Dictionary of urbanism - Rob Cowan
Dictionary of urbanism
Rob Cowan
The author
Rob Cowan là người điều hành tổ chức đào tạo và tư vấn Urban Design Skills (http://www.urbandesignskills.com/). Ông ta cũng là biên tập tạp chí của học viện bản tồn các công trình lịch sử (Institute of Historic Building Conservation). Những xuất bản khác của ông bao gồm The Connected City, The Cities Design Forgot, Urban Design Guidance và London After Dark (cùng với nhà nhiếp ảnh Alan Delaney). Ông là đồng tác giả của Re:urbanism và CLG/CABE hướng dẫn thiết kế By Design, và tác giả của Scottish equivalent (Designing Places), hướng dẫn thiết kế nhà ở cho Scotland (Housing Quality), hướng dẫn về Masterplanning, Scotland. Ông ta phát minh ra phương pháp kiểm tra công đồng Placecheck (http://www.placecheck.info/) và phương pháp đánh giá những kỹ năng thiết kế đô thị urban design skills appraisal method - Capacitycheck (http://www.capacitycheck.co.uk/). Tranh đả kích hàng tuần của ông xuất hiện trên Planning đã 20 năm qua.
Sau đây là nguyên văn định nghĩa về URBAN DESIGN và URBANISM
urban design
The collaborative and multi-disciplinary process of shaping the physical setting for life in cities, towns and villages; the art of making places; design in an urban context. Urban design involves the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and the establishment of frameworks and processes that facilitate successful development. Peter Webber (1988a) defines urban design as ‘the process of moulding the form of the city through time’. John Worthington (2003) has described it as ‘managing space, time and experience to create memorable places’ and Jerry Spencer (2003) as ‘creating the theatre of public life’. To Carmona, Heath, Oc and Tiesdell (2003) it is ‘the process of making better places for people than would otherwise be produced’. The urban designer Doug Paterson has defined urban design as ‘merging civitas and the urbs: building the values and ideals of a civilized place into the structure of a city’. Peter Batchelor and david lewis (1986) define urban design as ‘design in an urban context’. They use the word design ‘not in its traditional narrow sense, but in a much broader way. Economic projections, packaging new developments, negotiating public/private financial partnerships, setting up guidelines and standards for historic revitalisation, forming non-profit corporations that combine citizens with public and private sector financing resources, all are considered as design.’
In the words of the writer and critic Peter Buchanan (quoted in Cowan, 1997): ‘Urban design is about how to recapture certain of the qualities (qualities which we experience as well as those we see) that we associate with the traditional city: a sense of order, place, continuity, richness of experience, completeness and belonging… Urban design lies somewhere between the broad-brush abstractions of planning and the concrete specifics of architecture. It implies a notion of citizenship: life in the public realm. It is not just about space, but time as well. Much of what passes for urban design is conceived only for one moment. Good urban design… is more than just knitting together the townscape. Urban designers should be configuring a rich network in which buildings come and go: a framework of transport, built fabric and other features, which will create natural locations for things. Urban design structures activities.’ Buchanan (1988) has written that ‘urban design is concerned with analysing, organising and shaping urban form so as to elaborate as richly and as coherently as possible the lived experience of the inhabitants. In essence it is about the interdependence and mutual development of both city and citizen. And at its core is the recognition that, just as the citizen is both biological organism and self-consciously acculturated persona, so the city too is an organism shaped by powerful intrinsic, almost natural, forces (that must be understood and respected in any successful intervention) and a wilfully, even self-consciously, created cultural artefact. Interventions of the creative will have always guided the city’s growth and change, elaborated its identity in many ways large and small as well as conceived and realised those crowning glories that make great cities so special. Urban design is essentially about place making, where place is not just a specific space, but all the activities and events that it makes possible. As a consequence the whole city is enriched. Instead of a city fragmented into islands of no place and anywhere, it remains a seamlessly meshed and richly varied whole. In such a city, daily life is not reduced to a dialectic between city centre and one of the similar suburbs: instead the citizen is encouraged to avail himself of the whole city, to enjoy all its various parts and so enrich his experience and education (become street-wise) in the ways only real urban life allows.’
