Read to create and create to design. Urban morphology as a guide to the transformation process of the 21st century city

The built environment is a resource for design, a library of tools and ideas. One of the keys to find and free types, models and associations incorporated for creative recombination is to abstract the patterns of relationships we find in our perception of the built environment and use them as potential solutions. Below it is necessary to identify the assembly processes and their components, which are a means to achieve the design purpose. A further task is to examine in more detail the different approaches to urban morphology, in particular their logic and their specific objective, to understand if and how they fit together or how they could more actively integrate with each other. The logic is simple: if the different approaches are studying the same thing - the urban form - and a multiple description provides more insight than a single point of view, we will benefit from understanding the specific relationships between different points of view. We must work through the logic and implications of the existing framework of ideas and start filling in the spaces left empty. Some of these spaces have already become evident and most involve a more active comparative study. The challenge is to select the concepts and methods that allow common principles to manifest and avoid superfluous analogies. In short, innovation involves modifying the elements of an existing previously developed type that are recombined to create something new that works and becomes the basis for a new design.