Cities and Forms on Sustainable Urban Planning

Morphology as a lever for cities to adapt to climate change

“Les Villes et les Formes”, written in collaboration with François Labbé and Caroline Nowacki by Serge Salat, explores how to shape the sustainable cities of the future. Based on a rich mosaic of two millennia of urban history in the East and the West, the book presents 1,200 drawings, city maps and photographs, accompanied by original analyses of diverse urban textures from around the world. The book addresses topics such as density, connectivity, diversity and accessibility, exploring the qualities of historic urban fabrics.

By highlighting organic patterns, grids, transformations and fractal symmetries, the book seeks to give the city a meaningful and human order, while being structured like an ecosystem. It proposes a method of urban composition based on the perceptive qualities and design of public spaces, thus contributing to a vision of the sustainable city as a place of memory, history and social integration.

Through its innovative results, its methods and its concrete application of complexity theories, the book is of crucial importance for architects, urban planners, decision-makers and all those involved in understanding and working towards a sustainable city.