From Iconographies to Morphologies. An Overview on European and Chinese Urban Forms through 10 Images

Abstract

A recurring misunderstanding pushes Western architects to transfer the images, the uses and the symbols of European cities’ spaces to projects located into the Chinese cities, that in reality show different and specific images, uses and symbols in their own urban spaces: the idea of the Western square as a place of individual interplay, able to create the ‘society’, cannot work in the same way in China, where the role of the street as the place of the family life and the urban community’s awareness cannot find a correspondent in Europe. The ‘Transitional Morphologies’ Joint Research Unit (at Southeast University and Politecnico di Torino from 2018) operates on the formal analysis of the dynamics in urban form between Asia and Europe in order to improve the design practice through new technical and conceptual tools and often adopting comparative methods. The aim of the paper is to describe the methodology, the contents and the outcomes of a comparative research activity developed by the Author within the context of the Joint Research Unit in the last seven years (2015–2021) in Nanjing, at SEU School of Architecture.