Some urban designers define urban design as ‘the design of the spaces between buildings’, presumably to distinguish it from architecture, which they define as the design of the buildings themselves. This definition excludes urban design’s proper concern with the structure of a place; it ignores the fact that to a significant extent the characteristics of the spaces between buildings are determined by the buildings themselves; and it encourages architects in any tendency they may have to ignore the context in which they are designing. The question of where urban design should or does fit into the landscape of urban professions – whether it should be regarded as a distinct profession itself, or as a way of thinking, or as common ground between a number of professions or between a wide range of people involved in urban change, for example – is widely discussed. Barry Young (1988) has suggested one set of stages for the urban design process. These are: a) Define physical design principles. b) Identify performance criteria. c) Develop design options. d) Evaluate the options in terms of design principles and performance criteria. e) Develop the preferred option. Abercrombie and Forshaw wrote in their 1943 County of London Plan of the ‘low level of urban design’ in pre-war London. Urban design was being discussed in the American planning profession in the 1950s. What is generally said to have been the first urban design conference was held at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 1956, its participants including lewis mumford, jane jacobs, victor gruen and edmund bacon. Its organiser, Jose Luis Sert, announced urban design as a new academic field, which he defined as ‘the part of planning concerned with the physical form of the city’ (Kahn, 2002). The first university course in urban design was established at Harvard in 1960. lewis mumford wrote in 1957 from the USA accusing FJ Osborn (in a letter to him) of identifying new towns with ‘only one kind of urban design’ (Hughes, 1971). In 1959 the American Institute of Planners’ policy statement on urban renewal stated: ‘Renewal offers an opportunity to secure superior urban design when relatively large areas of land are improved under coordinated design leadership, and relatively uniform site and building controls’ (quoted in Goodman, 1972). The American Institute of Architecture established a Committee on Urban Design in 1960 and it published Paul D Spreiregen’s book Urban Design: the architecture of cities and towns in 1965. The Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Polytechnic (later Oxford Brookes University) was established in 1972. The UK urban design group was formed in 1978. Punter and Carmona (1997) note that in the UK the term urban design ‘had been conspicuous by its absence’ in government publications and guidance until the publication of John Gummer’s Quality in Town and Country in 1994. The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions gave a definition (in Planning Policy Guidance Note 1) that was broad in describing what urban design covered but, despite its length, said little about what sort of activity urban design was. Urban design, said PPG1, was ‘the relationship between different buildings; the relationships between buildings and the streets, squares, parks, waterways and other spaces which make up the public realm; the relationship of one part of a village, town or city with other parts; patterns of movement and activity which are thereby established; in short, the complex relationship between all the elements of built and unbuilt space.’ See also knowing urban design and unknowing urban design.
The collaborative and multi-disciplinary process of shaping the physical setting for life in cities, towns and villages; the art of making places; design in an urban context. Urban design involves the design of buildings, groups of buildings, spaces and landscapes, and the establishment of frameworks and processes that facilitate successful development. Peter Webber (1988a) defines urban design as ‘the process of moulding the form of the city through time’. John Worthington (2003) has described it as ‘managing space, time and experience to create memorable places’ and Jerry Spencer (2003) as ‘creating the theatre of public life’. To Carmona, Heath, Oc and Tiesdell (2003) it is ‘the process of making better places for people than would otherwise be produced’. The urban designer Doug Paterson has defined urban design as ‘merging civitas and the urbs: building the values and ideals of a civilized place into the structure of a city’. Peter Batchelor and david lewis (1986) define urban design as ‘design in an urban context’. They use the word design ‘not in its traditional narrow sense, but in a much broader way. Economic projections, packaging new developments, negotiating public/private financial partnerships, setting up guidelines and standards for historic revitalisation, forming non-profit corporations that combine citizens with public and private sector financing resources, all are considered as design.’
In the words of the writer and critic Peter Buchanan (quoted in Cowan, 1997): ‘Urban design is about how to recapture certain of the qualities (qualities which we experience as well as those we see) that we associate with the traditional city: a sense of order, place, continuity, richness of experience, completeness and belonging… Urban design lies somewhere between the broad-brush abstractions of planning and the concrete specifics of architecture. It implies a notion of citizenship: life in the public realm. It is not just about space, but time as well. Much of what passes for urban design is conceived only for one moment. Good urban design… is more than just knitting together the townscape. Urban designers should be configuring a rich network in which buildings come and go: a framework of transport, built fabric and other features, which will create natural locations for things. Urban design structures activities.’ Buchanan (1988) has written that ‘urban design is concerned with analysing, organising and shaping urban form so as to elaborate as richly and as coherently as possible the lived experience of the inhabitants. In essence it is about the interdependence and mutual development of both city and citizen. And at its core is the recognition that, just as the citizen is both biological organism and self-consciously acculturated persona, so the city too is an organism shaped by powerful intrinsic, almost natural, forces (that must be understood and respected in any successful intervention) and a wilfully, even self-consciously, created cultural artefact. Interventions of the creative will have always guided the city’s growth and change, elaborated its identity in many ways large and small as well as conceived and realised those crowning glories that make great cities so special. Urban design is essentially about place making, where place is not just a specific space, but all the activities and events that it makes possible. As a consequence the whole city is enriched. Instead of a city fragmented into islands of no place and anywhere, it remains a seamlessly meshed and richly varied whole. In such a city, daily life is not reduced to a dialectic between city centre and one of the similar suburbs: instead the citizen is encouraged to avail himself of the whole city, to enjoy all its various parts and so enrich his experience and education (become street-wise) in the ways only real urban life allows.’
