Cities Made of Boundaries

Front matter

Mapping Social Life in Urban Form

Benjamin N. Vis

*UCL

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of abbreviations

Introduction to Cities made of Boundaries The rationale The questions The content The book

Introduction Urban studies Urban origins Categorical cities

Introduction To C/ties Made Of Boundaries

The rationale

We live in a time when over half of the world’s population resides in cities, a proportion that is expected to grow rapidly. A thorough understanding of this way of inhabiting the world has never been more pertinent. Alongside consideration of how to promote the ecological sustainability of urban life, social scientific concern with the societies inhabiting urbanised landscapes has understandably been preoccupied with the actuality of city dwelling, current governance and future planning. Due to this temporally narrow scope, the problems we are confronted with as populations build and reside in cities are often regarded as particular to our present-day predicament. In addition, this confined perspective results in research efforts being almost exclusively absorbed by cities belonging to a western or globalised urban tradition. This comes at the expense of understanding historically and culturally indigenous city building.

It is generally accepted that the spatial design of cities (their physical construction and form) is a determinant of the social life in, and subsequent development of, cities. Simultaneously, people are quick to point out the apparent inaptitude or inability of contemporary urban design ideas to effectively improve the many societal and sustainability issues revolving around urban life. In order to make positive contributions to the continued development of cities and urbanised ways of life, a better understanding is needed of the relationship between society and space and the nature of inhabiting an environment of our own making. Seen in this light, it is peculiar that urban academic discourse is inclined to such narrow perspectives, ignoring many known alternative patterns attesting to the versatility of urban possibilities.

Granted, the vast majority of the non-western or non-globalised urban traditions are a fixture of the past. Archaeological research teaches us that human beings have manifested a proclivity to urbanise for many millennia, and that the resulting settlements took widely varying forms. Although the disappearance of these alternative urban forms could be taken as a sign of general inadequacy, archaeological evidence is mounting that demonstrates many examples have been remarkably resilient, successfully persisting as a city or tradition for numerous centuries. Much of the current global urban paradigm finds its roots in the historically compact cities of Europe — but were the Spanish invaders not marvelled by the overall sophistication of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan?

It applies to all previous urban traditions that they, to various degrees of success, accommodated inhabitation by an urban society, their physical form standing in support of the everyday functioning of urban social life. In spite of differing technological abilities, environmental requirements and cultural, economic or political ideas, cities of the past, as in the present, share that they need to function as spaces that are being inhabited. In all their morphological variety and complexity, cities in every respect are part and parcel of the fundamental human process of inhabiting the world. Given the openness of this developmental process it is extraordinary that, out of the spectrum of feasible opportunities to manipulate and transform the environment for all kinds of societal organisation, so much resemblance exists amongst protean urban forms.

The similarities resulting from the essentially human process that produces cities is easily acknowledged. Yet, social scientific research on urbanism and urban form exhibits a certain reluctance to overcome the limitations on the transferability of interpretative knowledge that are imposed by working on isolated examples of cities materialising in time-space specific socio-cultural contexts. Accordingly, the knowledge acquired on urbanisation and urban life remains relevant only within the particularity of that context. Indeed, glancing over urban landscapes other than those roughly pertaining to the influence of global standardisation clarifies that one cannot assume the general validity of theoretical frameworks employed for narrowly focused urban academic discourse.

If we desire a deeper and commonly relevant social understanding of the breadth of alternative traditions of building and inhabiting urban form, we need frames of reference that allow socio-cultural diversity to arise from fundamental principles. This requires a comparative approach built on concepts and analytical units from which particular meaning can emerge. Conducting radical comparative research can supply the evidence-base for emancipating knowledge that critically articulates the contrasts and consistencies in geographically separate cases and their development through time. Through interpretively unrestricted radical comparisons that exploit ubiquitous data on built form, we could learn about the mechanisms of how cities function socially. We may assess how inhabitants are restricted and enabled in creating diverse urban landscapes and developmental trajectories that accommodate degrees of social coherence and resilience, and their successes and failures in long-term sustainability. From a critical context that consists of optimally diverse and versatile knowledge we may approach current practice directing urban design interventions and strategies with greater confidence.

This book is tasked with making that first step: to devise an appropriate means for the radical comparative social study of the rudimentary material and spatial characteristics of urban built environments as they are inhabited across all urban traditions and throughout the full history of cities’ existence.

