Urban Morphology & Theories of Urban Morphology

• Urban morphology is the study of the physical form of a city: its street plan, plots, buildings, land-use zones and open spaces, and the processes that produce and change them over time.
• The term “morphology” was coined by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the 1790s for the study of biological form. In urban geography it covers the shape, layout, internal structure and arrangement of towns.
• It joins two questions: what the city looks like (form) and why its parts sit where they do (process). The second question produced the classical models of internal structure and the economic theory of land values.

Concept of Urban Morphology

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Meaning and Elements

• In simple terms, urban morphology is the plan map of a city with its land uses identified.
• Raymond E. Murphy (1966) described its concern as the form elements of the city: the arrangement of streets and railways, the form of buildings, indeed the whole urban landscape.
• Enayat Ahmad (1957), studying Indian towns, treated a town’s morphology as a function of its site, historical vicissitudes, successive cultures and economic setting, much as a landform is a function of structure, process and stage.
• L. Dudley Stamp (1961) treated morphology as the study of a town’s form and structure and of how they developed. It takes in three things: layout and outer shape, land use, and demographic structure.
• The British school reduces the townscape to three elements (Michael R. G. Conzen, 1960):
  • Town plan: the street system, plots and the block-plans of buildings.
  • Building fabric: the form, age and style of buildings.
  • Land and building use.
• These physical elements carry social elements: cultural groups, economic classes and workers in different sectors. Urban morphology is therefore also a part of urban ecology, the study of how these elements interrelate.
• The study of the arrangement of buildings and open spaces at the scale of a neighbourhood is called the study of urban tissue.
• Methods of study:
  • Town-plan analysis: reading the street, plot and building pattern of large-scale maps, layer by layer, back to the oldest surviving plan.
  • Land-use survey and mapping, block by block and floor by floor.
  • Morphogenetic study of how each historical period added a distinct layer to the city.
  • Remote sensing and GIS, which now track built-up growth, density and land-use change over decades.
  • Space syntax (Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, 1984), which measures how well each street is connected to the rest of the network and links this to movement and land use.

Scope

• How settlements originate and transform over time.
• Spatial transformation: how land-use patterns shift over decades through expansion, urban sprawl, agglomeration and the absorption of the rural–urban fringe.
• Neighbourhood morphology: the arrangement, function and change of buildings and open spaces.
• The influence of transport, trade and technology on city growth.
• Social segregation and the cultural factors that shape the cityscape.
• Both natural factors (climate, relief, building materials) and human factors (trade routes, markets, defence, transport lines, planning law) shape a city’s layout.
• Factors that shape a city’s morphology:
  • Site: relief, rivers, coasts and floodplains fix the first plan and the direction of growth. Mumbai grew as a narrow peninsula; Kolkata as a strip along the Hooghly levee.
  • Situation: routes, ports and river crossings decide which way the city stretches and where its centre lies.
  • History and culture: walls, forts, temples and colonial cantonments survive as fixed features long after their purpose has gone.
  • Function: port, industrial, administrative and religious cities each develop a distinctive land-use mix.
  • Transport technology: walking, tram, rail, car and metro each produce a different city shape.
  • Land markets and regulation: zoning, floor-space limits and land ownership decide what can be built where.
• The field serves urban planning, architecture and infrastructure design. It has recently added socio-cultural meaning to its older focus on physical form.

Urban Land Use

• Urban land use describes which activities take place where, and how densely and intensively they are concentrated.
• Each use has its own relation to distance from the centre:
  • Commercial (market) use is most intense at the centre, where accessibility and the consumer base peak, and falls off quickly outward.
  • Light manufacturing (garments, jewellery, utensils, printing) sits near the centre, close to markets and labour.
  • Residential use rises some distance from the crowded centre and then thins out.
  • Heavy manufacturing lies farther out, because it needs large plots, cheap land and distance from housing because of pollution.
• The main land-use classes are:
  • Residential: upper, middle and lower class.
  • Commercial: retail and wholesale; hypermarkets and offices of large firms.
  • Industrial: light and heavy.
  • Institutional and public: health, education, government, recreation and open space.
  • Transport and utilities.

