The study of urban form in Ireland

Abstract

Urban form is studied in a variety of disciplines in Ireland, but it has not, until recently, been central to urban studies. Histories of individual towns have usually been preoccupied with political, socio-economic and cultural issues. Archaeological excavations have made an important contribution to the reconstruction of Viking and Anglo-Norman towns. Map evidence is good for early-modern plantation towns. The Irish historic towns atlas provides detailed cartographic and topographical information for a growing number of towns within a chronological and thematic framework. Urban form is often considered as a container for socio-economic processes or as a marker in the search for cultural identity. Architectural studies have focused by and large on buildings of importance. While no Irish scholar has in a strict sense adopted Conzen’s method of town-plan analysis, there is evidence for the emergence of a new focus on the fabric of the urban area rather than on the special event represented by the particular building. The ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences has favoured discussions on town plans as ideological constructs and on the importance of urban space for civic society. There appears to be an increasingly strong morphological perspective in urban studies which is likely to be a reaction to the loss of historical fabric in the context of large-scale urban renewal schemes.

The study of urban form: reflections on national reviews

“…Over the past 16 years, articles in the series have been published on: i) nine European countries -Spain (Vilagrasa Ibarz, 1998), France (Darin, 1998), Italy (Marzot, 2002), Germany (Hofmeister, 2004), Great Britain (Larkham, 2006), Ireland (Kealy and Simms, 2008), Sweden (Abarkan, 2009), Poland (Koter and Kulesza, 2010) and Portugal (Oliveira et al, 2011); ii) two North American countries -United States (Conzen, 2001) and Canada (Gilliland and Gauthier, 2006); iii) one Asian country -South Korea (Kim, 2012); and finally, iv) one Oceanian country -Australia (Siksna, 2006). There was also an article by Kubat (2010) on Turkey, a country straddling two continents, part being in the Anatolian peninsula in Asia, and part in Thrace in South-Eastern Europe.…”

“…Group 3 -Siksna ( 2006), Kealy and Simms (2008) and Kim (2012) -can be distinguished from the former groups by its more balanced disciplinary coverage. It resembles Group 1 in the attention it gives to the urban landscape itself.…”

“…Those articles published earliest have tended to accumulate the most citations. Conzen (2001) has been cited 13 times; Darin (1998), Marzot (2002) and Hofmeister (2004) 10 times each; Larkham (2006) 8 times; Vilagrasa Ibarz (1998) 6 times; Gilliland and Gauthier (2006) 3 times; Siksna (2006) twice; and Kealy and Simms (2008) once. The other five articles, all published in the last 4 years, have yet to be cited.…”