Ian Morley is an Assistant Professor of Urban History.

He has published widely on the design of built environments during the late-1800s and early-1900s.

Prof. Morley has also participated in television documentaries for The Discovery Channel and Voom!, as well as been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal Asia, The Los Angeles Times, Southeast Asia Globe and La Stampa, e.g. about British colonial architecture in Yangon, Myanmar.

He is the Book Review Editor for Urban Morphology: Journal of the International Seminar on Urban Form, an editorial board member of the journal Planning Perspectives, and a former council member of the International Planning History Society. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and University College Dublin, and in 2012 he was a Visiting Scholar on the urbanism programme held by the Universidade Estudual de Maringá and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil.

He is the recipient of the 2010 and 2011 History Department Teaching Award. In 2010 and 2011 he was awarded the CUHK Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award. He is Assistant Professor (by Courtesy) on CUHK’s Urban Studies Programme.

Publications

Books

British Provincial Civic Design and the Building of Late-Victorian and Edwardian Cities, 1880-1914 (Mellen, 2008)

Edited with Mira Crouch, Knowledge as Value: Illumination through Critical Prisms (Rodopi, 2008)

Journal Articles

‘Canberra’s Connections: Canberra’s Plan and Nationhood’, forthcoming paper in volume 23.1 of Fabrications (ISSN 1033-1867).

‘Asian Culture and Urbanism: Meanings and Experiences of the Evolving Built Environment’,forthcoming article in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.2 (ISSN 1481-4374).

‘Rangoon’, Cities 31 (2013)

‘Utilising Social Media to Know the Victorian World: A Blended Approach’, Journal of Victorian Culture 17.4 (2012).

‘The Creation of the Modern Urban Form in the Philippines’, Urban Morphology 16.1 (2012).

‘America and the Philippines: Modern Civilization and City Planning’, Education About Asia 16.2 (2011).

‘Civic Design and National Identity: The Example of Edwardian Ireland’, Planning Perspectives 26.3 (2011).

‘American Imperialism, Civic Design and the Philippines in the early-1900s’, European Journal of American Culture 29.3 (2010).

‘A New Lens to Illuminate and Elucidate Urban Form?’, Urban Morphology 14.1 (2010).

‘Revelations, Predicaments & Civic Design: The Americanisation of the British Urban Environment, c. 1900-14’, Cercles 14 (2009).

‘Representing a City and Nation: Wales’s Matchless Civic Centre’, Welsh History Review 24.3 (2009).

‘The Contemporary Chinese Metropolis: Modernity, Globalisation, and Conceptual Meanings’, Design Principles and Practice 3.1 (2009).

‘The Making and Maintenance of Cenotaphs’, Fieldwork and Documents 52 (2008).

‘Chaos, Contagion, Cholera & Chadwick’, Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine 80.2 (2007).

‘Arquitectura, Oportunismo y la Planificación del Rostro de un Imperio’ (Architecture, Opportunism and the Planning of an Imperial Face), Revista de Arquitectura 9 (2007)

‘Post-Industrial Urbanism and the Growth of Sustainability: Historical Trends, Present and Future Obervations’, The Journal of Futures Studies 9.4 (2005).

Chapters in Edited Volumes

‘Modernizing the Urban Landscape: Architecture and the Internationalized Face of Asia’, Asian Popular Culture: Dialogues with Modernity (eds. L. Fitzsimmons and J. Hunt), Palgrave, 2013.

‘Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, Popular Controversies in World History Vol. 3 (ed. S. Danver). ABC-Clio, 2010.

‘British Slavery Abolition Act (1833)’, Milestone Documents in World History (ed. P. Finkelman), Schlager Group, 2010.

‘Abstracting the City: Urbanisation and the ‘Opening-up’ Process in China’, China in an Era of Transition: Understanding Contemporary State and Society Actors (eds. Reza Hasmath and Jennifer Hsu), Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

‘The Impact of the Internet upon the Commodity of Knowledge and the Craft of History’, Knowledge as Value: Illumination through Critical Prism (eds. I. Morley and M. Crouch), Rodopi, 2008.

‘British History’, 21st Century History Highway: A Guide to Internet Resources (eds. D. Trinkle and S. Merriman), M.E. Sharpe Inc., 2006.