Some urban designers define urban design as ‘the design of the spaces between buildings’, presumably to distinguish it from architecture, which they define as the design of the buildings themselves. This definition excludes urban design’s proper concern with the structure of a place; it ignores the fact that to a significant extent the characteristics of the spaces between buildings are determined by the buildings themselves; and it encourages architects in any tendency they may have to ignore the context in which they are designing. The question of where urban design should or does fit into the landscape of urban professions – whether it should be regarded as a distinct profession itself, or as a way of thinking, or as common ground between a number of professions or between a wide range of people involved in urban change, for example – is widely discussed. Barry Young (1988) has suggested one set of stages for the urban design process. These are: a) Define physical design principles. b) Identify performance criteria. c) Develop design options. d) Evaluate the options in terms of design principles and performance criteria. e) Develop the preferred option. Abercrombie and Forshaw wrote in their 1943 County of London Plan of the ‘low level of urban design’ in pre-war London. Urban design was being discussed in the American planning profession in the 1950s. What is generally said to have been the first urban design conference was held at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 1956, its participants including lewis mumford, jane jacobs, victor gruen and edmund bacon. Its organiser, Jose Luis Sert, announced urban design as a new academic field, which he defined as ‘the part of planning concerned with the physical form of the city’ (Kahn, 2002). The first university course in urban design was established at Harvard in 1960. lewis mumford wrote in 1957 from the USA accusing FJ Osborn (in a letter to him) of identifying new towns with ‘only one kind of urban design’ (Hughes, 1971). In 1959 the American Institute of Planners’ policy statement on urban renewal stated: ‘Renewal offers an opportunity to secure superior urban design when relatively large areas of land are improved under coordinated design leadership, and relatively uniform site and building controls’ (quoted in Goodman, 1972). The American Institute of Architecture established a Committee on Urban Design in 1960 and it published Paul D Spreiregen’s book Urban Design: the architecture of cities and towns in 1965. The Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Polytechnic (later Oxford Brookes University) was established in 1972. The UK urban design group was formed in 1978. Punter and Carmona (1997) note that in the UK the term urban design ‘had been conspicuous by its absence’ in government publications and guidance until the publication of John Gummer’s Quality in Town and Country in 1994. The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions gave a definition (in Planning Policy Guidance Note 1) that was broad in describing what urban design covered but, despite its length, said little about what sort of activity urban design was. Urban design, said PPG1, was ‘the relationship between different buildings; the relationships between buildings and the streets, squares, parks, waterways and other spaces which make up the public realm; the relationship of one part of a village, town or city with other parts; patterns of movement and activity which are thereby established; in short, the complex relationship between all the elements of built and unbuilt space.’ See also knowing urban design and unknowing urban design.
urbanism1
The study or appreciation of the processes of change in towns and cities; making towns and cities work; town (UK) or city (US) planning. 2 The process of becoming urban. 3 The product of town planning or development. 4 Patterns of social life characteristic of urban areas. 5 Architecture in an urban context. 6 A building’s characteristic of having internal spaces that create something of the sense of being in a street, square or other external urban space. See the dictionary for a fuller entry.
What is the difference between arcology and archaeology? Why did Hitler use Baedeker? What are the blue banana and the blue carrot? Who was Bungalow Briggs? Who lives in Cactusville? Who or what would you call café creep? What is the difference between a car ban, a car barn and kan-ban? Who asked: Can Man Plan? Who is white van man? Where is the city of magnificent distances? What is the difference between disurbanisation and desuburbanisation? What is wrong with dingbats? Where are Dulburb, Dullborough, Dullsville and Dulston? Who suffers from link wilt? What are muesli, spotted dick and Spam Valley? Is there a connection between noli me tangere design and a Nolli diagram? What is the difference between personalisation and personification, or between planning permission and planning consent? What is rear-view marketing? What difference is there between urban regeneration and urban renewal, or between topology and typology? Who or what is a rural buffer? When is a square not a square? What or where is subtopia? When does suburbia become slurbia? What are twocking and triple convergence? Is there a difference between an urbanite and an urbanist? ‘Every language is a world,’ George Steiner declared. Welcome to the world of urbanism: the world of people who think, talk and write about towns and cities in all their ever-changing complexity; who plan, manage, design, administer, celebrate, build, govern, study, engineer, survey, embellish and portray them; and who campaign, teach and sing about them. That, come to think of it, is everyone. The language of urbanism is a rich one. We communicate about the built environment with an astonishing wealth of words and concepts, from dry legalistic formulae to street slang. There is the language of statute (like conservation area), professional practice (like park and ride), design (like massing), academia (like proxemics), polemic (like gnomescape), politics (like positive parochialism), the arts (like lipstick on the face of the gorilla), popular culture (like Stepford Wives), marketing (like kerb appeal), science (like ecosystem), slang (like derry), theology (like strangeness) and warfare (like mousehole). The categories overlap, intersect, collide and merge into one another, and into the everyday language that we all use in talking about the places where we live and work. Specialists develop