shows the three fundamental principles of morphological analysis:

1. Urban form is defined by three fundamental physical elements: buildings and their related open spaces, plots or lots, and streets. 2. Urban form can be understood at different levels of resolution. Commonly, four levels are recognized, corresponding to the building/lot, the street/block, the city, and the region. 3. Urban form can only be understood historically since the elements of which it is comprised undergo continuous transformation and replacement. (7)

Nevertheless, these three principles - "shape, resolution and time" - can come together in different ways, because of the inquiring purposes and the subject of analysis. The construction of these common propositions, however, was constituted from various collaborations, often concurrent in time, but almost with no exchange. Thus, the diverse original intent that each school has built its conceptual base promoted different theoretical directions (8).

The European experience, after all, has been fleshed out in other contexts. In the United States, the urban form is configured as a direct reflection of the "commercialism" predomination in a liberal capitalist environment, which makes the cities 'economic machines' aimed to producing material abundance, favoring the utilitarianism at the expense of "beautification". This fact would allow easy identification of the absence of certain common attributes to European and Asian cities (9). As a result, much of the historical and geographical studies tend to be oriented towards the understanding of the original plans, in an attempt to identify physical principles and different typologies. M. Conzen’s studies, son of the geographer M. R. G. Conzen, are important references in applying the principles of the English school in the United States. They help to alleviate what he considers “the lack of a geographical analysis of the structure of urban plans" and "systematic study of regional distribution of American town planning types by period and region, detailing the geographical diffusion of plan ideas, dimensions, geometries, and decision-making” (10). At this point, these studies unveil important contributions to the establishment of a comparative view of urban form that the U.S. will certainly invite Pan American scrutiny.

During this interview - made on two occasions in the month of May 2008, at the facilities of the UW - Anne presented important considerations for those interested in the study of urban form and the possible methodological developments. Moreover, like any good conversation, it offered a variety of provocations; the preserved here are intended to promote a wider discussion about ways of thinking and action in the city. In this sense, the discussion about the relevance of design spaces or places, the presumptions of New Urbanism Movement and the scope of the work of Kevin Lynch in academic life and career of architects and planners allow enrich the existing debate.

Anne also taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1973 - 1975) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975 - 1981). She earned her master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley (1969), and her PhD at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland (1987). She collaborates with several journals, as author and member of scientific committee and editorial.

notes

1
The International Seminar on Urban Form is an international organization established in 1994 and headquartered at the University of Birmingham, England, which the yearly publication "Urban Morphology," since January 1997, constitutes one of the leading publications for the dissemination of work in this field of study. To understand the genesis and goals of this institution, see MOUDON, A. V. Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field. In: Urban Morphology n 1, 1997, p. 3 - 10 and http://www.urbanform.org/gen/index.html.

2
ROSANELI, A. F. New Towns of Coffee Frontier: History and Urban Morphology of Towns Founded by Real Estate Companies in Northern Paraná State. São Paulo, 2009. Thesis (Ph.D.), College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Sao Paulo.

3
GAUTHIEZ, B. The history of urban morphology. In: Urban Morphology v. 8, n. 2, 2004, p. 71 -89.

4
MOUDON, A. V. Getting to Know the Built Landscape: Typomorphology. In: FRANK, K. A. & SCHNEEKLOTH (ed.). Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design, 1994; WHITEHAND, J. W. R. British urban morphology: the Conzenian tradition. In: Urban Morphology v. 5, n. 2, 2001, p. 103 -109; LARKHAM, P. J. Misusing ‘morphology’? In: Urban Morphology v. 6, n. 1, 2002, p. 95 -97; GAUTHIEZ, B. The history of urban morphology. In: Urban Morphology v. 8, n. 2, 2004, p. 71 -89.

5
LARKHAM, P. J. & JONES, A. N. A Glossary of urban form. Birmingham, England: Urban Morphology Research Group, School of Geography, University of Birmingham, 1991, p. 55.

6
MOUDON, A. V. Thinking about micro and macro urban morphology. In: Urban Morphology v. 6, n. 1, 2002, p. 37.

7
MOUDON, A. V. Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field. In: Urban Morphology n. 1, 1997, p. 7.

8
MOUDON (1994; 1997); SAMUELS, I. Conzen’s last bolt: reflections on Thinking about urban form. In: Urban Morphology v. 9, n. 2, 2005, p. 136 - 144.

