Proceedings of CITTA 3rd Annual Conference on Planning Research: Bringing City Form Back Into Planning

Following two previous and successful conferences organized around the topics of ‘Evaluation in Planning’ and ‘Planning in times of uncertainty’ the idea of ‘Bringing city form back into Planning’ was chosen to inspire the 3rd Annual Conference of our research centre, CITTA. City form and structure have long been associated with modern urban planning and yet, over recent decades, the mainstream theoretical debate on urban planning have seemed to privilege planning processes rather than planning policies, plans and outcomes. In our view, this focus has surely contributed to the growing and damaging divide between planning theory and planning practice.

More recently, the urban sustainability debate has underlined the importance of the physical dimension of our cities and city regions, through design-responsive urban regeneration strategies and urban transport policies. In this more general context, the main objective of the conference was to bring the whole debate on urban form and city structure back into planning by exploring recent advances on space syntax and revisiting classical disciplines such as urban morphology. We were honored with the presence and the stimulating keynote speech of Prof. Bill Hillier from the Bartlett School of the University College of London, surely one of the main contributors to the emergence, development and consolidation of these themes worldwide.

This book of proceedings includes an interesting selection of the papers presented at the conference. It is organized in five parts and reports research work carried out at CITTA and at other planning research centres in Portugal and abroad. In the first part we include a keynote speech on the return to urban design from a Portuguese perspective and the reporting of two major CITTA lines of research on urban and suburban morphologies. The second part includes fifteen papers organized under the heading of Planning and Environmental Assessment. The third part also gathers fifteen contributions under the heading of Urban Planning and Housing. The fourth part includes seven contributions covering the fields of Transport Planning and Logistics. Finally, the book closes with five short papers addressing, nonetheless, a number of relevant issues to the general theme of the conference.