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The sheer complexity and unpredictability characterising cities challenges the adequacy of existing disciplinary knowledge and tools in urban design and highlights the necessity to incorporate explicitly the element of change and the dimension of time in the understanding of, and intervention on, the form of cities. To this regard the concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which to understand and engage with a changing world. However, resilience is currently only superficially addressed by urban designers, and an explicit effort to relate elements of urban form to resilience principles is still lacking. This represents a great limit for urban designers, as the physical dimension of cities is the matter they work with in the first place. In this paper, we combine established knowledge in urban morphology and resilience theory. We firstly look at resilience theory and consistently define five proxies of resilience in urban form, namely diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. Secondly, we discuss the configuration of, and interdependencies between, several constituent elements of the physical city, as defined in urban morphology and design, in light of the mentioned five proxies. Finally, we conduct this exploration at five scales that are relevant to urban morphology and design: plot, street edge, block, street and sanctuary area / district.

The failure of conventional, post-war development to bring about the housing-led regeneration of much of Glasgow’s vacant and derelict inner-city land has exacerbated the loss of middle-income households to car-dominated suburbs built on green-field sites. Plot-based urbanism offers an innovative approach to development, based on an urban structure made up of fine-grained elements, in the form of plots, capable of incremental development by a range of agencies. The historical and morphological study of traditional, pre-war masterplanning methods in Glasgow suggests that a typically disaggregated pattern of land subdivision remains of great relevance for development, and that the physical form and organisation of urban land may relate to the capacity for neighbourhood self-organisation. This study assists future masterplanning and investment in the regeneration of inner-city neighbourhoods by suggesting ways of making investment more informed, and the development process more responsive to urban change. We argue that the publicly-funded sector could take on the role of lead provider of development opportunity through the adoption of methods derived from traditional masterplanning processes, providing opportunities for small-scale house building, and thereby supporting resilient and adaptable communities in the sustainable reuse of vacant inner-city land.

Slums have existed as long as cities have and are a growing context in the developing world. The challenge is in their efficient, effective and inclusive management. The purpose of this paper is to frame slums in the broad aim of urban development and the pursuit of prosperity, as active players and positive contributors in every right – a slum-prosperity framework. First, however, they need to be comprehensively defined in a non-exclusive, structured, dynamic and heuristic way; a previous publication was set to resolve this challenge.

Guided by a synthesized operative model for prosperity, such a definition for slums is used to precisely relate their characters to the pursuit of prosperity through a mapping process, whereby these characters are linked to potentials for prosperity, improvement goals, resources and intervention plans.

Both slums and prosperity are fuzzy, complex and variable terms; the only possibility to deal with them both is to break them down into simple and manageable yet operative units and establish the most influential and effective links between them to organize intervention according to patterns of change in both slums and city.

An intervention agenda like the one proposed here, that gives room for contextual and temporal urban complexities, has the potential to augment urban practice and help curb the slum phenomenon. A final paper (forthcoming) will illustrate the application of both the comprehensive definition of slum and the implementation of a pathway toward prosperity.

The proposal in this paper is derived as part of research conducted for the award of a PhD at the University of Strathclyde Glasgow. This was in general set to contribute to the proactive and inclusive improvement of slums and cities. The proposal is further derived from the authors’ involvement and personal interest in developing regions and is designed on local experience and on wider expertise in urban renewal.

In urban studies, understanding how individuals perceive density is a complex challenge due to the subjective nature of this perception, which is influenced by sociocultural, personal and environmental factors. This study addresses these complexities by proposing a systematic framework for comprehending how people perceive density within urban contexts.

The methodology for developing the framework involved a systematic review of existing literature on the perception of density and related concepts, followed by integrating insights from empirical investigations. The framework designed through this process overcomes the limitations identified in previous research and provides a comprehensive guide for studying perceived density in urban environments.

The successful application of the framework on case studies in Glasgow and international settings enabled the identification of 20 critical spatial factors (buildings, public realm and urban massing) influencing density perception. The research provided insights into the subjective nature of density perception and the impact that spatial characters of urban form play, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in understanding the impact of urban form, which is the realm of design and planning professions, on individual experiences.

The paper's originality lies in its comprehensive synthesis of the existing knowledge on the perception of density, the development of a user-responsive framework adaptable to future research and its application in case studies of different natures to identify recurrent links between urban form and user-specific constructs.