9
CONZEN, M. P. The study of urban form in the United States. In: Urban Morphology v. 5, n. 1, 2001, p. 4 - 5.

10
Idem, p. 9.

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: You introduce in your articles (1994; 1997) three schools of urban morphology: the Italian (with the founding contribution of Saverio Muratori), the English (represented by the initial work of M. R. G. Conzen) and the French (concentrated in the Versailles School). Besides great convergence of interests and the “type” as a common framework, you and others authors pointed out that the different languages and disciplines bring difficulties to build a convergent path. Do these problems remain today yet?

Anne Vernez Moudon: I guess the first thing to focus on is the similarities and the differences between the English, the Italian and the French Schools in chronological order. In a simple way, the English School was developed by Geographers. What do geographers do? They seek to be descriptive, they want to explain phenomena. The Italian School was started by architects, and what do architects do, they are interested in finding out about the kinds of buildings we should build and how we should design them. And the French School was started later, in the late 60’s. Its contributors were somewhat aware of the Italian School (they had found Muratori’s studies of Venice in a used book store in the late 60’s). The French School consisted of architects who were actually interested in Urbanism, and of Sociologists. In the 1960s, many architects were interested in the social aspects of the built environment. Both Panerai and Castex had taken courses with Lefèbvre and others French sociologists and geographers. Each School, because of its respective professional orientation had different purposes for the investigation of urban form. What I am trying to say is that, the geographers were interested in developing theories of urbanization, of how cities come about, but they were not necessarily interested directly in understanding or developing more prescriptive theories of how to plan cities. Whereas the Italians definitely were interested in developing theories of architectural design, building design, city design, and were therefore more proactive in their outlook than the British morphologists. The French were somewhat in-between (typical French) [rs]. They were critical of architectural design theories and they were interested in both the architectural and the urbanistic scales. But they were also interested in testing architectural theories. And they wanted to explore the origins of the theory the Moderns had proposed to make building blocks and to have streets at the level of the “superblock.” They asked when that movement and design emerge and how did it originate? They found that the theories of the Moderns had first been proposed in the nineteen century when parts of cities were already designed with superblocks.

Those are the three different interests that the three Schools had. They did have a common finding, that looking at the building on its parcel, or on its lot, was key to understanding urban form. Understanding urban form was understanding building types based on how the land was divided into discreet parcels that can be built on whether by individual builders or by land developers. The Schools all found that the lot or the parcel and the building(s) found on it, are key elements of urban form. I call the lot or the parcel the “pivot” of urban form, because it is the instrument with which one can understand building typologies, as well as how people live within buildings, and so on. From there, one can go “up” in scale, into how multiple lots or parcels are aggregated into street-blocks, and then how multiple street-blocks make up and form cities.

As an interesting aside, I called the three groups studying morphology ”schools” because I did not know what else to call them. When you do international work you have to find words that everyone understands and agrees on and words that will be “international enough” to be easily translated into different languages. So I proposed the word “schools” in 1997, when I did the retrospective on the three schools.. People in ISUF first liked it but on second thought, they wondered whether the three groups were actually “schools,” meaning that their members saw the research as coming from within an explicit set of theoretical questions and methodological frameworks. To tell you the truth I don’t entirely understand why they questioned the term, all I know is that ever since then, everyone referred to them as schools.

AFR / DSP: Talking about History and Geography, Peter Marcuse (1987) defends that the “city form is a residual”, that means, it is the result of the clashes of socio-economical and political interests. Thus, the urban design and planning, as an effort of professionals and technicians, have a secondary role in this process. In what measure do you believe that this limitation is an impeditive factor for better urban plans and projects?

AVM: I think that may explain why morphology “is” or “is not” considered as an important part of thinking about the city. For instance, Lynch was certainly more interested in the social, political, and psychological forces that shaped the city. He often said that he did not care about what the city was “physically” but instead cared about what “people thought or felt” about the city. Marcuse’s (and in essence, Lynch’s) has a “post structuralist”, “post constructivist” attitude, it could also be “Gestalt,” where the object (urban form) does not exist, except the eye to beholder.  I have no problem with that stand as a philosophical one. However, this stand is instrumentally very limited, because it does not help us understand how cities are actually made. To understand how the city is made, going into people’s heads and figuring out how they conceive the city, how they want to live in it, etc., is not sufficient. We have to know “what” is being made as well, no matter how and why it’s made. The city is in part a collective object. A planner cannot easily go into the head of a collectivity and figure out exactly what they thought or wanted about their city. So, I think that considering or not considering the physical form of the city is a basic ideological and intellectual kind of issue that people like Marcuse and Lynch and so on, have unfortunately refused to face. While the city, the building, the street-block may indeed exist in the eye of the beholder, we as planners cannot take into the account all of the eyes of all the beholders, it is just a impossibility. In view of this impossibility, the planner can take an “artistic” approach and say, like Lynch, well, we will try to understand as much as possible how people conceive, understand, feel about the city, and then I will “go” from there and giving it my best and try working in groups to get to the collective shape of the city.

