Towards a New Epistemological Regime of Urban Morphology: History, Data, and Artificial Intelligence

1. The City as a Complex System of Data, Relations, and Narratives

As urban morphology rediscovers itself as being “observed from space”, the traditional lexicon of schools of urban-form analysis is placed under pressure that is twofold. On the one hand, the city appears less as a stable figure than as a complex system of data, relations, and flows; on the other, form itself is revealed as a vast collective narrative, a stratification of stories, memories, conflicts, desires, and imaginaries that research is called not merely to describe but to reinterpret critically and, in a sense, to rewrite.

Within this horizon, the issue Urban Morphology. A Perspective from Space (Volume 1) brings together a constellation of contributions, which, despite their disciplinary and methodological heterogeneity, converge in outlining a genuine epistemological shift: from form as object to form as a “horizon of meaning”, increasingly functioning as an interface within the physical world, digital infrastructure, and the imaginative dimension of design. The starting point remains the recognition of the city as a complex system, irreducible to a simple aggregation of buildings and types—instead to be understood as a dynamic interweaving of spatial networks, practices of use, normative dispositifs, material and immaterial infrastructures, energy and environmental patterns, and symbolic representations. The scholarship on complexity—one may recall, among others, Michael Batty’s account of cities as self-organizing systems of networks and flows [1]—converges here with the historical traditions of urban morphology in acknowledging that form is never merely geometry but always also a provisional outcome of social, economic, and political relations sedimented over time. In this sense, Karsten Ley’s essay (Contribution 1), which opens the volume, plays a programmatic role: the history of urban space is framed not as an ancillary discipline nor as an illustrative repertoire but as an indispensable site for constructing the very categories through which the city becomes intelligible. Urban history—read through the lens of morphological traditions, from Conzen, Muratori, Caniggia, and Whitehand to the more recent textbook syntheses by Vítor Oliveira [2] and Karl Kropf [3]—is not mere background; it is the laboratory in which the “ways of seeing” form are forged, namely the interpretive grids that bring certain patterns into focus while obscuring others.

This centrality of history does not oppose the dimension of data; rather, it constitutes its critical condition. The shift from the city as an object of punctual observation to the city as a “field of data”, rendered visible by new satellite geographies, ubiquitous sensing, urban big data, and digital platforms, requires an acknowledgement that every datum is already an implicit narrative, a choice about what to measure and how to territorialize information. The perspectives opened by remote-sensing-based urban morphology, which aims to read urban forms at a planetary scale through global datasets, Local Climate Zones, and morphological metrics derived from high-resolution satellite imagery, make this condition particularly evident: the city appears as a pattern, yet that pattern is the outcome of processes of selection and abstraction carried out by algorithms and scientific communities that are themselves situated within specific regimes of knowledge and power [4].

As a whole, this volume takes this nexus—between form, data, and narrative—as a shared horizon, unfolding it across a spectrum of scales and diapositives ranging from aesthetic theory to pedagogy, from the “micro-morphology” of local fabrics to the “macro-morphology” of satellite observations, and up to the new thresholds opened by the metaverse and by generative artificial intelligence.

2. Design as the Exploration of Scenarios

If the city is a complex system, design can no longer be conceived as the search for a single, optimal solution but rather as the construction of plural scenarios, which are differentiated and often mutually conflicting. In this framework, urban morphology does not merely provide the “grammar” of the built environment; it becomes instead a hypothetical–experimental device for exploration: the type yields to its variant, permanence to transition, and the stable object to perspective. JöJörgrg H. Gleiter’s contribution (Contribution 2), with its theses on the aesthetics of sustainability, is emblematic of this shift. Far from reducing sustainability to a repertoire of technical solutions or to a set of performance protocols, Gleiter shows how it implies a different conception of dwelling: not the simple adaptation to given physical conditions but an open evolutionary process in which the relation between the living and the environment is continuously renegotiated. From this viewpoint, the urban form is the temporary result of a series of “sovereign decisions,” to borrow the reading proposed by Marzot in the following work, decisions that institute spatial hierarchies, rights of use, and symbolic values.

Marco Trisciuoglio’s essay (Contribution 3), devoted to “exaptation” in transitional urban morphologies, pushes this framework further by grafting onto morphological discourse a lexicon derived from natural evolution. Revisiting Stephen J. Gould’s concept of exaptation from the biological sciences [5], Trisciuoglio shows that many urban forms persist not through inertia but because they are re-semantized, or “co-opted”, for functions different from their original ones, within a process of adaptive reuse that generates new spatial, social, and symbolic equilibria. The city thus appears as an immense archive of latent possibilities, in which every morphological element can be reconfigured within alternative scenarios.