specialist languages. They do so because they need to talk about specialised matters, but that is only partly the reason. Language is constantly evolving, and any group – whether a family, a tribe or a profession – that is to some extent living in a world of its own, isolated from other groups, will adopt some ways of speaking and writing that are unique to itself. Different types of specialist often fail to understand each other, and fail to communicate with non-specialists. It is even worse than that. Each specialism has a language that its own practitioners only partly understand. They pick it up gradually throughout their training and career, but learning the language is not easy. First, meanings change. Second, any one term may have several different meanings, even though those who use the term may not be aware of it. Academics coin new terms for new concepts, or for repackaging old ones. Politicians find new terms to make their ideas seem fresh. Drafters of legislation need them for new laws. Polemicists need them to get their ideas noticed and to ridicule their opponents. But many terms appear seemingly from nowhere. At conferences of urban specialists of one kind or another it is common to hear a word or phrase that an attentive listener can be fairly sure has never before been heard by most or all of the audience. The speaker is not trying to confuse anyone. He or she is probably using a term that is current in their own office or among fellow members of their own particular specialism. Occasionally, searching for the right expression to express a thought, the speaker appropriates a word or metaphor that just happens to come to mind. Unfamiliar though it may be, the term may yet be understood in its context. If it is not understood, it merely joins the other 98 per cent of the content of the average conference presentation that passes by the audience without making any lasting impression at all. Occasionally an unfamiliar word or phrase will – consciously or not – stick in someone’s memory. It may even enter their vocabulary, and possibly eventually that of their office, of their specialism, of their broad professional field or, ultimately, of the common language. This dictionary records current meanings and tracks how some of them have changed over the years. It may encourage people who write official documents to define their terms. The development plans of a few local authorities already do it. Generally, though, the writers leave their readers to puzzle out meanings for themselves, and the unfamiliar language helps to exclude many of them from joining the debate. Sometimes this is deliberate. More often it just does not occur to the writers that they are communicating in anything other than plain English. ‘Ignorance is power,’ a Liverpool councillor once told me. ‘If you don’t understand what someone is saying, it probably means that they don’t either, so you are doing them a favour by pointing it out.’ That may well be true, but this book is for those who would rather not risk a punch on the nose.
In 2000 the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions published the report of a research project that its Sustainable Development Research Panel has commissioned with the title ‘Towards a language of sustainable development’. The oddly-worded brief was ‘…to identify a coherent language for the education of Sustainable Development…’ The researchers identified the problem as being that, although the term ‘sustainable development’ was well known, too few people were acting in a sustainable fashion. The researchers saw their job as being either to find better ways of explaining the term, or to find an alternative term that would provoke people into action. The project’s aim was to find or develop a language that would help government departments and other agencies educate people into behaving in ways that would support sustainable development. ‘This culture shift will not happen overnight,’ the report declared. ‘Indeed the creation of a new and relevant language for sustainable development will not alone automatically lead to the desired culture change’. It is extraordinary that anyone could have suspected for a moment that it might. Sustainable development is not a specialist topic that can be communicated in a few carefully chosen phrases. At that time the government’s definition of sustainable development, as quoted in the report, encompassed ‘better education, learning resources, training, health services, safer communities,… limiting global environment threats, protecting human health and safety, wildlife, landscapes and historic buildings from natural and man-made hazards,… preserving natural resources… and [enabling everyone to] share in higher living standards and greater job opportunities.’ The challenge is not to persuade people that those are worthy aims, but to help them make choices that support a sensible set of priorities. The best language for English-speaking people to use in discussing what those priorities might be and what choices will support them is plain English. After a year’s work (during which they consulted focus groups), the researchers failed to achieve to their satisfaction the aims of explaining sustainable development or finding an alternative term. This led them to the fatal error of concluding that the concept of sustainability was too complex to communicate through words alone. So they invented a translucent plastic three-sided pyramid. Each face of the pyramid would bear an image representing, respectively, society, economy and environment (which their research concluded were the three elements of sustainability). Eureka! ‘The Sustainable Pyramid is translucent, so that when it is viewed through the base, all three elements are seen coming together,’ the researchers wrote. ‘The power of the pyramid lies in its simple approach to communicating what is otherwise too complex to articulate in words.’ They recommended that the pyramids should be manufactured and distributed in a variety of sizes as ‘creative learning tools’, and that 2-D versions could be marketed as jigsaw puzzles (‘large pieces for young children, small pieces for adults’). The researchers could not have been more wrong. Communication is not like that. A concept ‘too complex to articulate in words’ is unlikely to be understood by looking up the backside of a mass-produced plastic pyramid. Most languages are collections of dialects. The language of urban specialists is itself a collection of different dialects spoken by, for example, planners and architects. As with all dialects, there is a limited degree of mutual understanding between their speakers. Within each dialect group the degree varies from speaker to speaker, depending on the extent to which each has been exposed to other groups. All languages and dialects change continuously. They change for a variety of reasons. First, they absorb words and ways of speaking from other languages and dialects. Second, new linguistic complexities emerge, often for no identifiable reason at all, and become standard, making the group of speakers progressively less intelligible to outsiders. Third, a group of speakers will sometimes cement its own identity – and distance itself from being understood by outsiders – by deliberately adopting usages special to itself. The language and dialects of urbanism change for all these reasons and more, though the processes are hard to follow. For example, if you hear the phrase ‘horses for courses’ spoken at a conference on urban regeneration, the speaker is likely to be a planner, or possibly an engineer, but not at all likely to be an architect. Is this because the concept of means being appropriate to ends is particularly important in planning? Or because planning attracts people with a particular propensity for thinking in such terms? Or has the particular phrase become part of planners’ dialect by chance, giving them a warm sense of belonging when they use it, whereas for architects it has not? To take another example: if you hear the phrase ‘urban intervention’, the speaker (unless an academic) is likely to be an architect. Practising planners, though they spend much of their lives talking about what architects would call ‘urban interventions’, hardly ever use the term. The details may not matter. The important point is that what might at first seem to be a common language has much that is not held in common at all. Cities are the most complex of artefacts. They are matched in complexity by language. In the language of urbanism the two complex structures – of language and cities – collide, with the variously illuminating, exasperating or entertaining consequences that this book records. Some urbanists regret the lack of precision with which their subject is discussed. American new urbanists such as Andres Duany see part of their mission as being to provide precise definitions of urban elements. Terms such as avenue, boulevard, drive, lane, road and street once had specific meanings, they say, but are now used more or less interchangeably. Yet each element has a specific role in helping a particular urban place to function in a specific way. Abandoning the precise definition, the new urbanists argue, deprives planners and urban designers of the ability to make intelligent use of the available urban elements. If these elements are the words, they explain, then there is a grammar and syntax for joining them together. The new urbanists’ solution is to compile lexicons. These prescribe precise definitions for each urban element, explaining in words and diagrams exactly what each element is, and how it should be used in each of a range of precisely defined urban and semi-urban contexts. There are some ways of arranging urban elements that will work in a specific context and some that will not, the new urbanists say, and it is the duty of those who understand the difference to explain it. Such an attitude makes sense for a group of people with a fully worked-out view of how to create the type of urbanism appropriate for a particular context and culture. This dictionary has a different aim. Recognising that all languages change continuously, it describes how words and phrases are actually used. The aim is to help people understand what they are hearing and reading, and to show how clear thinking and effective communication depend on defining our terms wherever there is a danger of ambiguity. Urbanism has faced the problem of how to define its terms for at least a century. The garden city movement defined what a garden city was with some precision, but the more successful the pioneers were in building the movement’s credibility, the more house-builders gave the name ‘garden city’ to developments that met few, if any, of the pioneers’ criteria. The same thing happened when the garden city movement moved on to advocate new towns. At first a ‘new town’ was one designated under the New Towns Act – Stevenage, Bracknell and the like. These government-sponsored initiatives were the new town movement’s idea of good planning. To the public and the sponsors of a wide variety of kinds of developments, though, new town was a convenient term to apply to a scheme of any sort. Consequently the term bore the weight, not just of public disapproval of the towns developed under the New Towns Act – which was itself considerable – but of a wide variety of other urban discontents. Language is seductive, and like all good things it is in danger of being borrowed and debased. Half a century later, the British advocates of urban villages were aware of the problem from the start. They dismissed as too complicated the idea of establishing a detailed test (a ‘sieve’, as the abandoned prototype was called) of what could and could not be called an urban village. Instead they published a simple list of criteria. The urban village concept was successful in attracting professional as well as Royal approval, but before long the Urban Villages Forum was complaining that housing developments meeting none of the urban village criteria were appropriating the name and threatening the movement’s credibility. A few years on, the same is happening with ‘urban extension’. The term is used approvingly by the UK government and the Prince’s Foundation, among others, to describe well-planned developments at the edge of urban areas. But already sharp developers are using the term to give spurious credibility to ill-conceived examples of suburban sprawl. It was the realisation that unregulated labels are public property that led, for example, to the term ‘architect’ being regulated by statute and the term ‘planning for real’ being copyrighted. In the latter case the originators of the participation method had become concerned that the term was being applied sometimes to cynical exercises that merely went through the motions. They now insist that it can be used only to describe programmes run by people with the appropriate training. But for few other urbanistic terms is such an option available or, probably, desirable.