Schools of Urban Morphology

• British (Conzenian) School:
  • Built on Otto Schlüter’s (1899) work on the ground plans of German towns, which deeply influenced M. R. G. Conzen.
  • Conzen’s micro-scale town-plan analysis of Alnwick (1960), Ludlow and Newcastle traced plots and streets back to the medieval period. The school speaks of the city’s townscape.
  • Fringe belt: a belt of large plots with extensive and institutional uses (parks, cemeteries, hospitals, schools, utilities) that forms at the edge of a town when its growth pauses at a fixation line such as a city wall. Herbert Louis first identified it in Berlin (1936).
  • Burgage cycle: the progressive filling of the back-plot of a medieval burgage with buildings until a climax, followed by clearance and “urban fallow” before a new cycle of redevelopment.
• Italian School:
  • Founded in the 1950s by the architect Saverio Muratori through studies of Venice and Rome.
  • It focuses on the typology of buildings, which it links to the history and culture of the inhabitants.
  • It is criticised for treating the city as architecture alone and neglecting its social, economic and political aspects.
• French School:
  • It began with architectural models at the Versailles School of Architecture in the 1970s.
  • Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the “right to the city” (1968) then drew it into the social and political production of urban space.
  • It is therefore more holistic than the Italian school.
• Chicago School:
  • The human ecologists of the 1920s–40s (Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Roderick D. McKenzie) treated the city as an ecosystem in which groups compete for space through invasion, succession and dominance.
  • It produced the three classical models of internal structure.
• Los Angeles School:
  • It studies the post-modern, post-Fordist metropolis, drawing on Marxist and post-structural urban theory (Edward Soja, Michael Dear).
  • It arose as a critique of the Chicago School. Its main idea is the polycentric, fragmented metropolitan region, with no single centre organising the whole.

Classical Models of Internal Structure

• Each city has its own mix of land uses, but recurring patterns can be traced. Three models from the USA describe them:
  • the concentric zone model, the sector model and the multiple nuclei model.
• Cities have changed greatly since these models were drawn. They remain the foundation of urban geography, even when they are cited only to be rejected.

Concentric Zone Model (Burgess, 1925)

