The five categories of Solà-Morales as a legacy for reading the urban landscape

Abstract

Objective

Nearly forty years after Lynch (1960) proposed the use of his “five elements” to apprehend the “image of the city,” Solà-Morales (2002) published the article “Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en la ciudad” in which he also proposed five "concepts” or "platforms" focused on the changing dynamics and morphologies of 21st-century large urban areas. The objective of the study is to propose a method for analyzing the urban morphology of the rapid-growing new suburban areas in the city of Campinas, State of São Paulo, Brazil based on those five categories.

Methodology

The methodology consisted of analyzing Google Earth and Google Street View images, complemented by street level observations and photographs, under an approach that takes advantage of Solà-Morales' five categories as analysis units.

Conclusions

The paper concludes that local conditions tend to shape these (undergoing change) areas in ways that are in tune with the categories’ descriptions. The phenomenon was observed not only in Campinas, but also in other major cities of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. This shaping indicates a shift in the traditional hierarchical structure of the urban territories, with an emphasis toward new “mutation” areas.

Originality

The new method proposed by this paper, based on Solà-Morales’ revolutionary concepts, may trigger further investigations and unexpected results when applied to other metropolises throughout the globe.