Perhaps the most important question to consider in discussing the language of urbanism is the extent to which specific words relate to specific things. The answer, as the entries in this dictionary show, is that the relationship is often not very close at all. Avenue, boulevard and street sometimes have inconsistent meanings. A square may or may not have four sides. A new town or an urban village may or may not conform to any official definition. The meaning of amenity may be whatever is in a particular planner’s head at the time. Sustainability may be used in any one of the 500 different senses identified by Heather Cruickshank, or in another sense entirely. Renewal may or may not be a synonym for regeneration. A great deal of discussion about urbanism uses abstract words as though they were concrete things. Amenity, community, quality, sustainability and urban renaissance, for example, are spoken of almost as if they were physical substances so familiar that there is no need to define them. Such use of language may make life simpler for the specialists who speak and write it, but it does not match the complexity of the urban experience. Language, as Simeon Potter (1950) noted, does not offer a simple relationship between words and things. If it did, there would be no need for language to be so complex. Nor would a dictionary of urbanism be so long, or such fun to write. Speaking and writing effectively about urbanism depends on defining terms for specific contexts. Urban movements need their lexicons. Planning documents need their glossaries. But individual words can not do the hard work for us. Specifying in a plan that development must be sustainable, for example, is no more useful as guidance to a developer than describing a piece of music as beautiful tells us anything about what it sounds like. Communication depends on taking the trouble to explain what we mean. The rich resources of the language of urbanism are there to tempt us from empty abstractions and from the sterile wastes of professional jargon. This dictionary is offered as evidence that we are spoiled for choice.
What is the difference between arcology and archaeology? Why did Hitler use Baedeker? What are the blue banana and the blue carrot? Who was Bungalow Briggs? Who lives in Cactusville? Who or what would you call café creep? What is the difference between a car ban, a car barn and kan-ban? Who asked: Can Man Plan? Who is white van man? Where is the city of magnificent distances? What is the difference between disurbanisation and desuburbanisation? What is wrong with dingbats? Where are Dulburb, Dullborough, Dullsville and Dulston? Who suffers from link wilt? What are muesli, spotted dick and Spam Valley? Is there a connection between noli me tangere design and a Nolli diagram? What is the difference between personalisation and personification, or between planning permission and planning consent? What is rear-view marketing? What difference is there between urban regeneration and urban renewal, or between topology and typology? Who or what is a rural buffer? When is a square not a square? What or where is subtopia? When does suburbia become slurbia? What are twocking and triple convergence? Is there a difference between an urbanite and an urbanist? ‘Every language is a world,’ George Steiner declared. Welcome to the world of urbanism: the world of people who think, talk and write about towns and cities in all their ever-changing complexity; who plan, manage, design, administer, celebrate, build, govern, study, engineer, survey, embellish and portray them; and who campaign, teach and sing about them. That, come to think of it, is everyone. The language of urbanism is a rich one. We communicate about the built environment with an astonishing wealth of words and concepts, from dry legalistic formulae to street slang. There is the language of statute (like conservation area), professional practice (like park and ride), design (like massing), academia (like proxemics), polemic (like gnomescape), politics (like positive parochialism), the arts (like lipstick on the face of the gorilla), popular culture (like Stepford Wives), marketing (like kerb appeal), science (like ecosystem), slang (like derry), theology (like strangeness) and warfare (like mousehole). The categories overlap, intersect, collide and merge into one another, and into the everyday language that we all use in talking about the places where we live and work. Specialists develop specialist languages. They do so because they need to talk about specialised matters, but that is only partly the reason. Language is constantly evolving, and any group – whether a family, a tribe or a profession – that is to some extent living in a world of its own, isolated from other groups, will adopt some ways of speaking and writing that are unique to itself. Different types of specialist often fail to understand each other, and fail to communicate with non-specialists. It is even worse than that. Each specialism has a language that its own practitioners only partly understand. They pick it up gradually throughout their training and career, but learning the language is not easy. First, meanings change. Second, any one term may have several different meanings, even though those who use the term may not be aware of it. Academics coin new terms for new concepts, or for repackaging old ones. Politicians find new terms to make their ideas seem fresh. Drafters of legislation need them for new laws. Polemicists need them to get their ideas noticed and to ridicule their opponents. But many terms appear seemingly from nowhere. At conferences of urban specialists of one kind or another it is common to hear a word or phrase that an attentive listener can be fairly sure has never before been heard by most or all of the audience. The speaker is not trying to confuse anyone. He or she is probably using a term that is current in their own office or among fellow members of their own particular specialism. Occasionally, searching for the right expression to express a thought, the speaker appropriates a word or metaphor that just happens to come to mind. Unfamiliar though it may be, the term may yet be understood in its context. If it is not understood, it merely joins the other 98 per cent of the content of the average conference presentation that passes by the audience without making any lasting impression at all. Occasionally an unfamiliar word or phrase will – consciously or not – stick in someone’s memory. It may even enter their vocabulary, and possibly eventually that of their office, of their specialism, of their broad professional field or, ultimately, of the common language. This dictionary records current meanings and tracks how some of them have changed over the years. It may encourage people who write official documents to define their terms. The development plans of a few local authorities already do it. Generally, though, the writers leave their readers to puzzle out meanings for themselves, and the unfamiliar language helps to exclude many of them from joining the debate. Sometimes this is deliberate. More often it just does not occur to the writers that they are communicating in anything other than plain English. ‘Ignorance is power,’ a Liverpool councillor once told me. ‘If you don’t understand what someone is saying, it probably means that they don’t either, so you are doing them a favour by pointing it out.’ That may well be true, but this book is for those who would rather not risk a punch on the nose.