• Proposed by Ernest W. Burgess (1925) in The City, co-written with Robert E. Park and Roderick D. McKenzie. It generalised empirical observations of Chicago.
• Assumptions:
  • An isotropic surface: a flat plain with no relief or other barriers.
  • Economic and rational people, and free competition for land.
  • All transport routes converge on the centre, and accessibility is equal in all directions from it.
  • Growth outward from a single centre, so the city is circular.
• Process: invasion and succession.
  • The CBD and its jobs attract poor migrants, who invade the old residential areas next to it.
  • The better-off move outward to cleaner, less crowded areas; their old homes are subdivided and pass to the newcomers.
  • Second- and third-generation migrants move outward in turn and displace the groups beyond them.
  • Faster transport lets the rich commute from the edge, so each zone presses into the next as the city grows.
• The five zones:
  • Zone I, the Loop (CBD): offices, department stores, banks, government buildings and wholesale trade.
    • The city’s highest accessibility, land values and building heights.
    • Few residents, so it is busy by day and a “dead heart” at night.
  • Zone II, the zone in transition: the oldest housing, being invaded by light industry and business.
    • Deteriorated, overcrowded tenements; slums, ghettos and immigrant colonies.
    • High room density, pollution and social disorganisation.
  • Zone III, the zone of working-men’s homes: skilled workers and second-generation migrants who have escaped Zone II but must live near work.
  • Zone IV, the residential zone: middle- and upper-class single-family homes and better apartments, with parks and better civic services.
  • Zone V, the commuters’ zone: suburbs and satellite settlements beyond the built-up edge, 30–60 minutes from the CBD.
    • It holds scattered upper-class colonies, hypermarkets and daily workers’ dwellings, and grain and vegetables are bought wholesale here.
• Burgess’s own refinements for Chicago:
  • Satellite loops: the business centres of satellite towns, dominated by the main Loop.
  • Ethnic enclaves inside the rings: the Black Belt, Little Sicily and the Jewish ghetto.
  • “Hobohemia“, the district of homeless migratory workers described by Nels Anderson in The Hobo (1923).
  • Transport stages kept changing the city’s form: horse-car lines (1860), trolley lines (1890) and electric suburban lines (1925).
  • The Jewish ghetto lay at Lawndale.
• Criticism:
  • It fits American industrial cities, where the poor live in the inner city and the rich in the suburbs. It does not fit pre-industrial, European or Asian cities.
  • It ignores relief, rivers and lakes, and the radial transport lines along which cities actually grow.
  • Zones are never clear-cut; each contains several land uses.
  • It ignores the location of industry, the role of government and planning, and later gentrification of the inner city.
  • Maurice R. Davie (1937) found no concentric pattern in New Haven. Walter Firey (1947) showed that sentiment and symbolism kept Beacon Hill and Boston Common intact against the land market.
  • Other critics include Milla A. Alihan, Brian J. L. Berry and Frank E. Horton, and Robert E. Dickinson.
• Evaluation: a normative, deductive model built on one city. It still captures the outward movement of the better-off and the ageing of the inner city in many industrial cities.

Sector Model (Hoyt, 1939)

• Proposed by the land economist Homer Hoyt (1939) in a study for the US Federal Housing Administration. He analysed residential rent data for 142 American cities.
  • Older accounts also cite a closer study of 34 American cities and of Latin American cases (Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Buenos Aires).
• He found that rent areas form sectors (wedges) radiating from the CBD, not rings. A sector of a given character keeps that character as it grows outward.
• Mechanism:
  • Growth follows the main transport routes (railways, tramlines, highways), which create directional differences in accessibility.
  • High-rent housing grows outward along the fastest transport lines, towards high ground, open country and the homes of community leaders. It pulls the whole city in that direction.
  • Industry extends along railways, rivers and canals, and low-income housing clusters next to it.
  • Filtering: as the rich move outward, their older houses filter down to lower-income groups.
• Zones: 1 CBD; 2 wholesale and light manufacturing; 3 low-class residential; 4 middle-class residential; 5 high-class residential.
  • CBD: circular core with no housing, the costliest land; dark and empty at night, so also called the city’s blighted part (Connaught Place).
  • Wholesale and light manufacturing: mixed land use along the main artery; polluted, noisy and congested, with slums.
  • Low-class residential: factory workers of the second zone; highest room density, shanties and slums.
  • Middle-class residential: better civic amenities and less pollution.
  • High-class residential: along main transport lines with direct links to the city; engineers, doctors, professors and managers.
• Indian illustration:
  • Delhi’s Mathura Road (old NH-2, now NH-19) towards Faridabad grew as an industrial and working-class wedge.
  • The Delhi–Jaipur highway (NH-48) through Gurugram and Manesar drew corporate offices and affluent housing.
• Evaluation:
  • It adds direction and the role of transport to Burgess’s distance. It fits semi-planned post-industrial cities of Europe and Indian state capitals and large district towns.
  • It still assumes one centre and pays little attention to non-residential land uses. It suits medium-sized towns better than metropolitan cities.

