This research provides an abstract representation of neighborhoods, accounting for the actors involved in the process of their formation and transformation as local entities embedded in a complex yet specific configuration of historical, social, structural, and political contexts. The analysis uses a conceptual framework combining Assemblage Theory and Actor–Network Theory to examine how both human and non-human actors or agents interact and consequently exert an impact on three different neighborhoods in Limassol, Cyprus. The methodology combines both qualitative as well as quantitative approaches. The tools used include space syntax, land use, and building typology, descriptive statistics of social factors, a photographic survey, observation of the built environment’s expressive features, and archival research of press articles. The findings reveal the extent to which global factors, such as colonialism and the mobility of wealthy populations from former Soviet countries, have an impact on the social makeup and expressive features of the environment, while local factors, such as block size and housing typology, have a strong impact on the use of public space. Furthermore, more complex networks may exhibit structural resilience or adaptability but may be, at the same time, more sensitive to varying and conflicting interests.

This paper describes the factors that influenced urban development in Cypriot cities and how the Cypriot planning system evolved to address such factors. Limassol is chosen as the case study for an in–depth approach in order to come to general but precise conclusions. The paper offers an interpretive–historical narrative of the urban development of the city from the latter part of the Ottoman period to the present day in order to understand the mechanism through which Cypriot cities have grown and the role of planning in shaping their form and influencing how they function. The objective is to provide a comprehensive description of factors, mechanisms and actors involved in the emergence and transformation of Limassol, and in particular the role of planning in its historical evolution and in more recent regeneration and development projects. The narrative was constructed using a variety of primary and secondary sources, including travellers' reports, historical cartography, press articles and interviews with expert stakeholders. The paper concludes with an assessment of the current state of planning in Cyprus, its potential future directions, and remarks on the effectiveness of the narrative in interpreting causal pathways of development and evaluating the impact of planning actions and policies.

‘Urban Playground’ is published by RIBA Publishing and was supported by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation. The author, Tim Gill, is a well-known global advocate for child-friendly cities, whose work ...

The urban form is a political and social arena. It is produced as a composite of sediments of various ways of living, of complex flow of history, of relationships and subjectivities through which people build and exercise their agency to negotiate and change contingent urban realities. Studies of urban form have so far confronted the challenge of grasping this complexity by scrutinizing a city's physical features. However, this paper puts forward a proposition that urban morphological approaches can also be resourceful tools for conceptualizing and scrutinizing dynamic relations between plural urban realities and transformations of the physical urban fabric. By drawing on the experiences from the Erasmus+ project Emerging Perspectives on Urban Morphologies (EPUM), this paper suggests a multidisciplinary, open educational framework combining various urban morphological approaches as a productive means of developing an understanding of multifaceted spatializations of lived space within urban form, as well as materializations of urban form within lived space. Such an endeavour can extend the study of urban form beyond the focus on an object, to embrace the processes, practices and agents of the production of the built environment, including multiple tensions between changing scales and material manifestations of political, economic and social relations.

This project was developed as an attempt to assess the relationship between different morphogenetic processes, in particular, those of fringe belt formation as described by M.R.G. Conzen (1960) and Whitehand (2001), and of centrality and compactness as described by Hillier (1999; 2002). Different approaches’ focus on different elements of the city has made it difficult to establish exactly how these processes interact or whether they are simply different facets of development reflecting wider socio-economic factors. To address this issue, a visual, chronological timeline of Limassol’s development was constructed along with a narrative of the socio-economic context of its development. The complexity of cities, however, makes static visualisations across time difficult to read and assess alongside textual narratives. We therefore took the step of developing an animation of land use and configurational analyses of Limassol, in order bring to life the diachronic analysis of the city and shed light on its generative mechanisms. The video presented here shows that the relationship between the processes mentioned above is much stronger and more complex than previously thought. The related paper explores in more detail the links between fringe belt formation as a cyclical process of peripheral development and centrality as a recurring process of minimisation of gains in distance. The project’s outcomes clearly show that composite methods of visualisations are an analytical opportunity still little exploited within urban morphology. References Conzen, M.R.G., 1960. Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis, London: Institute of British Geographers. Hillier, B., 2002. A Theory of the City as Object: or how spatial laws mediate the social construction of urban space. Urban Des Int, 7(3–4), pp.153–179. Hillier, B., 1999. Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids. Urban Des Int, 4(3–4), pp.107–127. Whitehand, J.W.R., 2001. British urban morphology: the Conzenian tradition. Urban Morphology, 5(2), pp.103–109.

The Cyprus Network of Urban Morphology (CyNUM), established in 2016, is a bicommunal initiative led by scholars residing both in the North and the south of Cyprus. The aim of the network is to promote research on the urban form of Cypriot cities and support its dissemination in Cyprus and abroad. CyNUM also acts as a platform for knowledge exchange and networking among researchers who have a specific interest in Cypriot cities and the wider Eastern Mediterranean region. Because of the relative youth of universities in Cyprus, all leading urban morphology scholars trained in other countries and brought to Cyprus the approaches linked to their alma mater. In the country, there is a strong focus on two approaches: the historico-geographical and the configurational, although typo-morphological studies also exist. Since its inception, the network has made efforts to exchange knowledge, access expertise from other countries and develop various research strands through individual research, funded projects, and scientific events, including regional conferences and hosting the 2019 ISUF Conference. This paper reviews the background to the network, its activities and research outputs to critically discuss avenues for future development of Cypriot morphological research based on the direction of current and proposed future projects.