Myself, I take a “scientific approach” to understanding the objective and the subjective aspects of the city. When you look at what planners, urban designers, developers, builders, etc., really do, they built a “physical plant,” which is to say they create the objective reality of the city--that’s the only thing they can actually control. They cannot control what people think and eventually do about this physical reality. The political process is important; it determines why this developer or why this planner is selected rather than another. There is politics involved, and there is power involved. Politics are important to understand. Yet, when a decision is made, when a developer and/or a planner are selected to develop a part of a city, whether the person or a group is from the left or from the right, they only have control on the city as a physical object. I’m sorry if I disappoint you! But this is why I think that urban morphology and the objective aspects of the city are essential to consider. This object quality of the city may not (even never) really exist as such in people’s minds, but it is an essential baseline component of the planning process: it is the only thing we can measure objectively, meaning that the physical object is what we can agree on, and what we necessarily share. This physical dimension of the city is a common baseline from which we can then assess subjective aspects such as preference, meaning, usefulness, etc. In that sense, we have to use an urban morphological approach, which is an object oriented approach, not because it is the “truth”, or the “best,” but because it is the only common base from which you can measure everything else. So I often say to students: “you do not make “place,” you make “space.” Some people get horrified, because they so much want to make “place.” The fact is that planners, designers, and developers cannot directly shape people’s thoughts or even behaviors, hence they cannot “make place.”

But back to Marcuse, I agree with him that planning is limited, and when an area is planned, chance and hazard come into the picture, and the space made may not match the intended users’ expectations or needs. On producing urban form (space more than place), planners and designers should generally look for the “greater good” in the long term, they should have grounded historical knowledge, and they should try to introduce change gradually. They should not look for tomorrow’s market, but for the value of the built environment over several generations.

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: One of the most excited assumptions supported in the last decades by architects and urban planners is the attention on the context searching for the design of the “place”. However, you emphasize that is impossible to design the place; we can only design the “space”. In your book “Built for Change” (The MIT Press, 1986), one of the lessons pointed out is that architects and urban planners have not to worry with the total design: we have to leave space for the ambiguities of individual manifestations. What are the implications of that for the Architecture and Urban Design and Planning today?

Anne Vernez Moudon: I still agree with that idea that planners and designers can only create space, not place, and I am not the only one to think like that. For instance, Gianfranco Caniggia called himself a “technician of the built or human environment”, and he believed that he needed to understand tradition and the evolution of the built environment in order to be a good architect. The architect’s role is to carry on this tradition and to introduce change with modesty, moderation, and based on clues that we (society and its different people) may need change. Caniggia showed in the transformation of the collective house of medieval times into the row house of the late Middle Ages, early Baroque times. That kind of change was societal change demanding that architects and builders respond to social processes and try to interpret them for the next generations. Caniggia and, I believe, Muratori, had the theory that the act of building and the resulting buildings were part of biological processes. In other words, what was built resulted from deeper forces than just the sensory forces that we refer to when we talk about place. To make place, to transform the building as object into place, there were deeper, more basic, processes at work than social ones. They believed that the object qualities of buildings we produce were actually part of our DNA. Buildings were made and inhabited, much like we make children and take care of them!

Saying we make “space” doesn’t mean that the act doesn’t have a spiritual or psychological or even biological dimension. And once “space” is made, it can be interpreted, used and experienced in very different ways, by you as well as by other people. But, when you think of it and you are honest about it, designing and building only involves the making of material space. As a designer or builder, you don’t really know if someone will say “Wow” or will feel great or will love this wall or that room. What you know is that different people will have different feelings about it. So that leads me to the notion of “Affordance” that Gibson best explained in the early 70s; the notion of “Affordance” is that we know what the object qualities are and we can describe them fairly well. We can describe them from the micro scale if one wanted to, and certainly the 3D space is not so difficult to describe – the materiality of the space maybe with a little bit more difficult to capture. Yet we all agree that the materiality of space exists. And I think that everybody can agree that material space can be and indeed is interpreted and used in different ways, depending on the person and the circumstance: it can be good or bad, so there are different measures of space. Gibson provides the example of the knife, which has a material dimension common to all of us, but can be seen and used differently, as a utilitarian tool or as a weapon. Similarly, a wall can be a barrier or a protective devise. Gibson thought it would be a good idea to try and find measures of space and objects that combined both their materiality and their “interpretability” or use. So in the case of the knife, it’s use to cut something versus cutting someone, it should be given multiple definitions related to context, which would describe its eventual “affordance.” The affordance of an object is of course very difficult to capture in its entirety. Yet in order to start defining the affordance of an object, one needs to establish its physical dimension—and hence accept its existence!  Applying this concept of affordance to the city, and saying that designers, planners, developers make space not place, is essentially agreeing, supporting and using the concept of “affordance” and saying that “affordance” is sort of the next “internet”.