Multiple Nuclei Model (Harris and Ullman, 1945)

• Proposed by Chauncy D. Harris and Edward L. Ullman (1945) in the paper “The Nature of Cities“.
• Large cities grow around several discrete nuclei, not one centre. Some nuclei are old villages or towns absorbed by growth; others arise as the city specialises.
• Why separate nuclei develop:
  • Some activities need specialised facilities: a port needs a waterfront, and retail needs maximum accessibility.
  • Like activities cluster because they gain from proximity (financial or legal districts).
  • Unlike activities repel each other: heavy industry and high-class housing.
  • Some activities cannot afford the rents of the most desirable sites, such as wholesaling with its large storage needs.
  • The motor car dispersed the city, and new nodes grew around airports, universities, parks and suburban business centres.
• Nine zones:
  • 1 CBD; 2 wholesale and light manufacturing; 3 low-class residential; 4 middle-class residential; 5 high-class residential.
  • 6 heavy manufacturing; 7 outlying business district; 8 residential suburb; 9 industrial suburb.
• Indian illustration, Delhi–NCR:
  • The original core is the walled city with Chandni Chowk. Connaught Place is the colonial CBD.
  • South Extension specialises in high-end retail, Nehru Place in electronics and computer peripherals, and Okhla in industry.
  • Gurugram and Noida now have their own business centres.
• Evaluation:
  • It is the most realistic of the three for metropolitan and megacities and for planned modern cities. It also reflects better policy, because several centres divert population and traffic from one core.
  • It ignores building height, treats zones as internally uniform when they overlap, and leaves out relief and government policy. It gives no general rule for where the nuclei form, does not fit oriental cities, and assumes evenly spread resources and transport costs.

• Application and common criticism:
  • Burgess fits small, single-centred towns such as Varanasi, Kanchipuram and Gaya. Hoyt fits quasi-planned state capitals such as Jaipur and, in part, Chandigarh. Harris and Ullman fit the megacities.
  • All three were built on US cities (Burgess on Chicago alone). They ignore redevelopment, edge-of-city growth, relief and the role of the state. The first two treat housing as the only land use that matters.

Later and Regional Models

• Hoyt’s own revision (1964) accepted that cars, expressways and suburban shopping centres had broken up his sectors into many centres, moving towards the multiple nuclei view.
• Urban realms model (James E. Vance Jr., 1964):
  • A large metropolis divides into semi-independent realms, each with its own business centre, jobs and housing, focused on a suburban downtown.
  • The old CBD becomes the centre of only one realm. The size of each realm depends on terrain, the size of the metropolis, its economic activity and internal accessibility.
  • It describes the polycentric American metropolis of freeways and suburban centres, such as the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Mann’s model of a British city (Peter H. Mann, 1965):
  • It combines Burgess’s rings with Hoyt’s sectors, based on Sheffield and Huddersfield.
  • Four sectors run from a middle-class sector to a lower-working-class sector with industry. The middle class lies to the west, upwind, because the prevailing westerly winds carry industrial smoke eastward.
  • It adds council estates at the edge and commuter villages beyond.
• Kearsley’s modified Burgess model (G. W. Kearsley, 1983):
  • It adds to the rings the processes of late-20th-century cities:
    • inner-city decline and gentrification;
    • inner-city redevelopment and new peripheral council estates;
    • decentralised retail and office parks at the edge, and commuter villages.
• Latin American city model (Ernst Griffin and Larry Ford, 1980; revised by Ford, 1996):
  • A CBD with a traditional market is extended by a commercial spine lined by an elite residential sector, along a boulevard with the best services.
  • Rings of declining quality lie outward: the zone of maturity, the zone of in situ accretion and the zone of peripheral squatter settlements (favelas, barriadas).
  • A disamenity sector of the very poor follows railways, rivers and steep slopes. An industrial sector runs along the main transport routes.
  • The 1996 revision added a ring road (periférico), malls, industrial parks and gentrified districts.
  • It is the inverse of Burgess: status falls with distance from the centre.
• Pre-industrial city (Gideon Sjoberg, 1960):
  • The elite live at the centre, around the palace, temple or mosque and the main market.
  • The poor and outcastes live at the periphery.
  • Quarters are divided by occupation and ethnicity, and the place of work and the place of residence coincide.

