The morphological study of a growing entity, such as a city, deals with its structure and form. In biological sciences morphological analysis is essential for understanding the functions of the component parts of a growing system. Likewise, for city planners there is a need to really understand how a city grows, develops, and evolves. Urban growth components have been identified as objects of a system, where the system is defined as a set of objects together with relationships among these objects. A morphological model of a city therefore attempts to relate urban growth or decay to the urban infrastructure, such as its transportation and other life-supporting systems. This paper serves as an introduction to the morphological modelling of the city in general and the transportation system in particular. Since professionals of many disciplines are involved in city planning and design, it is expected that the morphological modelling of city systems also will involve knowledge distilled from several disciplines. Research findings in the areas of automation, control, and stochastic theories could be integrated advantageously for use in such modelling through interdisciplinary research involving biologists, control systems engineers, city planners, system analysts, and transportation engineers. In this paper an explanation is presented of the morphology of city systems in terms of their growth and decay patterns and the basics of control theory, and, finally, a brief introduction is given to the biometrical modelling of the city. Several real-world applications of simple morphological and allometric methods applied to transportation systems planning are described. The need for a co-ordinated transfer of knowledge initially developed in systems control to urban system design is discussed. It is expected that such research will greatly benefit professionals involved in urban systems design and management, since morphological modelling of city systems will put the design components of the city in a new perspective. Several important and valid reasons are given that illustrate the superiority of morphological modelling over conventional analytical modelling as currently practised.
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