AFR / DSP: How about the reactions of the people when you talk about “Affordance”? What do they say? If you look at the explanation of the Architects, when they explain their projects it is just about feelings and about “place” not about space…

AVM: They think that making “space” is like a low level activity (read technically bounded activity) and making “place” is a high level of activity (read spiritually driven activity). There is the notion of the designer has ways to “save” the world. I think this stand is at best silly, and at worst irresponsible. Well, we should know better than to try and save the world, shouldn’t we? Don’t we have a few thousand years of history teaching us lessons?

AFR / DSP: Is it a behavior coming from the Modernism, where architects are supposed to control everything or is it an historical approach?

AVM: I think that the tipping point of the Modern Movement was its self-righteousness. In other words, modern urbanists or architects were convinced that they had the right answers. In the pre-modern period, architects had a limited impact on the city. They worked for the elites, producing special buildings and complexes for very targeted and small numbers of people. They could “know” these elites, being close to them and having to relate to small, homogenous, groups—indeed they often dealt with the single individuals at the top of the societal structure. In this context, it is much more possible to do a “place” as oppose to “space” because the values of your “users” are known, and so are the often limited variances between these values. So in that sense, the process of translating values into “spaces” that correspond with these values, and therefore to make “place” is possible. And it is much more so than when you start working for the whole humanity, which was the modernists perspective. I think that a lot of modernism is novel and challenging, I am not putting down either the forms or the theories proposed. Their downfall, however, was to think that designing or planning for “humanity” could employ the same processes as designing or planning for the elite. Addressing the whole of humanity requires changing your attitude, your methods, and the way you position yourself as an individual or as a profession vis a vis the world. It is no longer an elite occupation. Unfortunately, much of the architectural profession continues to function as if it served the “elite.”

So to conclude, if the architects believe or want to serve a large portion today’s society, then they need a very different preparation from what we have given them. They probably have to have more skills grounded in psychology, sociology, anthropology. Alternatively, they should continue to design buildings only for their own kind... I told you informally that I went to UC Berkeley to attend the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Journal “Places” (edited by Donlyn Lyndon). Of course we talked about place. I listened carefully to the speeches and realized that what speakers meant by “place” was “architecture for everyone”. It seemed that those shaping the journal had adopted the modernist approach – that of architecture not only for the elite or monuments, but of the “people”. They were not making the “scientific” distinction between space and place. I doubt that space was even considered separately from place. And place was also the appropriation, use, and reuse of the built space by people.

Health studies have their own definition of place as well. This means that we have to be quite careful in how to define things. What I meant by saying that designers have no control about place making was that they have no control in how people eventually use, understand, relate to the space that they make. Realizing this lack of control means that designers have to actually know a lot about how different people can use spaces differently.

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: Talking about modernism we have a question that leads us towards the new urbanism: In what measure could the traditional city urban form is considered a good model for the contemporary city?

Anne Vernez Moudon: The first problem with this approach is how do you define a traditional city? What is a traditional city? People have had to face this problem in preservation and construction work. After World War Two, for example, the question was whether to reconstruct Warsaw as it was in 1790 or as it was in 1849. That was essentially a philosophic-political decision. The traditional city is not a fixed form, it is a moving form. We did not talk much about this notion of change in a city so far. Change is very difficult to understand, and to capture actually. Beyond the act of building, there is the lifespan of an environment, which changes within different time intervals. There is the short and the long lifespan. Space is being afforded and changed at many different levels. About the traditional city again, taking about its form, which one of its forms, over time, is deemed the traditional one? For instance, now in 2008, can we say that the city of the 1950s is the traditional city? Are today’s suburbs the contemporary traditional cities--we now have almost two generations of people who have lived in the suburbs? Most would agree that they are not part of the traditional city. Yet the city of the 1930s is often called traditional—and indeed urban forms of the early part of the 20th century are called traditional by the Congress for New Urbanism.

Regarding the use of and need for models, you have to ask yourself what is your model for. Does the model relate to one building, to an entire new section of a city? Where is it going to be applied, China, South America, where? Only then can you start thinking in terms of tradition and thinking in terms of innovation as well, because I think it makes no sense to continue the entire historical city forever. I am not answering exactly your question so, I think we urgently need to develop a model for the many new neighborhoods now being built in Asia. Korea, China, many of countries built sections of their cities (this is not incremental change!) in record time without explicitly considering different models.