In 2000 the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions published the report of a research project that its Sustainable Development Research Panel has commissioned with the title ‘Towards a language of sustainable development’. The oddly-worded brief was ‘…to identify a coherent language for the education of Sustainable Development…’ The researchers identified the problem as being that, although the term ‘sustainable development’ was well known, too few people were acting in a sustainable fashion. The researchers saw their job as being either to find better ways of explaining the term, or to find an alternative term that would provoke people into action. The project’s aim was to find or develop a language that would help government departments and other agencies educate people into behaving in ways that would support sustainable development. ‘This culture shift will not happen overnight,’ the report declared. ‘Indeed the creation of a new and relevant language for sustainable development will not alone automatically lead to the desired culture change’. It is extraordinary that anyone could have suspected for a moment that it might. Sustainable development is not a specialist topic that can be communicated in a few carefully chosen phrases. At that time the government’s definition of sustainable development, as quoted in the report, encompassed ‘better education, learning resources, training, health services, safer communities,… limiting global environment threats, protecting human health and safety, wildlife, landscapes and historic buildings from natural and man-made hazards,… preserving natural resources… and [enabling everyone to] share in higher living standards and greater job opportunities.’ The challenge is not to persuade people that those are worthy aims, but to help them make choices that support a sensible set of priorities. The best language for English-speaking people to use in discussing what those priorities might be and what choices will support them is plain English. After a year’s work (during which they consulted focus groups), the researchers failed to achieve to their satisfaction the aims of explaining sustainable development or finding an alternative term. This led them to the fatal error of concluding that the concept of sustainability was too complex to communicate through words alone. So they invented a translucent plastic three-sided pyramid. Each face of the pyramid would bear an image representing, respectively, society, economy and environment (which their research concluded were the three elements of sustainability). Eureka! ‘The Sustainable Pyramid is translucent, so that when it is viewed through the base, all three elements are seen coming together,’ the researchers wrote. ‘The power of the pyramid lies in its simple approach to communicating what is otherwise too complex to articulate in words.’ They recommended that the pyramids should be manufactured and distributed in a variety of sizes as ‘creative learning tools’, and that 2-D versions could be marketed as jigsaw puzzles (‘large pieces for young children, small pieces for adults’). The researchers could not have been more wrong. Communication is not like that. A concept ‘too complex to articulate in words’ is unlikely to be understood by looking up the backside of a mass-produced plastic pyramid. Most languages are collections of dialects. The language of urban specialists is itself a collection of different dialects spoken by, for example, planners and architects. As with all dialects, there is a limited degree of mutual understanding between their speakers. Within each dialect group the degree varies from speaker to speaker, depending on the extent to which each has been exposed to other groups. All languages and dialects change continuously. They change for a variety of reasons. First, they absorb words and ways of speaking from other languages and dialects. Second, new linguistic complexities emerge, often for no identifiable reason at all, and become standard, making the group of speakers progressively less intelligible to outsiders. Third, a group of speakers will sometimes cement its own identity – and distance itself from being understood by outsiders – by deliberately adopting usages special to itself. The language and dialects of urbanism change for all these reasons and more, though the processes are hard to follow. For example, if you hear the phrase ‘horses for courses’ spoken at a conference on urban regeneration, the speaker is likely to be a planner, or possibly an engineer, but not at all likely to be an architect. Is this because the concept of means being appropriate to ends is particularly important in planning? Or because planning attracts people with a particular propensity for thinking in such terms? Or has the particular phrase become part of planners’ dialect by chance, giving them a warm sense of belonging when they use it, whereas for architects it has not? To take another example: if you hear the phrase ‘urban intervention’, the speaker (unless an academic) is likely to be an architect. Practising planners, though they spend much of their lives talking about what architects would call ‘urban interventions’, hardly ever use the term. The details may not matter. The important point is that what might at first seem to be a common language has much that is not held in common at all. Cities are the most complex of artefacts. They are matched in complexity by language. In the language of urbanism the two complex structures – of language and cities – collide, with the variously illuminating, exasperating or entertaining consequences that this book records. Some urbanists regret the lack of precision with which their subject is discussed. American new urbanists such as Andres Duany see part of their mission as being to provide precise definitions of urban elements. Terms such as avenue, boulevard, drive, lane, road and street once had specific meanings, they say, but are now used more or less interchangeably. Yet each element has a specific role in helping a particular urban place to