Urban morphology is the study of the form and shape of settlements. It helps urban designers understand local development patterns and changes over time. The urban pattern consists of buildings, street blocks, and grids. Street blocks are surrounded by streets and contain plots of land for buildings. Plot size, building type, and street block design all impact the urban fabric. Common forces that determine urban form include natural conditions, economics, politics, law, and technology. The document discusses the grid system of urban planning and how it has been implemented, with examples from Barcelona.

1. ARC 331
URBAN DESIGN

2. MORPHOLOGICAL
DIMENSION OF URBAN
DESIGN

6. Urban morphology is the study of form and shape of settlements
Morphology helps the urban designer to be aware of
local patterns of development and
process of changes

8. The urban pattern and its components:
buildings (and plots),
street-blocks and
the grid
Urban pattern: a collection of built and un-built areas, and the ways in which
these are arranged within a geographical region.
The expression urban pattern often refers to, and is represented as the two
dimensional plan of a settlement but is also about its third or vertical dimension
specifically in urban design context.
Understanding the city in urban design terms

9. Street-block, plot, and building

10. Planned v. un-planned organic urban forms: urban patterns
vary greatly in geometry and order, form perfect grid or
chessboard layouts, to completely irregular or disordered
forms.

11. Street block:
A piece of urban land surrounded on four (or more) sides by streets.
Blocks and streets are the two elementary components by which we recognize
and experience an urban pattern, and through which we manipulate urban forms
for economic and social purposes.
The degree to which a city is sustainable is affected both by the form of the
urban street block and also by the composition of the activities it accommodates.
The way in which the street blocks are designed and the land use mix within
street blocks also affects the quality of the built environment.
It is the size, function and structure of the street block which gives form to public
space and contributes to the vitality of those spaces.

12. A city block, urban block or simply block is a
central element of urban planning and urban
design. A city block is the smallest area that is
surrounded by streets.

13. - Within the block are plots. Plots contain the various activities related to a
building:
the building footprint
the access requirements
the servicing space
amenity space
parking spaces
In design, the need for, and the relationship between these items should be
considered.

14. Plot:
A small piece of land that has been marked or measured for building
development (or other purpose).
Building type:
structure categorized according to the make-up and arrangement of its
construction not necessarily its use.
Urban fabric:
Understood in terms of the various forces that act upon an urban settlement and
its transformation, which can be best understood from the features of the blocks
and streets, their scale, dimension, grain or texture, geometry, subdivision of
plots and the mesh width of an urban district.

22. Urban form determining forces:
Natural conditions
Economics of city building: understood in terms of property development;
Political: understood in terms of public realm vs. the private realm as reflected in
space.
Legal: Understood in terms of the regulations imposed by a community on city
building process: technological and aesthetical.

23. Grid as an urban planning and design issue
Two arguments underlying the universal adoption of the grid as an effective city
building device:
a) man…….walks in a straight line
b) it offers a standard way of distributing land equally, and an easy way of
parceling for real estate development.

25. Barcelona, the scientific method for urban planning
the grid as the possibility of growth ad infinitum

26. scientific coherence in any scale
conceived as a worldwide system, but very specific in the local implementation
every detail was designed, from the surface of the extension plan to the positioning of
every bench or tree or clock
ventilation, sun radiation and mobility planned from a entire city approach rather
visionary. blocks’ depth and height regulated due to hygienic reasons

28. in the original regulations purposed by Cerdá, for the first time ever built facades
would partially dissociate from the streets. Due to existing circumstances, a higher
density was required.
early dissociation between street and inter-street

29. feasible variations within the grid
the grid as an structural framework for
the individual decisions and the
historical development

35. Traditionalist and modernist urban space

37. Transformation of traditional grid into super block