What is a Town? - The Urban Morphology of Towns and Cities in Asia

Biology Building, Room 101

Urban morphology combines geography, anthropology and history to explain how the shapes of towns and cities change over time. The unit of analysis is scalable from the attributes of buildings and streets, to neighborhoods, the city itself, and its place in the region. A city like Tokyo shows its historical provenance in the same way that Los Angeles does, although each has a very different historical origin and trajectory. In this presentation, we will examine the shapes of three different urban traditions in Asia and how they have changed over time. We will examine the Chinese imperial city tradition, the Silk Road Islamic urban tradition and the urban patterns of Tibet.