The questions

Presenting the background of my rationale elucidates that this book has been developed from a particular premise. I see urban life and development as part of the fundamentally human process of inhabiting the world. This causes a change in perspective as to what research on cities should address, emphasising a need for radical comparisons. To devise an appropriate means to enable such research, it is clear this book embarks on an endeavour of integral methodological development. That is, building a methodology from the bottom up, grounded by appropriate theorising and conceptual frameworks. Here that means a grounding that empowers and informs radical social comparisons of cities, seen through a lens that highlights the ubiquity of people inhabiting urban built environments. In establishing this methodological goal, this book will contribute to the realms of the man-environment paradigm and society-space relations at large.

My route of methodological development is guided by the pursuit of two main questions. The first addresses the grounding of the endeavour. How can we improve our understanding of the role of the built environment as emergent from the human process of inhabiting the world, and the functioning of urban life and development? The second addresses the subsequent need for a workable research process and the practical operationalisation of comparing urban built environments. How can we recognise and study inhabitation of urban built environments comparatively across geographical areas, societies, cultures and through time?

The consequence of these main questions is that an appropriately conceived object, field and method of research need to be determined. To clarify what causes the particular structure of this book, I have broken the consecutive developmental steps down into further questions that specify the ones above. The entire sequence follows consequential logic, because addressing each question introduces the next.

1. How can the urban built environment serve as an object for radical comparative social research, and what level of social interpretation is comparatively viable? (Chapter 1)

2. How can it be ensured that the development of method is appropriate to the ideational and empirical understanding of the research object, and how should a research process to this effect be designed? (Chapter 2)

3. What is an appropriate theoretical framework for understanding the specific structuring role of the built environment in the human process of inhabiting the world? (Chapter 3)

4. Which information contained in the built environment is key to characterising and explicating its structuring role in the human process of inhabiting the world, and which meaningful constitutive element can be derived to operationalise in research? (Chapters 3 and 4)

5. How can our understanding of that constitutive element that informs us of the built environment’s role in human inhabitation (especially urbanised) be conceptualised to fit the widest possible range of data on the urban built environment to suit a comparative frame of reference? (Chapter 5)

6. How can such conceptualisations be operationalised in (empirical and technical) research practice on actual urban built environment datasets of different origins, to cover both maximum contrast between urban traditions and the diachronic process of urban development? (Chapters 6 and 7)

7. Which are valid and viable directions for analysis with radically comparative potential for social interpretation, and how can such analytical measures be formulated and put to work? (Chapters 8 and 9)

Each reader may have particular interests in how any one of these questions is addressed, which may result in the inclination to take different approaches to reading this book. This especially can be expected from the division between theory and method, and concepts and observation, or is simply informed by disciplinary divides. To aid one’s way through the consequential logic that structures the sequence of chapters, this book is punctuated with cross-references. These act as sign-posts and markers for both what is to come as well as where and how present issues are grounded or previously introduced.

The content

Knowing how integral methodological development causes the structure of this book, I will now briefly look at what can be expected to be presented in reply to the questions in each chapter. Chapter 1 pitches just how interpretive social investigations in comparative urbanism can effectively be positioned. When evaluating previous thought on the nature of cities (i.e. what they are), it transpires that there has been a preoccupation with classification and the origin of cities. The dominant discourse, which is to pinpoint which requirements must be met to designate a settlement a city, results in static views and categories that prevent a critical assessment of how cities function and compare as socially emergent places. At the same time, the widely available data on the physical form of cities throughout human history comes to the fore as the constant point of reference. In reply, then, I formulate a working definition of the city as urban life in an urbanised landscape to establish an intellectual setting for the methodological development. On this basis, Chapter 1 determines at which level of detail interpretive efforts can be pitched to overcome the limitations of socio-cultural and historical particularism. Only when accepting an appropriate level for interpretations can truly comparative contributions to the social knowledge of urban life and development be made. A ‘low-level’ interpretation on the recursive relationship between human beings and the material manifestations of their environment is defined.

Having paved the ground for a social take on radical comparative urban studies, Chapter 2 discusses how a critical realist philosophy of science can be adapted for this purpose. This adaptation establishes both my base assumptions captured in metaconcepts for theorising, and designs the research process through which ideational understanding and empirical observation become structurally linked. A critical realist consideration of archaeological reasoning proves a cogent advocate for redefining ‘the material’ as an emergent entity that directly incorporates its human and social origin. Materiality discourse, in both archaeology and human geography, currently seems unable to achieve a similarly synergetic conceptualisation. Critical realist discourse in human geography usefully distils the research processes through which ‘the material’ could become part of social scientific research. In addition, critical realism helps define the other metaconcepts of ‘the social’ and ‘spatial (in)dependence’ that inform my theoretical groundwork, and so comes to direct my course in methodological development.