Along the same trajectory, though operating at different scales and with different instruments, are the contributions by Paolo Carlotti (Contribution 4) and Giulia Annalinda Neglia (Contribution 5). Carlotti’s “architectural acupuncture” insists on the capacity of small, targeted interventions to reorient the overall equilibrium of urban form: design does not act “on tabula rasa” but through shifts, re-readings, and micro-rewritings of the existing palimpsest. Neglia, for her part, shows that the relation between urban forms and territorial forms—particularly through attention to interstitial spaces, “voids”, and landscape relics—should not be interpreted as a residue but as an index of processes that are under way: as a threshold where the city, by consuming and metabolizing the landscape, prepares new possible configurations. Across these contributions, urban morphology increasingly appears less as a closed taxonomy of types and more as a theory of transformational processes: a description of the rules through which the urban system generates variants, hybridizations, and metamorphoses. Consequently, design ceases to be the endpoint of a linear sequence, analysis–synthesis–form, and becomes a device for the exploration of multiple scenarios: a laboratory of possibilities—a space of “world exercises” in which the built form is only one possible materialization of alternative narratives of the city.

3. A Great Collective Narrative: The City

The subtitle of this volume, A perspective from space, must evidently be read in a double sense. On the one hand, it refers to the literal perspective enabled by high-technology observations that today allow morphological, climatic, ecological, and infrastructural parameters to be measured at global scales with an unprecedented resolution. On the other, it alludes to an epistemological shift in gaze: from the disciplinary tradition of morphology, anchored in direct observation, surveys, and historical cartography, towards a “semantic” vision of the city, in which local phenomena are continually repositioned within broader comparative sets, data networks, and “morphological models” that exceed individual case studies. Within this frame, the contributions with a stronger quantitative orientation take on a meaning that goes well beyond their already significant technical–operational dimension. The essay by Alessandro Venerandi, Giovanni Fusco, and Matteo Caglioni (Contribution 6), focused on the form of a “smart” district and its morphometric comparison with earlier design models, confronts a crucial question: can one recognize in the “smart city” specific formal evidence or a set of typical patterns or does its “intelligence” remain confined to the invisible layers of digital networks, services, and informational infrastructures? The answer, grounded in a careful selection of indicators and comparative methods, reveals how urban morphology is increasingly compelled to engage with forms that can no longer be described solely through typological–structural readings but require an integrated toolkit of metrics, simulations, and visualizations.

Similarly, the essays by Barbara Gherri (Contribution 7) and by Huimin Ji, Yifan Li, Juan Li, and Wowo Ding (Contribution 8) demonstrate how climatic and microclimatic parameters, such as heat islands, local ventilation, and bioclimatic comfort, now fully enter the morphological discourse. The use of vegetation as a formal device to mitigate overheating or the configurational redefinition of street fabrics to improve the aerodynamic behavior of the city are not mere technical adjustments: they entail a reformulation of the relation between urbs and nature, in which the built form is also the outcome of energetic, thermal, and ecological constraints operating “from below”. Numerical simulation tools, from simplified CFD to climatic performance maps, confer a performative character on representation: drawing does not merely illustrate an existing condition but anticipates and evaluates future outcomes, opening scenarios that remain largely unexplored within studies of urban forms.

Kayvan Karimi’s contribution (Contribution 9) offers a paradigmatic synthesis of this new conjunction between spatial configuration and evidence-based analysis. Space Syntax, since Bill Hillier’s pioneering work Space is the Machine [6], has challenged the strict separation between form and use and configuration and society, showing how spatial structures systematically influence patterns of movement, interaction, and appropriation. In the essay included here, the integration of syntactic methods, empirical flow data, and traditional morphological categories produces a representation of the city that is at once descriptive, analytical, and projective: an interactive environment in which alternative scenarios can be tested, compared, and discussed in the light of measurable evidence.

The “perspective from space”, therefore, does not replace the long tradition of urban morphology; rather, it confronts it with a challenge: how can interpretive accuracy—the ability to recognize fabrics and historical substrata, the inherited characters of forms from Conzen to Muratori and from Whitehand to Oliveira—be maintained within a cognitive environment dominated by high-frequency data, predictive models, and global digital infrastructures? This volume suggests that the answer does not lie in a sterile defense of instruments, needs, and logical structures forged by a society now metabolized and sedimented but in a critical, reflective, and selective use of new scales and new observational possibilities, capable of preserving the bond between form and history, between morphology and architecture.

