Glossary

Glossary of urbanism and urban studies

Sixty-one terms from urbanism and urban studies, defined in a few lines, with the videos from the channel that explain them.

Housing

Evictions · 15 videos: An eviction is the legal removal of a person from the home they occupy, for unpaid rent or mortgage or at the end of a lease.
Financialisation of housing · 21 videos: The financialisation of housing is the process by which a home stops being primarily a place to live and becomes a financial asset: bought, securitised and traded like any other investment product.
Gentrification · 62 videos: Gentrification is the process by which a working-class neighbourhood attracts investment and higher-income residents, housing and retail prices rise, and the original population is displaced.
Inequality · 68 videos: Urban inequality is the unjust distribution of what the city offers —housing, jobs, transport, greenery, clean air, safety— among its neighbourhoods and inhabitants.
Informal housing · 34 videos: Informal housing is built outside planning rules: without title, permit or services, on occupied or illegally subdivided land.
Land and land value · 11 videos: Urban land is the resource that cannot be manufactured: its price depends on where it is and what the rules allow to be built.
Latin America · 84 videos: Latin America is the most urbanised region in the world after North America —more than 80% of its population lives in cities— and the one that urbanised fastest in the twentieth century: from rural-urban migration to the ten-million metropolis in two generations.
Neoliberalism · 23 videos: Urban neoliberalism is the dominant way of governing cities since the 1980s: the municipality stops providing and starts competing to attract investment, privatises services, promotes with public money and sells land and housing to the market.
Public policy · 49 videos: Urban public policies are the government decisions —laws, plans, budgets, taxes, programmes— through which the state, at its three levels, intervenes in the city: housing, transport, land, services, safety.
Rent · 127 videos: Rent is the monthly price of occupying a home that belongs to someone else.
Segregation · 31 videos: Urban segregation is the spatial separation of the population by income, origin or ethnicity: rich neighbourhoods and poor neighbourhoods that never touch, each with its schools, services and opportunities.
Shrinking cities · 2 videos: A shrinking city is one that loses population steadily —through deindustrialisation, emigration or ageing— and is left with more homes, streets and services than it can sustain.
Social housing · 57 videos: Social housing is housing built or subsidised by the public sector and rented or sold below market price to those who cannot afford it.
Spatial justice · 28 videos: Spatial justice is the idea that geography —where one lives, what is near, what is far— produces injustice by itself, and that changing space is therefore a way of doing justice.
Speculation · 18 videos: Real estate speculation means buying land or housing not to use it but to sell it at a higher price, betting on appreciation.
Thinkers · 276 videos: Urban thinkers are the authors —geographers, sociologists, architects, economists, journalists— whose ideas explain the city: from Engels and Howard to Jacobs, Lefebvre, Harvey, Sassen or Gehl.
Touristification · 8 videos: Touristification is the transformation of a neighbourhood to serve visitors before residents: homes turned into holiday rentals, everyday shops replaced by chains and leisure, and prices that push out those who lived there.
Urban economics · 11 videos: Urban economics studies why cities exist, why some grow and others do not, and how land, housing and transport prices form within them.

Streets & mobility

15-minute city · 3 videos: The 15-minute city is an urban model in which work, school, healthcare, shopping and leisure are within a quarter of an hour on foot or by bike from home.
Accessibility · 22 videos: Accessibility has two meanings in planning.
Cars and parking · 13 videos: A car takes ten to twelve square metres parked and around a hundred in motion, sits idle 95% of the time, and is the user to whom the most public space has been ceded in a century.
Citizen participation · 9 videos: Citizen participation is the involvement of inhabitants in decisions about their city, from the mandatory consultation on a plan to participatory budgeting or neighbourhood management of a space.
Cycling · 28 videos: The bicycle is the most efficient vehicle in existence for trips of two to ten kilometres, and its urban use depends almost entirely on one thing: segregated, continuous infrastructure.
Gender · 9 videos: Gender-sensitive planning starts from a fact: for a century the city was designed for a male worker's trip from home to job, not for chained trips, care work, the pushchair or fear on a dark street.
Pedestrians · 34 videos: The pedestrian is the most numerous and least considered user of the street: everyone walks some part of every trip, yet space, signage and priority were designed for a century around the car.
Public space · 76 videos: Public space is the set of streets, squares, parks and promenades in common ownership and use: where the city meets without anyone having to pay or ask permission.
Public transport · 51 videos: Public transport is the network of buses, trams, metros and trains that moves many people in little space: a bus lane carries five to ten times more people per hour than a car lane.
Street life · 2 videos: Street life is the everyday activity that happens between buildings: people walking, stopping, talking, selling, playing or simply watching.
Urban psychology: Urban psychology studies how the built environment shapes perception, behaviour and wellbeing: why one street feels calm and another anxious, how we orient ourselves in the city, what makes a place memorable.
Walkability · 25 videos: Walkability is the degree to which a place invites people to move on foot: wide, continuous pavements, frequent crossings, street-facing shops, shade, nearby destinations and a sense of safety.