function in a specific way. Abandoning the precise definition, the new urbanists argue, deprives planners and urban designers of the ability to make intelligent use of the available urban elements. If these elements are the words, they explain, then there is a grammar and syntax for joining them together. The new urbanists’ solution is to compile lexicons. These prescribe precise definitions for each urban element, explaining in words and diagrams exactly what each element is, and how it should be used in each of a range of precisely defined urban and semi-urban contexts. There are some ways of arranging urban elements that will work in a specific context and some that will not, the new urbanists say, and it is the duty of those who understand the difference to explain it. Such an attitude makes sense for a group of people with a fully worked-out view of how to create the type of urbanism appropriate for a particular context and culture. This dictionary has a different aim. Recognising that all languages change continuously, it describes how words and phrases are actually used. The aim is to help people understand what they are hearing and reading, and to show how clear thinking and effective communication depend on defining our terms wherever there is a danger of ambiguity. Urbanism has faced the problem of how to define its terms for at least a century. The garden city movement defined what a garden city was with some precision, but the more successful the pioneers were in building the movement’s credibility, the more house-builders gave the name ‘garden city’ to developments that met few, if any, of the pioneers’ criteria. The same thing happened when the garden city movement moved on to advocate new towns. At first a ‘new town’ was one designated under the New Towns Act – Stevenage, Bracknell and the like. These government-sponsored initiatives were the new town movement’s idea of good planning. To the public and the sponsors of a wide variety of kinds of developments, though, new town was a convenient term to apply to a scheme of any sort. Consequently the term bore the weight, not just of public disapproval of the towns developed under the New Towns Act – which was itself considerable – but of a wide variety of other urban discontents. Language is seductive, and like all good things it is in danger of being borrowed and debased. Half a century later, the British advocates of urban villages were aware of the problem from the start. They dismissed as too complicated the idea of establishing a detailed test (a ‘sieve’, as the abandoned prototype was called) of what could and could not be called an urban village. Instead they published a simple list of criteria. The urban village concept was successful in attracting professional as well as Royal approval, but before long the Urban Villages Forum was complaining that housing developments meeting none of the urban village criteria were appropriating the name and threatening the movement’s credibility. A few years on, the same is happening with ‘urban extension’. The term is used approvingly by the UK government and the Prince’s Foundation, among others, to describe well-planned developments at the edge of urban areas. But already sharp developers are using the term to give spurious credibility to ill-conceived examples of suburban sprawl. It was the realisation that unregulated labels are public property that led, for example, to the term ‘architect’ being regulated by statute and the term ‘planning for real’ being copyrighted. In the latter case the originators of the participation method had become concerned that the term was being applied sometimes to cynical exercises that merely went through the motions. They now insist that it can be used only to describe programmes run by people with the appropriate training. But for few other urbanistic terms is such an option available or, probably, desirable.
Perhaps the most important question to consider in discussing the language of urbanism is the extent to which specific words relate to specific things. The answer, as the entries in this dictionary show, is that the relationship is often not very close at all. Avenue, boulevard and street sometimes have inconsistent meanings. A square may or may not have four sides. A new town or an urban village may or may not conform to any official definition. The meaning of amenity may be whatever is in a particular planner’s head at the time. Sustainability may be used in any one of the 500 different senses identified by Heather Cruickshank, or in another sense entirely. Renewal may or may not be a synonym for regeneration. A great deal of discussion about urbanism uses abstract words as though they were concrete things. Amenity, community, quality, sustainability and urban renaissance, for example, are spoken of almost as if they were physical substances so familiar that there is no need to define them. Such use of language may make life simpler for the specialists who speak and write it, but it does not match the complexity of the urban experience. Language, as Simeon Potter (1950) noted, does not offer a simple relationship between words and things. If it did, there would be no need for language to be so complex. Nor would a dictionary of urbanism be so long, or such fun to write. Speaking and writing effectively about urbanism depends on defining terms for specific contexts. Urban movements need their lexicons. Planning documents need their glossaries. But individual words can not do the hard work for us. Specifying in a plan that development must be sustainable, for example, is no more useful as guidance to a developer than describing a piece of music as beautiful tells us anything about what it sounds like. Communication depends on taking the trouble to explain what we mean. The rich resources of the language of urbanism are there to tempt us from empty abstractions and from the sterile wastes of professional jargon. This dictionary is offered as evidence that we are spoiled for choice.
Nhãn: Sách Thiết kế Đô Thị
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