In this transition, the essay by Alessandro Merlo and Gaia Lavoratti (Contribution 10) plays a strategic role. The path they trace, “from 2D representations to metaverse”, does not merely register the evolution of documentation techniques, from hand drawing to digital photogrammetry and from GIS to immersive digital twins. Rather, it reveals how every technological leap in documenting urban forms implies a different regime of truth: a transformation in the very way the city can be interrogated, measured, and narrated. The systematic georeferencing of sources, the integration of historical cartographies with three-dimensional surveys, and the possibility of navigating urban fabrics within immersive virtual spaces or metaversal environments turn representation into a genuine design testbed. As Aldo Rossi had already intuited in his discussion of the “analogous city” [7], the represented city is never a simple copy of the real city but a device through which correspondences, analogies, contrasts, and possible montages are explored. Digital technologies amplify this combinatory capacity, turning representation into an open field of experimentation in which alternative scenarios can emerge as internally coherent “possible worlds”.

It is at this point that generative artificial intelligence enters, implicitly, into the field of urban morphology. If deep neural networks are now able to extract, from large corpora of satellite imagery and urban data, morphological patterns that are otherwise invisible, classifying tissue typologies, estimating performance parameters, and detecting correlations between form, mobility, and socio-economic conditions [8], those same algorithmic architectures are increasingly used to generate images, scenarios, and visions of cities that do not exist yet remain plausible. Urban morphology thus finds itself, for the first time, not only describing the form of the city but negotiating its own status with artificial systems capable of proposing autonomous formal and narrative variants.

Within this transformation, the city can be read, explicitly invoking James Lovelock’s metaphor, as a “text of Gaia”: a self-organizing system in which biotic and abiotic components cooperate in maintaining conditions that are favorable for life at a planetary scale [9]. Yet, unlike Lovelock’s terrestrial organism, the city is an open text, continually rewritten by a plurality of human and non-human agents. In Ricœurian terms, urban form may be considered a “narrative configuration” that organizes heterogeneous elements over time, establishing plots that allow communities to recognize themselves and to project themselves into shared futures [10]. It follows that morphology today does not merely record the current state of the city but selects the elements destined to constitute the “canon” of what will be considered heritage, patrimony, and identity.

The essay by Domenico Giuseppe Chizzoniti and Tommaso Lolli (Contribution 11), devoted to reconstruction processes in post-war Middle Eastern contexts, shows forcefully how every morphological operation in these settings is, prior to being a technical exercise, an act of rewriting collective memory: the way urban fragments are reassembled, traces are reinterpreted, and continuities and innovations are decided is inseparable from a political (and poetic) choice about “which story” the city should continue to tell.

All the contributions to this volume—from Karsten Ley’s historical framework to the pedagogical perspectives of Nadia Charalambous and Vítor Oliveira and from Ilaria Geddes’s multiscalar agency analyses to Kayvan Karimi’s intertwining of spatial configurations and social interactions—converge in suggesting a new figure of the designer: no longer merely a “director” of form or a “problem solver” but a narrative designer capable of operating on the threshold between morphology, data, and imagination, consciously deciding which fabrics and which processes deserve to be translated into urban forms.

In the realm of teaching urban form, the contribution by Charalambous and Oliveira clearly shows (Contribution 12) how the education of future architects and urbanists must confront this narrative dimension. Their proposed blended model, alternating direct on-site experience, desk-based analytical work, the use of advanced digital tools, and moments of collective reflection, configures a pedagogical environment in which learning does not consist in the passive assimilation of analytical categories but in the ability to narrate the city through different media, scales, and languages. Students are called to construct interpretive sequences, to connect quantitative and qualitative elements, and to imagine transformation scenarios that are at once plausible, efficient, and desirable.

The contribution by Geddes, Chatzichristou, Charalambous, and Ricchiardi (Contribution 13), with its attention to Neighborhood Social Actors, strengthens this perspective. The adoption of categories derived from assemblage theory [11] and Actor–Network Theory [12], extended to the reading of urban form, makes it possible to recognize that every spatial configuration is the provisional result of a web of relations among heterogeneous actors, people, institutions, infrastructures, norms, and technical artefacts that are constantly under negotiation. Morphology here is less a “map” of permanences than a “story” of how those permanences were produced, maintained, and contested. In such a framework, to speak of the city as a great collective narrative is not a rhetorical metaphor but the recognition of a structural condition. Every morphological choice implies a selection and a hierarchy of stories: some are rendered visible in form through typological continuities, material memories, and symbolic signs; others are removed, marginalized, or rendered opaque.

