Quantitative and qualitative analysis in urban morphology: systematic legacy and latest developments

Urban morphology studies the physical forms of human settlements and how these change over time by the action of different processes and agents. The field of knowledge has developed several theories, concepts, and methods to describe and explain the phenomena at hands. As in many fields, urban morphology contains a few misconceptions. One of these is the idea that quantitative analysis is a feature of the present and the future, and qualitative analysis of the past. The paper addresses this fallacy. Our discussion of the main schools of thought in urban morphology and their influential researchers suggests that quantitative approaches are well rooted in it since at least the mid-twentieth century and that the dominance of quantitative or qualitative tools is subject to cycles, as it happens in other sciences. Demonstration of both statements leads to a focus on a line of approaches, historico-geographical, configurational, and lately morphometrics, which share a common interest in cross-cases regularities, hence practices of pattern recognition.