Chapter 3 presents a constitutive theoretical framework through which we gain a precise understanding of the role of the built environment as emergent from the human process of inhabiting the world. I theorise a number of conditional statements. First, I determine what it means to be a human inhabitant of the world. Second, I introduce a series of abstractions framing the contingent consequences of inhabiting the world that are necessary conditions for the occurrence of city emergence, or rather, as we come to understand, inhabited urban built environments. The bottom-up reasoning of this constitutive theoretical framework reveals that differentiation is key to the intelligibility of habitability in the social and spatial world. Consequentially, differentiation also causes the transformative making-habitable of the socio-spatial world. Making-habitable captures the process through which eventually cities are built. The recognition and introduction of differentiations as materialised physical properties that constitute the spatial subdivisions which compose the built environment complex, become denoted by the flexible notion of boundaries. The affective and affording physical properties of materialised boundaries so assume their socio-spatial significance for urban inhabitation. The book subsequently focuses on this phenomenon.

The three preceding chapters install three distinct theoretical platforms. These theoretical platforms constitute a conceptual premise that is comprised of a disciplinary, scientific, and phenomenological nature respectively. Together, these platforms advance an interdisciplinary synthesis that grounds the launch of a targeted methodological development, fulfilling three specific theoretical tasks. Thanks to Chapter 1 we know exactly on which level a radical social comparative contribution to urban studies should be pitched. Thanks to Chapter 2 we have adapted the social scientific critical realist tools (processes and metaconcepts) to pave an original path for research design. Thanks to Chapter 3 we are in possession of a precisely articulated multidisciplinary and conditional theoretical framework of understanding the phenomenon of the inhabited (urban) built environment.

From this point, we can appreciate that the inhabited urban built environment is made of boundaries. Regarding the built environment as a composite complex of boundaries demands a new look at how spatial data truly represents the spatial and material characteristics that urban built environments comprise. Therefore, Chapter 4 first critically evaluates (social scientific and philosophical) boundary theory to select those ideas that can crucially relate to how we understand the representative nature of spatial data. It transpires that the boundaries’ operation of seclusion is a determinant for the spatial subdivisions of the built environment. Accepting the nature of boundaries as secluding sites of difference, I introduce the fiat and bona fide boundary distinction to navigate us through a sequence of abstractions. This sequence is designed to better appreciate how abstract spatial data refer to the concrete social empirical reality of the material presence of the built environment to its inhabiting society. Through these abstractions, the notion of types of boundary lines to create a built environment ontology of analytical units that are at once ideational and empirical is introduced. Ultimately, we gain a thorough understanding of what happens to spatial data on boundaries at each stage, from the original input data through to an analytical mapping practice.

Chapter 5, then, forms a pivotal point in the methodological development, because it presents the ontological Boundary Line Types (BLTs) with fully illustrated definitions.' To formulate effective formal definitions I first argue the requirements for an ontology that ensures comparative applicability is maximised. This includes a review of the level of detail and material-spatial principles that guide how spatial data representing the built environment should be approached. Equality of information assures parity in applying the ontological BLTs, so spatial data must comprise an equivalent outline selection forming the contiguous complex of subdivisions. On this basis BLTs can be identified. The chapter then turns to introducing the iteratively abstracted BLT definitions themselves. In addition, I reason through the consequence of investing spatial data with a formal BLT redescription. This redescription produces the socio-spatial ontology intrinsic to a city, or its socio-spatial signature of inhabitation.

1. Towards the back of this book a supplementary table of abridged BLT definitions can be found, serving as a quick and easy reference throughout all chapters.

A city’s intrinsic BLT ontology can be approached from three levels of socio-spatial significance that comprise distinct contexts, which both restrict and inform possible social interpretations.