AFR / DSP: Maybe they create the model…

AVM: In the absence of explicit and a priori models, the reality becomes the model! Then the problem becomes one where you cannot even evaluate what you build. So what would be the model for those “instant” neighborhoods that are as big as many towns elsewhere? Well, I don’t think that “my cherished Bastides town in the southern France would be a good model”. Neither will Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit used in American cities, or the Unitè d’habitation used in many parts of the world. How would you start developing this model? You would start thinking of this model based on all these past ideas, and adapting them to the high densities of Asian cities today. I would think that concerns and solutions for energy consumption, water, garbage and waste, transportation systems, would be essential in developing that model.

AFR / DSP: So we can consider this question as an attack about the discourse of the New Urbanism. Because this words, traditional city, good model, they are always applying this discourse to design their cities. They are looking for the American traditional cities, there is a linkage with the European old cities and try to construct new suburb today, and you can see a lot of this in America. 

AVM: The New Urbanism movement is so multi-leveled that I think it is really hard to criticize them as a block. You can criticize their choice of architectural style, the way they configure street-blocks, the way they mix income, their house types, etc. But you should not criticism them at the general level. On the other hand, many of the pieces of the New Urbanism are not models that will work outside the US. I know it’s fashionable to say, oh, we have new urbanism communities in China. Well this association is a stretch as it may only apply to the use of an architectural style that is similar to some of the new urbanism communities that are built here, even not all of them are like that. I think that New Urbanism is looking for an approach to the American city that accommodates the middle class. Only aspects of this approach may apply elsewhere.

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: I would ask the same question that opens a Kevin Lynch’ book: “A Theory of Good City Form” (1981): “What does make a city a good city?”

Anne Vernez Moudon: First of all, I do not ask myself this question, I think it is a rhetorical question that is kind of silly. It’s silly in the sense that a city itself is not an entity that you can ask what is good or bad about it. When Kevin Lynch asked this question, I think he did so in a romantic sort of way. He was being allegorical. I am not a romantic person, so I cannot tell you what a good city is. To address the question, Kevin Lynch talks about processes that are very abstract. I love to read the book, but I think it is impossible to actually apply the ideas in an operational way. I don’t know what people mean or think when they say they can make a good city after reading “Good city form.”

AFR / DSP: But it still has a lot of influence on the Urban Design…

AVM: Oh, absolutely, but that influence feeds the persistent notion that designers can “change the world,” that dreaming about our role in making a good place, or a good city. First of all what city are we talking about? You have here Seattle, you have Londrina, Tel-Aviv, they are very different cities, extremely different. The same person with the same money can live in Tel-Aviv or in Seattle in many different ways. Which one is the good city for that person? Why? Let’s say a good city is where people like living, this would be a very simple definition. Try to make this happened as an urban designer, this is not easy.

AFR / DSP: But here in the University of Washington, in many courses, also in Israel and Brazil, a lot of people are still talking about Kevin Lynch, because he opened a door with this romantic side approach for urban design, and if you don’t apply this for us to try to built or design better cities as a professional or as a technician there is no more definition or no more role for us, what is our role? For example “visibility”, a subtle concept, but you can try to explain in your words, he just opened the door and he were not closing doors. He is not focusing on “you have to do that!”

AVM: Yes, Lynch’s work is an inspiriting force and the writing is beautiful. My preferred book by the way is “What time is this place” (1976), but the difference I make is, I guess, I don’t need Kevin Lynch to develop my professional thoughts and skills. I like some of the concepts he offers, I like reading the books as works of literature, but I don’t find them very helpful in the every day of my professional life.

AFR / DSP: You used to think of them? Let’s say 20 years ago...

AVM: Lynch’s writings were likely less influential for me than Umberto Ecco’s, both however were inspiring pieces of literature. The other thing I have with Lynch is I see both his interpretation and his vision of the city as primarily Anglo-Saxon and protestant. I find him “different” and interesting, but I don’t think I can apply his advice to my questions.

Did you read the chapter in “Good city form” that talks about his idea of the future city? His vision to me is not that of a city at all, with a bustling life, mix of people, domestic and commercial life, movement, trade, etc., but a pastoral landscape for a highly ordered society. I see Lynch’s vision as akin to that of an ideal and idealized contemporary suburb. I don’t like this personally, but that’s irrelevant, what is relevant is that vision does not match 90% of the cities in the world today! Further, I suspect that that vision is ill fitted for an earth with 8 or 9 billion people. We just do not have enough space and resources for this kind of good city.