• The city across cultures:
  • The European CBD keeps an open square (the hollow pattern), cathedral, town hall and monuments, with low buildings and wide streets.
  • The socialist city (Moscow, Beijing) is built around a ceremonial square for parades, ringed by government buildings. Housing is in standardised blocks (microrayons), and there is little land market.
  • The East Asian CBD has government and corporate towers, ring roads and flyovers.
  • The American downtown is a skyscraper core with parks, wholesale functions and few residents.
  • The Indian CBD has mixed commercial and residential use, wholesale and retail in the same streets, and narrow, congested lanes. The older CBD sits next to newer CBDs of European style.
• Population density profile:
  • In Western cities, residential density forms a crater at the CBD, rising to a ring around it and then falling.
  • In Indian cities John E. Brush (1968) found the peak density in the old core itself, because traders and artisans live above and behind their shops.

Urban Population Density Models

• These models turn the density profile into a curve of residential density against distance from the centre. Density is written dx, at distance x.
• Colin Clark (1951) found that outside the business core, density falls exponentially in every city he studied, from 1801 to his own day: dx = d0 e^(−bx).
  • d0 is the central density, extrapolated inward. b is the density gradient, which depends on the cost of travel relative to income.
  • London’s b fell from about 1.41 in 1841 to 0.66 in 1871, per mile, as steam trains and horse buses spread.
  • As cities grow, density tends to fall in the inner suburbs and rise in the outer ones.
• Clark’s curve misses the core, where offices replace homes. Later models address this and the outer edge.

• Newling treats the core and the suburbs as one continuum. When b is positive, a density crater appears, with the crest at x = b ÷ 2c. Clark’s curve becomes the special case without a crater.
• Evaluation:
  • Alain Bertaud and Stephen Malpezzi’s study of about 50 world cities found that the exponential form often fits well, and that gradients flatten with income, city size and cheaper transport.
  • Strict land regulation can flatten or even invert the gradient.
  • All these models assume one centre and a circular city, so they fit polycentric metros poorly, and they describe night-time residence, not daytime population.
• Indian cities depart from the Western form. Residence in the old core keeps the peak near the centre, as Brush showed, and Mumbai’s uniform, low Floor Space Index (1.33 in the island city, 1.00 in the suburbs, from 1991) has limited vertical growth at the centre.

Land Values and the CBD

Bid Rent and the Geometry of Land Values

• Economic models explain land use through rent and accessibility, where the ecological models used competition between social groups.
  • Richard M. Hurd (1903): value depends on rent, rent on location, location on convenience, and convenience on nearness.
  • Robert M. Haig (1926): rent is the price paid for accessibility, which saves transport costs.
• Bid-rent theory (William Alonso, 1964) applies von Thünen’s agricultural logic to the city:
  • Each user (commerce, industry, housing) is willing to pay a rent that falls with distance from the centre, because accessibility declines.
  • Commerce gains most from centrality, so its bid-rent curve is steepest. Industry comes next. Housing has the flattest curve.
  • Each site goes to the highest bidder. The intersections of the curves become the boundaries of concentric land-use rings: commerce in the centre, industry and dense flats next, and spacious single-family homes on the outside.
  • It reaches a Burgess-like structure by economic reasoning. It shares Burgess’s weakness: a normative model of one centre and perfect competition.
• The land-value surface:
  • Land values peak at the peak land value intersection (PLVI), the most accessible street corner in the CBD, usually where the main roads cross.
  • Values fall steeply away from the PLVI, and then more gently.
  • Ridges of higher value run along radial arterials and ring roads.
  • Secondary peaks stand at the intersections of major roads and at suburban business centres.
  • Duane S. Knos (1962) mapped this surface for Topeka, Kansas.
  • Maurice Yeates (1965) showed that in Chicago the pull of the CBD on land values weakened from 1910 to 1960, as cars and suburban centres spread accessibility.
• Land values explain vertical growth: high rents at the centre are paid back by building upward, so building height and intensity rise towards the PLVI.
• Distortions of the ideal surface:
  • Regulation: low, uniform floor-space limits in many Indian cities flatten the expected rise of height towards the centre and push growth outward.
  • Public land and institutions (cantonments, railways, government estates) remove large blocks from the land market.
  • Rent gap (Neil Smith, 1979): when actual rents in a run-down inner area fall far below what the land could earn, capital returns and gentrification follows.

