Evolution of the Urban Form of Historic Hit Citadel: Deriving a Schematic Model for Iraqi Fortified Cities

Hit Citadel is a historic fortress that has witnessed a distinctive urban development. Like many old citadels in the Middle East, the basic features are included, but not limited to, a fort with an organic zigzag street network, a scattered distribution of open spaces, a compact built-up area, a recognized socio-commercial form, and a peripheral area of military and industrial uses. The evolution of these features was constant and survived largely intact until the early of the 20^th century when modern planning practices were adopted in the site. The citadel form thus, has influenced by two types of urban growth: organic and planned. Taking this distinction as a start point, this paper investigates the development of Historic Hit Citadel and seeks to answer the question of; how this urban form was evolved. The main purpose of this paper is to derive a schematic model that represents the Iraqi fortresses. Morphological methods were used to study the patterns of growth formations and transformations. Results have shown that the deriving model is describing the character of Hit Citadel; however, further efforts need to be spent in effective comparisons with the other Iraqi fortresses for the sake of robust results and representativeness.