Urban Morphology Framework; A Sustainable approach to Heritage Contexts – Fes El-Bali: The sacred heart of the old city, Morocco.

Morphologies, patterns of urban form, are outcomes of myriad decisions taken by planners, urban designers, architects, engineers, politicians and others, addressing existing problems. Many city strategies and programs focus on specific urban issues in which local improvements, designs are considered, where as a broad context vision stays unknown. The insufficiency is in taking responsibility of the whole city shape, since development is limited to a group of land uses and road networks. Instead, looking at the coherent structure originating from significant patterns and unique relations forming the existing urban product must be considered. This paper tackles heritage contexts being sites with distinct complex conditions, these sites have been evolved over several generations with accumulative social, cultural and political transformations. Moreover, they present the city history, the community's heritage asset that must be preserved, maintained and at the same time invested. The paper presents one of the most significant ancient cities which is the old city of Fes, Fes El-Bali, in Morocco, as a world heritage site. Fes is considered a model for an urban Islamic complicated fabric that recently undergoes careful restorations for revival. The paper introduces a morphological approach in order to achieve an integrated framework through the study of the sacred heart of the old city of Fes. The proposed framework offers the track for achieving efficiency and value for integrated developments.