This lecture addresses one of the dominant schools of thought in urban morphology, the historico-geographical approach (also labelled as Conzenian school). The lecture is in four parts. The first part describes the origins and early developments of this approach in urban geography, in Central Europe, in the turning from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The second part explores the work of M. R. G. Conzen, a German geographer who laid the foundations for a new perspective on the urban landscape, based on a deep understanding of history and geography. In this view, the town plan (streets, plots, and the block-plans of buildings), building fabric, and land and building utilization, had a central role. Conzen has also developed fundamental concepts to explain the process of urban development, over time and at different scales, notably the fringe belt (macro), the morphological region (meso) and the burgage cycle (micro). The third part focuses on J. W. R. Whitehand, who took Conzen seminal work and effectively built a school of morphological thought, first based in Birmingham, and then spread over different continents, with a significant impact in Chinese academia. Whitehand’s institutional (including the ‘Urban Morphology Research Group’ and ‘Institutional Seminar on Urban Form’, and also the ‘Urban Morphology’ journal) and substantive contributions (fringe belts, agents of change) are analysed in detail. Finally, the lecture addresses the concept of morphological region, including its ability to analyse the urban landscape, making evident the most structural differences in terms of urban form, and the potential applicability of the concept into planning practice, namely as a significant alternative to land use zoning.