This presentation is about the first-generation urban designer Conzen.pptx

This presentation is about the first-generation urban designer Conzen

1. MRG Conzen Urban morphology and town plan analysis

2. Contents Biography Urban morphology City of Alnwick Conzen’s photo and map collections Influences

3. Biography Birth: 1907, Berlin, Germany 1912–1926 School education at Berlin 1926–1932 Study of Geography, History, and Philosophy at the University of Berlin 1933, Emigration to United Kingdom as a refugee from Nazi Germany 1934–1936 Study of Town and Country Planning, Manchester 1937–1942 Postgraduate research in historical geography Death: 2000, Newcastle upon Tyne, England

4. Research Interests Urban geography, historical geography, applied geography Other aspects of human geography Regional geography of the British Isles, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, southeast and East Asia Philosophical and methodological aspects of geography

5. Urban morphology The form of human settlements and the process of their formation and transformation Understanding the spatial structure and character of a metropolitan area, city, town or village by examining the patterns of its component parts and the process of its development Special attention is given to how the physical form of a city changes over time and to how different cities compare to each other. Study of the social forms which are expressed in the physical layout of a city, and, conversely, how physical form produces or reproduces various social forms.

6. The British school centers around the work of M.R.G. Conzen , who developed a technique called 'town-plan analysis.' The elements for morphological analysis according to Conzen are: The town plan Pattern of building forms (building types) Pattern of land use (and it social effects) understanding the layering of these aspects and elements through history is the key to comprehending urban form Streets : arrangement into a street-system Plots (or lots) : aggregation into street-blocks Buildings, in the form of the block-plans

7. City of Alnwick , UK The town of Alnwick is located on the east coast in the North of England, near the Scottish border, or north of Newcastle Upon Tyne and South of Edinburgh. Conzen’s very complex work is to provide an adequate procedure and a proper terminology for the study of the form on the ground The whole form is dependent on the 3 main elements of morphological analysis and how they overlap The method is used establish dominant themes based on the arrangement of these features and the identification of plan units.

8. T he medieval plan of Alnwick and its development forms an interesting subject for cartographical analysis since the nucleus , is still present from the Middle Ages, although it has changed with time In Alnwick , the majority of property boundaries may at least be regarded as preserving the medieval pattern in modified form. In all the surveys these units are known individually as burgage ( burgagium ), i.e. the urban plot is held by a burgess. It contained a house and a yard and was charged with a fixed rent as a contribution to the communal borough tax of the town. T here is continuity in the identity of the great majority of burgages as ownership units revealed by this evidence stretching over more than 200 years. It makes the assumption that, in its general features, the burgage pattern of 1567 inside the walled town is essentially that of the Middle Ages.

9. Medieval plan units showing traditional, long strip plots or deep burgages arranged in a series on either side of a major traffic street widened to provide a ‘street market’.

10. Conzen's concepts 1. burgage cycle , by which burgage plots are filled up and then re-developed 2. fringe belts or fixation lines of peripheral land utilization, have great importance for older towns as they have grown in more recent times I ndividual burgages generally form rather long narrow strip- plots laid roughly at right-angles to the street-line and parallel to each other. In the case of Alnwick , a high degree of individuality is imparted by the unusual arrangement of major traffic streets round the Central Triangle , the intersection of streets form the early market-place forming a village

11. Towns grow unevenly with periods of rapid extension followed by periods of stand-stills. In these periods of stability the margin of growth is separated by a distinctive line , sometimes a physical feature such as a town wall or a sharp break of slope , at other times a non-physical feature such as a property boundary In Alnwick the streets consequent upon the wall mark the urban fringe of the Old Town leaving important residual features in plan and exerting some morphological influence . It divides the great central area of traditional Burgage patterns from the surrounding areas which have plot patterns typical of subsequent growth I ts site has become the fixation line for a number of-peripheral streets that now form a ring-like system round most of the old borough. In the Middle Ages it had been public ground used for the practice of archery . After that it provided the space for a number of land- use units with public functions

12. Townscape management as in the case of Alnwick has a direct effect on the quality of the environment and has long term benefits to society the building fabric of towns can be readily divided according to original function into those buildings that house the dominant part of the land use occupying their plots and those that serve subsidiary functions

13. Original Conzen map shows six different patterns ( urban uses 1964) Review of Alnwick Showing same categories (2004)

14. the historical evolution is reflected in the current road structure. The expansion of this small village during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has led to the emergence of different types of road and urban patterns

15. Field work done by MRG Conzen over a period of more than 50 years. Every building is coded to show the town or village. Conzen used a system for coding the reports. The system is based on a list of two-letter codes were used to describe a cityscape. Alnwick , Northumberland two studies: 1953 & 1964

16. Conzen’s Photo collections Aerial view of Baghdad (late 1940’s) in the vicinity of the Al- Shuhada Bridge.

17. Selection of photographs and postcards from English field excursions 1937-8.

18. Conzen’s Map Collections (estimated 50,000 maps; possible 25,000 of them town plans) Views of Winterthur, Switzerland

19. Winterthur, Switzerland 1648

20. Winterthur, Switzerland 1800

21. Winterthur, Switzerland 1850

22. Influences on students “M. R. G. Conzen , ‘Con’ to everybody, had studied at the University of Berlin and arrived in England as the product of the German educational system. If anyone knows about the rigours of academic discipline it’s the Germans, but those whose works I’d previously come across seem to have been carried up into a kind of élitist cloud which had no place for me.” “I discovered almost immediately that Con seemed to have the same basic attitude to geography as I had, in that all his enquiries started with visual observation . For him the landscape was a repository of information which it yielded only to those who knew how to ask the right questions.” How I Made the World: Shaping a View of Landscape by Jay Appleton (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1994), pp. 180–182.

23. “His methods were far more exacting than mine, his insight infinitely sharper, his accumulated knowledge incomparably greater and his scholarship of a different order, but I very soon knew that I had found the link I was looking for between the world of everyday environmental observation, the world of the boy scout, and the world of the philosopher.” “I dare say the most important lesson I leaned from Con was to recognize the respectability of the elementary . I had until now been in danger of falling in to the trap of supposing that anything academically worthwhile must be highly complex, whereas it’s the function of the academic to reduce the complex to a level of simplicity at which it can be comprehended.”

24. “He taught me, for example, that everything in what he called the ‘cultural landscape’ (initially a German concept, covering the whole natural landscape as modified by human activity) can be interpreted in terms of three aspects, its morphology (its shapes, patterns and distributions; what it’s like), its function (what it’s for), and its evolution (how it came to be like that).”

25. Influences on the public sphere “ Professor Conzen stated that the burgage strips of the supposed medieval part of the town should not be straight, but slightly sigmoid in plan. He it was who delightedly suggested that this was the first time a medieval town had ever been planned ” The Man who made Beamish: An Autobiography by Frank Atkinson ( Gateshead : Northern Books, 1999), pp. 181 and 189. Beamish, North of England Open Air Museum is Britain’s first museum of this kind, devoted to interpreting the everyday life of the region during the peak of the Industrial Revolution.