At this stage in the development, our attention turns to the practical operationalisation of BLTs. Even though applying BLTs will follow a completely original theory and interpretive purpose, it is important to acknowledge that the vantage of analytically (re)mapping built form is not an intellectual vacuum. While readers from different backgrounds may find a review of existing methods welcome, Chapter 6 serves a more constructive purpose. By taking cues from existing research methods that previously developed practices to adapt urban plans, map urban space, and carry out spatial analysis on urban form and built configurations, the implementation of a new but related method will prove more effective. Naturally, running through the foundations of these precursors it becomes undeniable that none of the existing methods will be suitable outright for work on boundaries as broadly proposed, and BLTs in particular. As an analytical mapping practice the shared reference to urban built form means that research techniques of existing methods, including data preparation, basic terminology and analytical pointers, can greatly benefit a BLT-based method. Notwithstanding the existence of related urban design philosophies and architectural typologies, Chapter 6 focuses around three strongly represented relevant fields that emphasise urban layout and structure: urban historical GIS (Geographical Information System, HGIS), urban morphology and space syntax. To support and continue BLT method development, the practice of historically reconstructive mapping, the terminology of urban morphology and the empirical analytical rigour of space syntax are especially of value.

Chapter 7 is dedicated to the practical operationalisation of BLT Mapping. The application of BLTs to prepared spatial data of urban built environments plans in a GIS environment is called identification. To demonstrate the radical comparative ability of BLTs, first two contrasting case studies are selected: sixth-century Chunchucmil (Classic Maya, Mexico) and medieval to contemporary Winchester (western historical, UK). Together these case studies fulfil a demonstration of great variety in urban situations and involve a diverse set of associated legacy spatial datasets. To be precise, legacy data consisting of: urban maps derived from archaeological topographical surveys, reconstructed maps of historical situations, historical cartography and contemporary national mapping agency standards. Chapter 7 provides a rationale for the selection of these cities to exemplify two dramatically divergent urban traditions: tropical dispersed low-density urbanism, and temperate climate compact high-density urbanism. The chapter then uses test case areas to demonstrate the practical and technical stages of data preparation. By providing an overview of key technical details and pragmatic decisions adapted to the specific treatment that the origin of each legacy dataset commands, it can virtually serve as a manual for creating BLT data and overcoming inevitable limitations to our knowledge about urban spatial datasets.

Since BLT identification is carried out in a vector GIS software environment, Chapter 8 first needs to address the particularities of the spatial data structure that is created by BLT Mapping. While the BLT data structure opens a vast array of analytical opportunities, there are also limitations to how well they can be exploited. The complications of working effectively on this rich vector data in diachronic perspective is discussed. Simultaneously, the heuristic value of the primary analytical unit of single BLTs and the derivative analytical unit of the topological segment (co-located BLT combinations) is recognised as it emerges from the BLT data structure. Most of the chapter, then, is dedicated to presenting rationales for hypothetical spatial analytical measures. These measures remain hypothetical due to the lack of dedicated geocomputational tools to work with BLT data, yet their functioning and potential can be confidently projected and this sets an agenda for software development. The interpretive value of such measures is at once inherently ensured and restricted through the lens of the three levels of socio-spatial significance introduced in Chapter 5. Therefore, the analytical measures are explicitly proposed within the overlapping realms of each correspondent interpretive context. It will be shown how the efficacy of applying analytical units and the relevant scope of interpretive analyses is highly susceptible to improvement from original geocomputational software development. While many of these analytical extensions and composite complications remain directions for future research, a selection within computational reach is carried forward in the next chapter.

Now BLT Mapping has become fully invested and enabled in a GIS working environment, Chapter 9 presents preliminary analytical explorations and their interpretive potential as applied to my two test cases of Chunchucmil and Winchester. My aim is not to dive into the intricacies of full-fledged particular case studies, but to carry out targeted tests to demonstrate what BLT Mapping presently enables. In exploring valid and viable directions for spatial analysis and radical urban comparisons, this chapter introduces a number of innovations. First, some original basic geocomputational functionality was sourced in support of developing BLT Mapping in the format of an ArcGIS plugin.

These computational functions regard a broad sweep approach to first, visualising BLT maps, and second, generating global statistics on BLT datasets. Alongside, I utilise native GIS geoprocessing functions to aid visual data exploration. Furthermore, I introduce the manual production of ‘clock diagrams’ that graphically standardise complex boundary morphologies in support of detailed topological and morphological intra- and inter-city comparisons. As a demonstration of the general functionality, compatibility and applicability of the BLT Mapping method, Chapter 9 offers a positive conclusion to the methodological development of this book. The value of the interpretive insights derived from the relatively small, data-driven, test case areas will accordingly be limited. The purpose of showing the analytical tenets and promise that result from my initial explorations, innovations and demonstrations is to provide a compellingly broad proof of concept and foundation for future applications and adaptations. My methodological endeavour thus ends with some evidence, techniques and guidance for taking on a wide-ranging body of case studies to start acquiring a radically comparative evidence-base for the inhabitation of urban built environments.