In the presence of AI systems capable of generating, on demand, thousands of images of “possible” cities, the design act no longer consists solely of designing forms but of deciding which stories deserve to enter the realm of possibility. AI, both in its analytical articulation (pattern extraction, classification, prediction) and in its generative one (production of scenarios, images, simulations), makes visible what previously remained invisible: latent correlations between form and use, patterns of spatial inequality, and memories embedded in urban palimpsests but also latent desires of social groups and imaginaries that struggle to find expression in built spaces. In this sense, the city as an “open text” that is continually rewritten approaches the notion of enaction elaborated by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch: the world is not something that simply “stands there” waiting to be represented but is co-constructed in the relation between cognitive systems and the environment [13].

The architect–narrative designer, within this frame, does not delegate responsibility for choice to AI but uses it as a tool to explore the “space of the possible”: a “world engine” capable of generating variants, hybridizations, and deviations, which design must evaluate, filter, and orient in the light of criteria of spatial and cultural coherence, ecological sustainability, the recognition of identities, social inclusivity, and so forth. Therefore, urban morphology—if interpreted from its own ontological foundations, those that for sixty years have made it a precious instrument of knowledge and design for the city—can become the critical grammar that allows us to distinguish between scenarios that merely reiterate forms of exclusion and scenarios that truly open up new possibilities of cohabitation.

4. Towards a New Epistemological Regime

In light of the multiple trajectories included in this volume—historical, aesthetic, quantitative, pedagogical, technological, and political—by outlining not so much a finished framework as a horizon of research and practice, it is possible to conclude that urban morphology is today called to inhabit: that of a discipline situated between “Earth, Sky and … Gaia”.

“Earth” designates the irreducible dimension of the built form as the outcome of labor, effort, and conflict, as recalled both by the tradition of Vittorio Gregotti’s Il territorio dell’architettura [14] and by the stratified historicity analyzed by Ley, Neglia, Chizzoniti, and Lolli. It is the dimension of the internal measure of places, the specificity of contexts, typological continuities, and slow transformations, none of which any algorithmic abstraction can erase without a loss of meaning.

“Sky”, in contrast, refers to the growing condition of the city’s datafication: the possibility of observing the urban form and the “life between buildings” [15], tracking movements, consumption, and emissions and modeling alternative scenarios through advanced digital simulation tools. Within this horizon, urban morphology is called to negotiate with the world of big data, geospatial analytics, remote sensing, and numerical modeling without renouncing its interpretive vocation. The challenge, as studies on the relation between urban form, big data, and remote sensing show [16], lies in building critical interfaces between measurement and meaning and between indicators and design decisions.

“Gaia”, finally, points to the need to reposition urban morphology within the broader framework of the Anthropocene. The relation between form and environment, central in the essays by Gleiter, Gherri, Ji, and others, can no longer be conceived in terms of the simple “adaptation” of a human subject to a neutral environment but rather as the co-evolution of interdependent socio-ecological systems. It evokes a holistic conception of the human and of its “dwelling on the earth” [17], at the center of which lie two interconnected dimensions: creativity and knowledge. In the age of AI, knowledge transcends the mere accumulation of data, feeding on the connections between creative imagination and scientific reasoning through the Logos. The latter is thought and narrative: a concept that becomes real only in its representation and in its capacity to “tell itself”. It is no accident that the original sense of artificial intelligence resides in the narrative dimension of language: in the syntactic–symbolic quality of storytelling lies its capacity to “turn words into space” and to create plausible spatial scenarios not yet realized. Creativity is the human capacity to transform the world in response to needs, which is ever more “virtuous” the more it is “conscious”—that is, supported by knowledge.

If the city is thus a complex system of data, relations, and narratives; if design is increasingly the exploration of alternative scenarios; and if form is now inseparable from the digital instruments that measure, simulate, and rewrite it; then the task of urban morphology, as this volume makes clear, is not so much to guard a canon nor to pursue uncritically that “value of novelty” in Riegl’s sense [18]. It is, rather, to offer a structured yet flexible conceptual framework for deciding—case by case, individually, and collectively—“which story deserves to be told”: which narrative, made of desires, memories, needs, individual “stories” and “forms”, and fabulae and clichés [19], deserves to “become the city”.

Today, within this decision, which is eminently political, ethical, and narrative, lies the authentic meaning of urban morphology as a discipline for the design of the city.