AFR / DSP: Maybe he had the ability to make the city visible to everyone, also he gave us a way to think of a city not as an object or a way to think of a city as a sensation, and you can feel, and if you can feel you can design better it is not to much quantitative but more qualitative approach to the city. It is not really an easy book and as we said, the book open ideas…

AVM: Let me go back. For me, Kevin Lynch’s thought are those of an English, protestant romantic man. And so I read his books in this way, with a great pleasure, but with obvious distance. I do not learn much from them that apply to my profession, I learn about how his part of the world sees about my profession. For me William Whyte is more accessible, for instance. His book “The Organization Man” and his film “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” teach me more at the professional level. It is interesting because he is an American man of the mid 20th century, but the way he sees the world teaches me more.

What I perceive as the over-use of Lynch (and Jane Jacobs for that matter) is related I think to a certain intellectual laziness in our profession. Lynch was a good thinker and a good writer and we should refer to him. But there are lots of other authors with interesting writings! Why don’t we use them as well? This is why I did “A Catholic Approach to Organizing What Urban Designers Should Know” (1992). I did this not because I don’t like Kevin Lynch but because he is not the only one! We need to stop identifying or going being the identification of single idols. The world is complex, and we need to embrace this complexity in the works we reference. Interestingly, Lynch himself was an extremely modest person, and he wrote about his frustration with people from every walks of life quoting and specifically misquoting him! He wanted less the limelight than the discussions and new work that would emerge from his own work. Lynch’s work benefited from the MIT connection and the popularity of the institution. Lynch himself benefited from being a student when psychology studies of place first started and the Ford Foundation supported these efforts at MIT.

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: We turn now in to relation with Health. Closer to your present work. We have one general question, could you make some comments about the relationship between the urban form and human behavior? What are the limitations and potentialities of this approach for the Urban Design?

Anne Vernez Moudon: What we talked about until now was more theoretical and methodological, relating psychological, social, political processes to urban form. Now you are talking about behavior and environment. People have cautioned about this particular field of research, calling it physical determinism, where certain forms are believed to make people behave in certain ways. We know by now that there are definite co-adaptation processes between urban form and behavior. At a simple level, some people might put a king-size bed in a small bedroom, but most would not. They would look for a larger bedroom for this type of bed. Fewer people will walk if there are no sidewalks. Most but not all people will walk on a sidewalk. The environment/behavior relationship is not one to one and it is not entirely predictable. Work in urban form, building form and human behavior because will be useful to designers, as we aim for “making good places”. Environment behavior research can greatly help in relating spaces to their known affordances and hence would make designers’ work be more precise in projecting possible uses of space. We need more work on urban form and human behavior. To conclude about urban form and behavior, the more we know about it the better are we as designers.

AFR / DSP: Basically, what are the possible effects of the urban form in people’s health? In what measure are the socio-cultural factors important?

AVM: This is an interesting question, because going backward in time, the reason why I have done all this work, first with the transportation and now with the public health sectors, is because these fields open up the only mechanisms available through which you could study aspects of behavior and urban form. For example, I have student interested in the relationship between crime and urban form. There is a great difficulty to find support for that kind of research, except in the implications of this subject matter for human health. My focus on transportation and health has led to taking a practical view of behavior. I found out that people are interested in the effects of environment or urban form on certain behaviors—such as walking, using public transport, accessing certain types of foods, etc.  The behaviors studied are those that affect transportation or public health policies, and the research results lead to new ways of thinking about and regulating urban form.

AFR / DSP: You have chosen these two topics because the Americans are very concern about transportation and health. So you relate two American worries…

AVM: You are right, but I think the relationship between health and environment is now debated though out the world. The health issues related cities have changed. More than 100 years ago, these issues focused on the dense living conditions in urban centers and their implications for the spread of infectious diseases. People thought that infection was carried through air, which lead to concerns about overcrowding. These concerns eventually supported the development of low density suburbs, and the partial flight out of cities in the US and parts of the western world. Today’s, ironically, the overdependence on automobile travel, which was fueled by the low density suburban forms, is leading to the next health issue, which is physical inactivity! We worry less about the effects of high density living on health, and overcrowding only seems to be an issue in refugees camps, but not in the formal neighborhoods of China, South East Asia, Korea, etc., where people live in environments that are denser than those of US or European cities in the 19 century.

Now the issue of concern is with chronic diseases associated with physical inactivity and overweight or obesity. The overconsumption of cheap sugar and fat and sedentary life styles are linked to increases in cardio-vascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and various forms of cancers. Over-dependence on individual motorized transport and lack of access to healthy foods are the two aspects of behavior that seem to be influenced by contemporary urban forms. Other disorders, such as autism, are believed to be exacerbated by pollutants in the environment. Exposure to such pollutants is high in many cities. So not only the built environment but the air and water of cities affect our health.

