Forma Civitatis: playing with meaning and form

The “form of the city”, so the novice Latinist would translate the journal’s title Forma Civitatis. But the correct translation is subtly different, literally “the citizenship’s statute”, whereas the “form of the city” corresponds to the Latin diction “forma urbis”. We chose the title “forma civitatis” to widen the topics belonging to the urban morphology research field and include the social aspects, the history of law and more in general the normative part of urban studies. Our intention was not to limit the journal’s scope to the urban realm, but to widen it by including the landscape and more in general the territory, hence the subtitle International journal of urban and territorial morphological studies. Yet the title’s assonance with modern languages indeed nourishes the cultural project and builds the journal’s identity by playing with form and meaning in its title.