The book

This book begins a journey. So as to ensure that journey is off to a good start, it makes the first step. Exactly how that first step is made is just as important as the discoveries along the way. Rather than just proffering the reader an empirically applicable method, it is the express purpose of this book to be as explicit as possible about how BLT Mapping is conceived. Presenting BLT Mapping in this way not only enables applications, but empowers researchers to meticulously construct alternative (radical) comparative methods with similar rigour. By exhibiting the methodology at its different stages of development, it welcomes engagement on all of these stages. A strong conviction in the benefits of structurally linked and causally tighter integration of ideational concepts and empirical observations lies behind this particular methodological development. Ultimately, by writing this book I seek to strengthen and better equip the field of comparative urban studies to generate deeper understandings of the fundamentally human phenomenon of the experience and development of settled and urban life. The long-term benefits of such profound understanding are wide ranging.

Coming up with the most responsible and locally appropriate ways of developing landscapes supportive of long-term human inhabitation is recognised as one of the great challenges of our time (see Weller et al. 2017). My contribution comes from one specific perspective: the rudimentary social understanding of inhabiting urban form. Understanding the characteristics and dynamics of the social aspect of cities’ material structure is only one constitutive part of meeting the challenge for an evidence-base to improve our decision-making on continued urban development. The examples featured in this book highlight the tremendous potential that appropriate comparative frames of reference have in bringing urban trajectories of entirely different cultural, temporal and environmental contexts in direct relation to each other. This is significant, because I am certain that we should learn from the diversity of human life and indigenous responses to our social, cultural, economic and ecological environment. We must make a critical effort to understand the intricacies of how this plays out in the greatest variety of cases if we are going to be better informed and more aware of the many alternative ways we can plan and design for inhabiting the world.

On one level, the research towards BLT Mapping this book contains can simply facilitate the production of particular cultural, archaeological and historical knowledge about urban societies and explicate the developmental processes of (past) urbanisation. On another level, its foundational concepts and interpretive insights could eventually become reified in urban design and planning interventions. Employing BLT Mapping may support or challenge the socio-spatial implications of hypotheses formulated on urban form in the past, present and future. Systematic critical comparisons open our eyes to better appreciate alternatives to our own contemporary experience and the risks of trusting that the technological solutions of ‘smart cities’ will supply socially sustainable, ecologically conceived urban futures (cf. Colding & Barthel 2017). In other words, this work’s proclaimed trait is the pursuit of making fundamental research thresholds more accessible and attainable. Its more silent ambition is a contribution to the future of inhabiting our planet.

Chapter 1

In this book I focus on a particular situation that may occur in the broad, long-term process of human inhabitation of the world. When people settle in a particular location and the population starts to rise, the landscape becomes increasingly manipulated through human-environment interactions that accommodate how that residency functions. Simply put, within this book, living in a landscape of our own making will be referred to as the ‘inhabited built environment’ (see Chapter 3 for a theoretical treatise). Furthermore, my focus is directed to situations that are considered ‘urban’. Because ‘urban’ characterises the life, activities, provisions, and all things to do with cities, it is a problematic term. Cities and therefore urban life have existed for millennia. Currently over half the world’s population is considered to reside in cities. Yet, no single definition of the city is agreed upon. Disquietude over the lack of such definition has certainly not impeded cities as a substantive field of research. This even applies to the extent that having a categorical definition of the city could be counterproductive for some research in the first place (e.g. Smith 1989). Currently, the city or urbanism is a research theme in several disciplines and is increasingly represented by the field of urban studies.

Taking urban landscapes as the result of ongoing essentially human processes of inhabitation makes them a deeply historical phenomenon. Consequently, we must heed archaeological and historical thought on the origins of ‘urban situations’, alongside a social theoretical position towards urbanisation as a general process in human social life. Urban ‘inhabited built environments’ can only become a concept informing comparative methodological development within a context that explicitly defines my particular perspective on urbanism. This chapter will therefore lay the groundwork for studying the urban comparatively by anthologising disciplinary approaches which characterise the nature of urbanism, and by offering a process-based working definition of the city which centres on the practices of urban life. Subsequently, I will explain how comparative urbanism, broadly conceived, initially requires low-level interpretation instead of high levels of particular contextualisation. This groundwork then enables new theoretical and methodological work supporting research on the urban landscape as a social process.

