Research Project

Research interest

Historic urban form is not only a background to social life, but also a record of collective experience and a means of shaping a new future. My research is focused on approaches to the sustainable development of historic urban and architectural form that integrate the built heritage and associated community values and local cultures into contemporary life through design that understands the evolution of place. Urban typo-morphology, which provides methods for reading and interpreting the physical form of historic places, is the core methodology of the research. It takes into account social processes, usually indirectly – through an imprint in urban form – tracing social change through formations and transformations of the built environment (G. Caniggia, S. Muratori). Reading formations and transformations in urban form and types developed in a particular place allows a qualitative interpretation of form in architectural projects. At the relational level, the typological approach can be further refined and clarified through the notion of situational typification (Husserl) and the specificity of social relations within a particular culture and place. Dr. Belova’s research aims at enriching the spectrum of methods for creating a meaningful, integrated architecture that reproduces the continuity in historical urban environments.

Research initiative (pheno-morphology.com)

As a team, we aim to develop research with the overarching objective of fostering inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue. Our goal is to identify methodologies for shaping urban environments in a manner conducive to enhancing the quality of life, well-being and to multi- and transgenerational transfers of meaning. We will facilitate the dialogue on the transformation of the meaning of place in time, with a view to forming intergenerational environments for the present and future that are respectful of well-being.

Urban Morphology

The tradition of urban form studies, or urban morphology, links architecture, urban history, planning and design through form, uniting a vast and growing community of researchers originally coming from such diverse disciplines as architecture, urban design, geography, history, anthropology, heritage studies and so on. The field encompasses several complementary approaches that are collaborating within the framework of the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF). One of them is rooted in the method of process-based typology founded by the Italian architect Saverio Muratori and has been further developed, among others, by Gianfranco Caniggia. It stands apart from other typological approaches in its emphasis on process and the history of the development of local urban palimpsests, which is particularly attuned to historical and cultural context.  Another approach striving to link urban morphology to the phenomenology of human spatial perception is Space Syntax. This configurational approach to the study of urban form has been developed in the 1970s by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson and colleagues at the Bartlett, University College London. It examines the relationship between human behaviour and spatial configurations, comparing patterns of activity with patterns of space.