Abstract
Following Moudon's work on the history and philosophy of the ISUF (International Seminar on Urban Form) movement, urban morphology can be described as the study of the physical form of cities and the process of city-making. Particular emphasis is given to the notion of time and the importance of the single lot as the fundamental unit of evolutive analysis. As a professional and foremost academic set of methods, urban morphology functions empirically and descriptively, even though the complexity of city-making, its multidisciplinary character and behaviorist interdependencies do not facilitate the scientific proof of causalities. This paper further explores the discipline's normative challenges, particularly on the base of the above-mentioned positivist limitations, but also on the background of implementation issues for the present. To what extent, and for whom, can or should common goals be defined? Which ones are crucial for the creation or retention of an urban environment that does not mock the fundamentals of what we call " urban grain " ? How can we have an impact on city-and policy-making without losing the freedom of a neutral academic discipline? As a very tangible example of one of the discipline's allegedly most important issues, the one of scale, the paper discusses legal obstacles to small-scale development in Miami-Dade County.