Urban studies

For the foreseeable future the rapid urbanisation of the world is widely recognised as one of the major humanitarian global challenges (Dittmar 2013). It is therefore no surprise that urbanism should be at the forefront of research development. Urban studies is not a traditional academic discipline. Despite representation in many institutions and specialised research journals, its core area of interest is still fragmented over many academic disciplines. Nonetheless, Bowen et al. (2010) demonstrate that there is considerable coherence amongst the intellectual pursuits associated with urban studies. Importantly, Harris & Smith (2011) point out that Bowen et al.’s (2010) analysis of the field overlooks the significant presence of, and contributions made to, urban research from historical vantage points.

The deep historical nature of the processes of human inhabitation of the world was already recognised, so with the advancements in this book I deliberately intend to include all of human history: from prehistory to the present. The settling process that keeps on increasing the world’s urbanised population is fundamentally human. Therefore, to contribute a comparative understanding of the conditions and characteristics of urban life requires a perspective that accommodates the fundamentally human diversity in settlement patterns across cultures and through time. Any single piece of work is unlikely to accomplish a satisfying cross-section representing all instances of urban life. Instead, my investigations centre on how to start a body of research based on commensurable foundations which could come to encompass the diversity of cities.

To achieve commensurable research we must first establish the availability of equivalent information on urban places across time and space. Any archaeologist would be quick to point out that the material record, which their discipline is based upon, is probably the best preserved information source throughout the deep past of human life. Furthermore, no anthropologist would deny that material culture is part and parcel of continuing human life, society and culture (see Miller 1998, 2005). The material record naturally includes the dimension, shape and material composition of inhabited landscapes or urban built environments. Kropf (2009: 117) states: ‘The tangibility, ubiquity and persistence of physical form make it the most suited to act as the point of reference for co-ordinating and comparing aspects.’ The same is asserted by Harris & Smith (2011: 103), who note:

arguably the most enduring characteristic of cities, one that almost invariably forms the basis of their definition, concerns their physical presence. They are dense, well-populated settlements with considerable investment in the built environment, and other infrastructural components. We can, and do, debate exactly how large, or how dense, a place has to be to count as urban, but hardly anyone doubts that size matters.

All of Parr’s (2007) ‘spatial definitions’ of the city initially refer to the developed area, the physical entity, before characterising three kinds of socio-functional city. So it becomes a reasonable expectation that to embark on a methodological development for the social interpretations comparing the full range of urban possibilities throughout human history, our first port of call comprises the physical transformation of the landscape. Intense and relatively large-scale inhabitation of the landscape is accommodated by such physical transformations, even though we may not always be able to retrieve all modifications.

The notion of comparative urbanism already exists in urban studies and urban geography. However, Smith (2009b) draws attention to the fact that considering the breadth and depth of urban traditions, comparative urban geography displays a severely limited historical scope (see Briggs 2004 for an exception). Urban studies with explicit reference to the physical and architectural characteristics of the built environment regularly demonstrate historical interest (e.g. Bastian 1980; Daunton 1983; Lawrence 1996; Rotenberg 1996; Jenkins 2002). Yet, they rarely penetrate deeper than about two centuries’ worth (the medieval underpinnings of urban morphology (Conzen 1960) and Kostof’s (1991, 1992) well-known historically descriptive classifications of urban form are exceptions). This apparent historical myopia has been noted in both human geographical urban and planning interests (Nijman 2007; Smith 2009b; Harris & Smith 2011; York et al. 2011) as well as historical geography in particular. Often the early modern period acts as the earliest starting point (Jones 2004; Lilley 2011b). The particular field of urban historical geography (see Dennis & Prince 1988; Denecke 1988, discussing British and German research practice respectively), which maintains an allegiance with urban morphology (Conzen 1960; Moudon 1997), did cautiously venture into the early medieval period (e.g. Denecke & Shaw 1988). Yet, this has not resulted in a more structural presence of historical depth. There is no clear reason why this preoccupation with recentism should prevail. On the contrary, from the perspective of human or society-space relations and the ongoing processes of urbanisation, there is much to gain by structurally engaging the building processes composing the urban longue durée.