EDITORIAL COMMENT

The regeneration of urban areas located outside of city centres

PAPERS

The contemporary urban condition in the capital expansion border: patterns of spatial transformation in six cities of Pará, Brazil
A. C. Cardoso, A. C. Melo, T. Gomes

{+}Abstract [PDF]This text seeks to place the ‘city’ against the transformations occurying in Eastern Amazon and to identify a set of morphological patterns that are related to two competing trajectories of urban space structuring – urban-industrial and traditional – highlighting the potential legacy of the latter for innovating in urban design and planning. The patterns of evolution and occupation of six cities, located in an area that has been under intense transformations after the 1970s, are compared, making explicit a set of connections between morphological patterns and socioeconomic processes. The construction of the database used in this paper was based on field research carried out between 2012 and 2014 in the six cities studied under the framework of the UrbisAmazônia project. The methodological procedure includes a brief historical analysis and the characterization of the spatial structure of the city and of major events in the urban expansion of these cities, particularly on the action of public and private sectors. A new type of polynuclear urbanization in this region is identified. This occurs in complex times, where historical problems can be aggravated though the imposition of homogenizing rationales or be overcomed through the transition from the urban-industrial standard to a new stage of real possibilities for innovation, of a balanced relationship between nature and the rights of people and of representation of different rationales for sharing a territory.

The study of the urban ‘form-dynamic’: mapping the spatial appropriation and the social dynamics
D. L. Viana, I. C. Carvalho

{+}Abstract [PDF]The paper addresses the correlation between urban form and socio-spatial dynamics, focusing on tracking urban flows by using mobile communication devices (such as smartphones and tablets). It argues for the inclusion of contemporary ways of experiencing the urban space – potentiated by digital connection and access to the internet, supported by digital platforms processing a wide variety of individual and collective data, georeferenced in real time – into morphological analysis. The profusion of activities and uses occurying in the urban space leads to the acknowledgement that urban flows are key aspects in urban form analysis. As such, tracking, and mapping, the different urban experiences is of fundamental importance. This argument relates to the convergence between the concept of urban dynamic-form and the development of mapping spatial appropriationa and social dynamics. It makes reference to the ‘interoperability’ and the ‘multidimensionality’ of readings processed in combinatorial mode in morphological analysis, widening the scope of the study of the urban form. This interrelation of morphological analysis’ methods should make explicit, in a structured way, the rules underlying the dynamics detected in urban form, consolidating the interdependence between the physical configuration of the spatial system, its perceptions and the patterns of appropriation.

VIEWPOINTS _[PDF]

The ‘regeneration of sprawl’: from expansion to regeneration and from regeneration of high-density areas to regeneration low-density areas
T. Calix

Maputo: trends of intervention on (sub)urban neighbourhoods
D. L. Viana

The regeneration of areas outside (historical) city centres – a view on an Islamic city in Morocco
S. Safe

(Un)usual Brasilia
V. A. S. Medeiros

The landscape in the urban expansion of historical cities: scenarios and legebility
M. C. V. Teixeira e M. Salgado

REPORTS _[PDF]

Portuguese-language network of Urban Morphology (PNUM): 2015-16
T. Marat-Mendes

1st Meeting of the Cyprus Network of Urban Morphology, Nicósia, 2016
V. Oliveira

1st International Seminar of Urban Morphology, FAU Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brasil, 2016
F. R. Botechia e H. F. Borges

NEWS

Urban Morphology
ISUF 2017: City and territory in the global era
PNUM 2017 Vitória
Course ‘Urban Morphology: an introduction to the study of the physical form of cities’