Dr Ian Morley is an Assistant Professor of Urban History.

He has published widely on the design of built environments, particularly the civic design of settlements in Britain during the late-1800s and early-1900s.

Dr Morley is also interested in historic and modern cities in Asia. He has participated in television documentaries on the Taipei 101 Tower for The Discovery Channel and Voom!, as well as been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal Asia and The Los Angeles Times about colonial buildings in Rangoon, Burma.

He is the Book Review Editor for Urban Morphology: Journal of the International Seminar on Urban Form, a council member of the International Planning History Society, and an editorial board member of the journal Planning Perspectives. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and University College Dublin, and in 2012 will be a Visiting Fellow at the Universidade Estudual de Maringá in Brazil.

He is the recipient of the 2010 History Department Teaching Award. In 2010 and 2011 he was awarded the CUHK Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award.

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

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

‘America and the Philippines: Modern Civilisation 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’, forthcoming publication in Asian Popular Culture: Dialogues with Modernity (eds. L. Fitzsimmons and J. Hunt).

‘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 25 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, 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 Pespectives (ISSN 0266-5433)

Conferences

Papers have recently been given at the 18th International Seminar on Urban Form, Montreal, Canada (2011) 6th European Association of South East Asian Studies, Gothenburg, Sweden (2010), 16th International Seminar on Urban Form, Guangzhou, PR China (2009), UNESCO 12th International Seminar Forum: Historic Urban Landscapes, Hanoi, Vietnam (2008), UN/UNU-WIDER Workshop on Asian Development in an Urban World, Kolkata, India (2008), 13th International Planning History Society Conference, Chicago, USA (2008), and International Conference: Zagros Traditional Settlements, Sanandaj, Iran (2008). Sessions on the Victorian built environment were chaired in 2008 at Yale University and 2009 at Cambridge University as part of the North American Victorian Studies Association conferences.

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.

Research Specializations and Interests

• History of cities

• 19th century British urban history

• Late-Victorian and Edwardian civic design

• Asia-Pacific city planning, e.g. in the Philippines in the early-1900s

Current Research

Urban Design and Nation Building in the Asia-Pacific: Canberra’s Regional Connection?

This study aims to investigate matters involved in the design of Australia’s capital city, Canberra, a settlement built from 1913 as a grand expression of Australian sovereignty. The inquiry considers how the use of urban planning transformed a barren inland site into an impressive city that strengthened Australia’s embryonic sense of national identity after the Commonwealth Act was passed in 1900.

Using well-established research methods to align Canberra’s images, meanings, and associations with Australian society’s development, the project will reinterpret the history of Australia’s capital city by moving away from the traditional focus on American architect-planner Walter Burley Griffin. Instead the project considers Canberra’s design within a framework of national politics, nationhood, modernity and their manufacture. This shall not only provide a more comprehensive platform to understand the origins and structure of the city’s plan, but will permit a comparative analysis between Canberra and urban design schemes that were proposed as part of nation building processes in the Asia-Pacific at about the same time.

The study’s findings will deliver significant insights into the cultural, political, artistic and environmental forces that existed in the Asia-Pacific at the start of the twentieth century. This shall not only improve our understanding of Canberra’s past but will also help illuminate the alliance between city designing, and political and cultural advancement in the Asia-Pacific region during the early-1900s. With parallels in the spatial nature of city plans in the Philippines, China, and Canberra, the project ultimately enquiries as to whether an Asia-Pacific city model existed.

Courses To Be Given in 2011-12

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.: 394 37116

Email: ianmorley@arts.cuhk.edu.hk