The Central Business District

• The CBD (also called downtown, city centre or the “Loop”) is the commercial heart of the city.
  • Older accounts credit the term to Raymond E. Murphy, whose work with James E. Vance made it standard. It is also called the central traffic district or down-town commercial core.
• Characteristics:
  • Maximum accessibility: the focus of road and public transport.
  • Highest land values and rents, the PLVI and vertical growth.
  • Concentration of offices, retail and finance: banks, insurance, stock exchanges, corporate headquarters, department stores and specialised shops.
  • Use by floor: in a multi-storey block the ground floor goes to retail, and upper floors to wholesalers, offices and sometimes homes.
  • Functional zoning inside the CBD: separate districts for finance, retail, government and entertainment.
  • Almost continuous built-up area, with little vacant land and a shortage of parking.
  • Few permanent residents and a sharp day–night contrast in population.
    • In India the CBD is never truly empty. Merchants use the upper floors as homes.
• Core and frame (Edgar Horwood and Ronald Boyce, 1959):
  • The core (hard core) is the area of most intensive, vertical, pedestrian-scale use: offices, department stores, banks.
  • The frame around it is less intensive: wholesaling, warehousing, transport terminals, car sales, light industry, hospitals and institutions.

Delimiting the CBD

• The boundary of a CBD is gradational, so any line is an approximation. Several measures are used:
  • Land values or rents.
  • Building height.
  • Pedestrian counts and traffic flows.
  • Daytime population and employment.
  • The share of central business uses.
• Murphy–Vance method (Raymond E. Murphy and James E. Vance, 1954):
  • Developed by mapping land use, floor by floor, in nine medium-sized US cities such as Tulsa, Sacramento and Worcester.
  • Central business uses are retail, offices and services. Non-central uses are housing, manufacturing, wholesaling, government and public buildings, and vacant space.
  • Central Business Height Index (CBHI) = floor area in central business uses ÷ ground-floor area of the block.
  • Central Business Intensity Index (CBII) = (floor area in central business uses ÷ total floor area of the block) × 100.
  • A block belongs to the CBD if CBHI ≥ 1 and CBII ≥ 50%, and it is part of a contiguous group of such blocks around the PLVI.
  • The method uses whole city blocks, which avoids subjective splitting.
• Findings:
  • The tallest buildings stood one or two hundred yards from the PLVI, not at it.
  • Department stores and clothing shops clustered at the peak. Hotels and offices lay a little farther away.
  • Barriers such as railways, parks, water bodies and slopes shaped the outline of the CBD.
  • The CBD moves: it shows a zone of assimilation on the side where it is advancing and a zone of discard where it is retreating.

Is the CBD in Decline?

• Forces of decline:
  • Suburbanisation of housing, followed by retail (malls, out-of-town centres) and offices (business parks).
  • Edge cities at highway junctions (Joel Garreau, 1991).
  • Congestion, high rents, parking shortages and the ageing of buildings.
  • ICT and remote work: office vacancy in many US downtowns reached record levels after the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Forces of renewal:
  • Global cities keep and expand their CBDs as command centres of finance and producer services.
  • Old docklands and rail lands become new CBDs, such as Canary Wharf in London.
  • Mixed-use redevelopment, conversion of offices to homes, heritage tourism, culture and night-time economies.
• India:
  • The CBD multiplies and shifts more than it declines.
  • Mumbai’s centre of gravity has moved from Fort and Nariman Point to the Bandra–Kurla Complex. Delhi’s has moved from Connaught Place to Nehru Place, Gurugram’s Cyber City and Aerocity.
  • Most million-plus cities have several CBDs: Connaught Place, Karol Bagh and Chandni Chowk can be read as three CBDs of Delhi.
  • The old bazaar cores keep their wholesale and traditional retail roles.
• The CBD is therefore losing its monopoly on centrality, not its importance. The result is a polycentric metropolitan region.

