SOME REMARKS TO THE HISTORICAL URBAN MORPHOLOGY EXAMINATIONS
Abstract
Today’s morphological image, life possibilities and the historical distribution of their societies cannot be understood without the research of their development through history. It is historical geography that deals with the examination of geographical spaces depicted in different periods of history. In the present study, the authors are seeking the answers to three of the questions arisen during the examination of settlements’ historical geography:
- Where is the place of settlement history in the research of historical geography?
- What is the task and method of the historical geography of settlements?
- In what aspects can a typology be attempted to be set up regarding the development of the examined Transdanubian towns through history?
Historical geography examines the changes of settlements through time in two ways. It either discusses the spatial manifestations of a given historical period (cross-sectional examination), or it focuses on the spatial consequences of a development process (process examination). Within historical geography, the historical geography of settlements deals with the history of towns. The starting point is that every town is a unique location having its own values. These may be emotional, cultural or historical values. Urban spaces adhering to one another through time give the structure to the settlement. For this reason, geographer researching urban history regards ground plan research and the examination of settlement structures as being of utmost significance. The image of settlement morphology, along with that of spatial distribution according to functions, truly reflects the type of a settlement and includes the elements of not only its formation in the past but also its potential development in the future. Thus, the historical geography of settlements seeks the answer to two questions:
How did settlements’ functions change through the past centuries?
What are the historical roots of a settlement structure?
Historical geography of settlements is an empiric science. Its methods are reductive, which means that it deducts a settlement’s earlier states from today’s settlement image, in a manner simplifying from the internal structure of a settlement. It also assigns the changes of formal elements and the social structure to the changes of the ground plan in the order of chronology.
In Chapter 3 of the study, an attempt is made to group Transdanubian towns according to their ground plans. The authors all agree that the smaller the size of a town is the more obvious it is whether its ground plan can be classify either into the group of planned (regular) towns or into that of naturally grown ones (with a street network of irregular arrangement).