Transport in cities seems to be a significant barrier to healthy living for the population: it affects how sedentary people are and it generates the largest portion of environmental pollutants. We know that transportation systems are closely linked to urban form, so research is important to find out how we can shape our cities to decrease the use of current transportation systems and to promote healthy behaviors.

Health research uses techniques in epidemiology that aim to understand how individual behavior leads to population-wide health problems. The research includes consideration of the social and the economic environments in determining behavior, adding to them the possible effects of the physical environment. The physical environment has some effect on how active people are, explaining about 10% of behaviors.

AFR / DSP: We would like that you explain the importance of walking in the city and ask again, could a good city be a place where everybody can walk to reach their basic needs?

AVM: Again, a good city is where people can live quality life. This is a little bit vague, isn’t it? But there are ways to measure how good a city is. A good city is where people can walk, but there is more to that in a good city isn’t there?

I got interested in walking much before walking was a fashionable topic in transportation and health. Back in the 1980s in urban design and maybe even Lynch said it, we realized that one measure of a good place was that  of people being able to walk around. Actually, William White wasn’t so much talking about people walking than about people “being” around. No one around meant that the place was not a good place. I got into the social aspects of walking first. These aspects have taken a secondary importance in the more focused context of research in transportation and health, but they should not be forgotten!

On the other hand, it is amazingly refreshing to see that a lot of cities around the world are working to make bicycling as the main type of urban transportation. This is very hopeful because the distances are so short and it is so easy to get around by bike, if only cars are tamed and cycling on the roadway becomes safe.

AFR / DSP: Now cities have started to develop bicycle routs, which is very difficult to insert it in an existing city…

AVM: Yet they can find plenty of space for cars! I don’t buy this difficulty thing. I think it’s about priorities! With global warming and health questions, bicycling is becoming an obvious mode of transport to cover short distances. You go much faster by bike than by walking. It is good from the clean air and water and the physical activity perspective. It may be less good for social encounters, because cyclists are less likely than pedestrians to stop and talk with people.

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: What do inspire your scientific curiosity about urban questions in cities around the world?

Anne Vernez Moudon: Well, first things first. What I like about travel and going to these places is to look around, eat, drink some good wine and do as little as I can. This is what is nice about traveling. At the end of the day, I love to go to a terrace to enjoy the city and just hear the people and feel the place. That’s very precious. So in the back of my mind, I have always had a kind of urban form template – building typologies, plan sections, etc. So while I eat my food, drink my wine, talk with friends and listen to them, I think and feel all this stuff! My interest would be to have much better documentation about all these cities. And I think this is coming because people are increasingly interested in documenting their place. It is also a matter of how to disseminate this knowledge. It would be nice to have just simple documentation about the urban form of cities. The other thing is that the forces and principles that were behind of making the cities are all the same. I mean there are many common threads. It doesn’t matter whether you have big buildings or small buildings, different architectural styles, different street-block shapes, the process of making the cities is all very similar. So I’d like to read more about that. It’s hard to show it scientifically because you need good maps, drawings and analysis. It would be an enormous amount of work. The alternative would be to show it in a much simpler way. For example, I remember in China in a place like Kunmin, in the Yunnan Province. Being a Chinese city, it was a little bit different from what I had known, but I saw there and understood, or I thought I did, what I could be seen in most other cities around the world. You can ask how can you see similarities to other cities in a place where land is held in common and the communistic planning system prevails? I could see that the buildings were different, but I could also see the lot or parcel structure of the city! How could there be lots or parcels when land belongs to the community (actually the city of the provincial governments)? And by the way, this lot structure is now included in studies of Chinese cities because of recent moves toward land privatization. What I saw was that even without private land ownership, China still had a land system based on individual “private” use permits. The city legal development was done on lot by lot basis, as it was in other cities. So essentially, Chinese people developed lots just like we develop lots. This was fascinating to me because the way that we look at and understand cities can be transferable cross-culturally and very quickly it can teach you how pose questions about how things work!

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli e Dalit Shach-Pinsly: In Brazil, Architecture and Urban Planning have been taught together in the majority of the Universities. In opposite, in US they are taught separately – the union it’s a student’s decision and responsibility. However, while their relationship is evident the questions they deal with are immense. How can one teach to make future architects and urban planners to better relate these disciplines in their daily practice?