Dynamics of Urban Morphology

Land-Use Components of the City

• CBD: the core of highest land values, finance and offices. Residential use is almost negligible in Western cities.
• Retail, wholesale and commercial areas:
  • Before the Second World War, wholesale and retail trade was tied to downtown.
  • From the 1960s–70s, warehouses and wholesale markets moved to the periphery, to escape congestion and to reduce pollution in the city.
• Industrial areas:
  • In the 19th century, factories stood near the CBD and the railway.
  • High land rents and pollution pushed them outward in the late 20th century, into industrial estates beyond the residential areas.
• Residential areas, sorted by rent and income:
  • Low-income: near factories and the CBD. Old, dense and congested; workers cannot afford to commute.
  • Middle-income: farther out, near rapid transit. Often two-storeyed, with the owner below and tenants above.
  • High-income: away from congestion; single-family homes with gardens.
  • Commuter zone: at the outskirts. It mixes rural and urban uses and is favoured by those who can afford private cars.
• Urban villages:
  • Former villages swallowed by the city keep their mixed land use, medium-to-high density and access to transit.
  • In India they often have slum-like conditions because they lie outside building controls (R. Ramachandran, 1989). Munirka in South Delhi is an example.
• Slums and squatter settlements:
  • These are physically and socially deteriorated areas: bustees and jhuggi-jhopri in India, favelas in Brazil, gecekondu in Turkey and barriadas in Peru.
  • Their definitions, data and policies belong to slums and associated problems.
  • The word is traced to the Irish slome, a bleak or destitute place. They are residential areas so run down, physically and socially, that satisfactory family life is impossible.
  • Squatter settlements are areas occupied by people who take unauthorised possession of land.
  • Census 2001 counted as slums: areas notified under any Act; areas recognised by the State or local government but not notified; and compact clusters of at least 300 people or 60–70 households in crowded, badly built housing that lacks proper sanitation and drinking water.
  • Census 2011 used three types: notified, recognised and identified.

Forces of Change

• Transport revolutions:
  • Railways, trams, cars and metro systems let people live farther from work. Areas once suburban came into the commuter zone.
  • Mumbai’s suburban railway carries commuters from Goregaon and beyond to the island city. Kolkata’s Metro (1984) and Delhi’s Metro (2002) are reorienting their cities.
• Electricity and the elevator made vertical growth possible. The same plot is used in many layers, and high-rise building became part of city form everywhere.
• Post-Fordist restructuring:
  • Deindustrialisation emptied inner-city factory districts, which were later gentrified or redeveloped (the textile mill lands of Mumbai).
  • Globalisation added gated enclaves, IT parks and malls at the edge.

Urban Morphology in the Indian Context

• Models drawn for American industrial cities fit Indian cities poorly:
  • High-income homes stand next to the old core in many cities, the opposite of Burgess.
  • The dual structure of a dense indigenous core beside planned civil lines and cantonments follows neither ecological nor economic logic.
  • Government offices and the bureaucracy shape land use more than the market does.
  • Historical inertia is strong. Kolkata’s colonial waterfront of warehouses and trading offices persists though it no longer makes economic sense.
• John E. Brush, after surveying over eighty Indian cities, found no basic unity of layout and function. Indian cities must be read through their site and situation together with the history of their origin.
• Mumbai’s form now resembles that of other global port cities, while Varanasi keeps its ancient structure. The urban morphology of Indian cities is therefore best explained by period of origin.