‘Mid-Atlantic Region: Architecture’, American Regional Cultures (ed. R. Marzec), Greenwood Press, 2004.

Other Publications

Entries published in reference works such as The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern World (ed. P.N. Stearns), published by Oxford University Press in 2008, The Encyclopedia of American Urban History (ed. D. Goldfield), Sage Publications, 2006, and The Encyclopedia of the City (ed. R. Caves), Routledge Press, 2005.

Articles composed on Burma, China, Hong Kong, India, and Taiwan for the online journal Architecture Week!

More than 30 book reviews have been published in scholarly journals such as Planning Perspectives, Urban History, The Journal of Architecture, Journal of British Studies, Urban Morphology: Journal of the International Seminar on Urban Form, Canadian Journal of History, American Historical Review and Australian Economic History Review.

Editorship

Book Review Editor for Urban Morphology: Journal of the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISSN 1027-4278).

Editorial Board Member of Planning Perspectives (ISSN 0266-5433).

Conferences

In the past couple of years papers have been presented at the 15th International Planning History Society Conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012), the 22nd Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Surakarta, Indonesia (2012), 18th International Seminar on Urban Form, Montreal, Canada (2011), and 6th European Association of South East Asian Studies, Gothenburg, Sweden (2010). In November 2012 Prof. Morley participated in the 36th Southeast Asian Cities Seminar (held in Cebu, the Philippines).

International Media

‘Man Made Marvels Asia: Taipei 101 Tower’, The Discovery Channel (2006).

‘Vertical City 2: Taipei 101, Taiwan’, Voom! (2009)

‘Myanmar Memories: The Threat to a Cache of Colonial Treasures’, The Wall Street Journal     Asia, February 12 2010.

‘In Myanmar, Colonial Era Buildings Risk Demolition’, The Los Angeles Times, February 11 2011.

‘Lost in Time’, Southeast Asia Globe, April 18 2012.

‘Allarme a Yangon il “disgelo” Minaccia I Tesori Coloniali’ (Alarm in Yangon in ‘Thaw’ Threat to Colonial Treasures’), La Stampa, January 7 2013.

Current Research

Cities and Nationhood: American Imperialism, Civic Design, and the Philippines, 1898-1916 (funded by the Research Grants Council’s General Research Fund, HK$263,657).

The aim of the study is to investigate the design of Philippine cities between 1898 and 1916, a period when significant exercises in urban planning took place.

The Treaty of Paris (1898) initiated America’s administration of the Philippines. By 1905 Manila was replanned and Baguio built as expressions of colonial sovereignty, and as symbols of a society disassociating itself from its hitherto ‘uncivilised’ state of existence. While scholars have suggested that the importation of urban design practices into the Philippines was exclusively tied to the propagation of the City Beautiful Movement, initial research by this author has explicitly linked Philippine urban design to matters of ‘modern civilisation’, ‘cultural progress’, and the promotion of nationhood. Therefore a thorough investigation is now proposed to further elucidate the meaning of urban designing in the Philippines, and to examine its dissemination with respect to colonial ideals, social advancement, and the shaping of national identity.

The inquiry considers how the redevelopment of large-sized settlements alongside the creation of a new city, Baguio, strengthened a centralised sense of nationhood, and how recourse to civic design helped to express this. It thus systematically explores how the conceptualisation and construction of ‘modern cities’ articulated America’s yearning to establish a new culture and disassociate the Philippines from its Spanish colonial past, and its image as a place inhabited by ‘savages’. Using well-established research methods to align American urban design with the evolution of Philippine society, the project shall reinterpret Philippine city development by deviating from the traditional focus on the architect and planner Daniel Burnham. Accordingly, it positions urban design alongside education, politics, and economics as social institutions that have profoundly affected the development of the Philippines as a nation.

Courses To Be Given in 2012-13

HIST2001B History and the Historian (Introductory)

HIST2002B History and the Historian (Advanced)

HIST5507B Special Topics in Public History: The Victorian City – Comprehending Social Developments in British and Colonial Society in the 19th Century

HIST5539A Special Topics in Public History (Urban Studies): Patterns in Urban History and Development

Contact Details

Office: Room 129 Fung King Hey Building

Tel.: 3943-7116

Email: ianmorley@arts.cuhk.edu.hk