Anne Vernez Moudon: That’s what we are trying to do here in integrating urban design and planning. We don’t expect that every student will become an urban designer, but we try to get students from architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning, and to put them together in order for them to have a common knowledge for the city. This is a good way to start, with a lot of experiential sort of stuff, going out to experience the city, etc. But we also have to convince some students to take these urban design courses because they are not required. An architecture student is not required to take an urban planning course and vice-versa. This is strange because we are in the same College of Architecture and Urban Planning! In my past studies in an American University (UC Berkeley), I had to take a required urban planning course. This need to relate building design and construction to urban planning is in many ways why I’m teaching the urban form course as an architectural approach to urban planning. This type of approach is very important not only to appreciate “places” but to understand how cities are produced. Urban planning is often so divorced in scale from the development process. In this country, some years ago, planning Schools loved to admit lots of students, from just about any background except architecture! [rs] Urban planning at that time was trying to be against physical form, against physical determinism. Everything was socially and economically oriented. Planners were trying to make people believe that cities were only social or economic entities. Now things have changed. The reason we don’t have just Planning Schools is because the planning system is not that strong. Finally, I would say that planners and architects, when they acted as separate entities, developed their own sort of theories. As a result, I believe we are still lacking good theories in which work at an urban design scale. There is lots of work to be done in this area.

AFR / DSP: Your main topic research has been changed along the years, however, all relates significantly to urban environment and urban form. In addition, your researches mainly relay on quantitative methods, rather than qualitative, that measures different elements or aspects in the urban environment. When and how you have discovered that the fundamental base for research is to examine the objective and the quantitative elements first? What are your aspirations to your research topics? What was your inspiration towards your new research topic of Urban Environment and Health?

AVM: Considering the objective elements of space were done in the research about San Francisco. At the same time, that work was very architectural. I used an environment and behavior approach. So I’m always concerned with the objective questions of the environment and with the affordance of space: how do people use it, how can they use it, and so on. My research topics after the San Francisco work focused on the Boston and the Seattle metropolitan areas looking at infill strategies and new building types. I used to teach in a lot of studios on this topic. At that time, we were concerned with mixing buildings types and uses, a common topic now, but my architecture colleagues thought that I was crazy at the time… This was a great innovation, mixed-use buildings in contemporary settings! Can you believe this? But to the credit of Seattle, the zoning allowed mixed use in many areas! So I said to my colleagues: the zoning allows it and maybe we can show developers what they could do! At that time, I was waiting for GIS to come about. I edited the street book (Public Streets for Public Use, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987). In parallel work, we found that for the same planning measures of density and mix of uses in neighborhoods, there were three time more people walking to the neighborhood commercial center in urban areas that had small blocks and sidewalks than in suburban areas with large blocks and few sidewalks. That was kind of cool! We also found that there were many more neighborhoods in suburban areas that had the potential for walking than anybody had thought existed. I got some research support to continue looking at the suburban neighborhood clusters. This is when we started doing work with walking and transportation. At his time, in the 90s, there was no concern about health. It was all about transportation. The health issues came in much later. Public Health people contacted the transportation people who were doing the research on walking. And these transportation people in turn contacted me. We all had meetings for years. We had great time thinking about how to increase opportunities for more walking cities. Yet we kept saying: Why are we meeting? Nobody is paying us to work, nobody is “feeding us”! The frustration was enormous. I finally received a grant to study the health and walking question in early 2000s. That was a big project and I got so scared when I got this grant because we had so much to learn!

AFR / DSP: Finally a few questions about your life and…

AVM: Oh, my life? It’s almost done! [rs] Let’s go to have a drink! [rs]

Anna Verdez Moudon

Anne Vernez Moudon, architect and landscape architect, is a professor of graduate studies at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, the United States since 1981 and coordinator of the Laboratory of Urban Form in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at the same university. She was president of ISUF (International Seminar on Urban Form) between 1997 and 2005. Also taught at the University of California at Berkeley (1973 - 1975) and the Institute of Technology Massachusetts (1975 - 1981). She earned his master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley (1969), and her doctorate at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland (1987). Collaborates with several newspapers and journals, as an author and member of scientific committee and editorial.

Alessandro Filla Rosaneli

PhD, earned his Master and Doctoral degrees at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of São Paulo. He was visiting scholar with a grant from Fulbright Commission/FUNADESP in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at University of Washington, Seattle. Currently he is Professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Federal University of Parana, Curitiba.

Dalit Shach-Pinsly

PhD, earned her Doctoral degree at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She is collaborative researcher at Urban Form Lab in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning in the University of Washington, Seattle with a Marie Curie grant. Currently she is Professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.

Interview

Interview was granted to the architects Alessandro Filla Rosaneli and Dalit Shach-Pinsly on two occasions in May 2008, at the premises of the UW. The interview was released in Vitruvius in February 2010.