Combining the historico-geographical and configurational approaches to urban morphology: the historical transformations of Ludlow, UK and Chinatown, Singapore

Abstract

There have been notable efforts to coordinate and combine the historico-geographical and configurational approaches to urban morphology. Nevertheless, the new insights that the combination of these two approaches could offer are still to be fully identified, especially concerning the historical transformation of urban form. This paper develops a methodological framework for combining the historico-geographical and the configurational approaches in order to explore their complementarities. Ludlow (UK) and Chinatown (Singapore) are used as case studies to test this new framework. The results show that, on the one hand, the street configuration, especially the integration-segregation pattern, is correlated with the distribution of plan units and therefore can inform their recognition; on the other hand, place-specific knowledge relating to the historico- geographical process of the city can help to explain the changes in the configurational values of different plan units. The findings indicate that the combination of these two approaches is capable of providing enhanced understandings of the historical transformation of urban form for both urban areas with incremental growth and those with fast-changing urban landscapes.