Today we experience and acknowledge the nexus of ecology, culture and politics as a moving objective, defined by local realities placed within global developments. Large-scale change is no longer a distant probability but an approaching condition, which forces us to accept instability and envision sustainability transitions as the ground of future inhabitation. When looking closer into atmospheric, water (riverine, maritime, deltaic), and land systems and their inherent uncertainties we realize the agency that local sensitivities, culture and planning regimes have in defining the success or failure of sustainable development. This dialogue will question what the real ground of preMarsent and future urbanization is, imagining adaptive and transformative change as material and ecologically sensitive practices to site, context and culture. This dialogue is the transcription of the round table talk on the International Forum on Urbanism held in Delft on 26 November 2021. Lars Marcus, Chris Zevenbergen and Carola Hein presented their work in the light of the environmental crisis, sectoral versus integral: the agency of change. With moderator Fransje Hooimeijer they elaborated and related their work in a discussion around the main questions of history, the longue durée, disciplinarity and agency of change.@en

Typologies have always played an important role in urban planning and design practice and formal studies have been central to the field of urban morphology. These studies have predominantly been of a historical-qualitative nature and do not support quantitative comparisons between urban areas and between different cities, nor offer the precise and comprehensive descriptions needed by those engaged in urban planning and design practice. To describe contemporary urban forms, which are more diffuse and often elude previous historic typologies, systematic quantitative methods can be useful but, until recently, these have played a limited role in typo-morphological studies. This paper contributes to recent developments in this field by integrating multi-variable geometric descriptions with inter-scalar relational descriptions of urban form. It presents typologies for three key elements of urban form (streets, plots and buildings) in five European cities, produced using statistical clustering methods. In a first instance, the resulting typologies contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of streets, plots and buildings. In particular, the results offer insight into patterns between the types (i.e. which types are found in combination and which not) and provide a new large scale comparative analysis across five European cities. To conclude, a link between quantitative analysis and theory is established, by testing two well-known theoretical propositions in urban morphology: the concept of the burgage cycle and the theory of natural movement.@en