Urban form

Density · 22 videos: Urban density is the number of people, homes or built floor area per unit of land.
Height and skyscrapers · 9 videos: Height is the most visible and least decisive dimension of urban form: a skyscraper concentrates floor area on little land, but surrounded by emptiness it yields less density and less life than a six-storey block.
Heritage · 15 videos: Urban heritage is what a society decides to keep of its city because it gives identity: monuments, ensembles, layouts, and increasingly the intangible —the market, the festival, the trade.
Historic centre · 9 videos: The historic centre is the oldest part of the city, predating the nineteenth-century extensions: narrow streets, irregular blocks, buildings of several overlapping periods.
Industrial city · 14 videos: The industrial city is what the Industrial Revolution produced between 1800 and 1900: explosive growth around the factory, overcrowded working-class districts without water or sewers, epidemics, and the first planning legislation in history as a response.
Street grid · 1 videos: The street grid is the pattern streets and blocks form seen from above: orthogonal as in New York or Barcelona, radial as in Paris, organic as in a medina.
Suburbia and sprawl · 8 videos: Suburbia is the low-density residential periphery of detached houses and streets without shops that depends on the car for everything.
Urban history · 3 videos: Urban history studies how cities were formed and transformed: who decided their layout, what technique and what power made it possible, and what remained of each stage.
Urban planning · 16 videos: Urban planning is the technique and the politics of deciding in advance how a city grows and changes: which land gets developed, with what uses and densities, where the streets, parks and facilities go.
Urban utopias · 4 videos: Urban utopias are the models of the ideal city each era drew to correct the real one: Ebenezer Howard's garden city (1898), Le Corbusier's radiant city (1930), Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City.
Zoning · 25 videos: Zoning is the planning technique that divides land into zones and sets for each what may be built: use (housing, industry, retail), height, floor area and coverage.

Climate & nature

Biodiversity · 7 videos: Urban biodiversity is the set of species —plants, birds, insects, mammals— living in the city, and it is larger than it seems: parks, vacant lots, cemeteries and roofs sometimes host more variety than the farmland around.
Climate change · 14 videos: Cities produce around three quarters of global emissions and concentrate most of the population exposed to their effects: heatwaves, floods, sea-level rise.
Energy · 22 videos: The urban energy transition is the shift from a city that burns fossil fuels —in cars, boilers and power stations— to one that moves and heats with renewable electricity, consumes less and produces part of what it uses on its own roofs.
Flooding · 19 videos: Urban flooding happens when rain falls on an impermeable city —roofs, asphalt, concrete— and water that no longer infiltrates runs to the lowest point faster than sewers can swallow it.
Green infrastructure · 7 videos: Green infrastructure is the network of parks, trees, green roofs, wetlands and corridors that provides services to the city as grey infrastructure —pipes, cables, asphalt— does: it regulates temperature, absorbs rain, cleans the air, hosts biodiversity.
Heat island · 5 videos: The urban heat island is the temperature difference —from two up to ten degrees— between a city and its rural surroundings, caused by asphalt and concrete absorbing heat by day and releasing it at night, the lack of vegetation, and heat from cars and machines.
Infrastructure · 79 videos: Infrastructure is the set of networks that make the city work and are only seen when they fail: water, sewers, electricity, data, roads, transport, waste.
Resilience · 19 videos: Urban resilience is a city's capacity to absorb a shock —flood, earthquake, pandemic, economic crisis— and keep functioning, recover and reorganise without losing what is essential.
Urban trees · 1 videos: The urban forest is the set of trees on a city's streets, parks and lots, and it is the cheapest infrastructure there is: it gives shade, lowers temperature by several degrees, holds rainwater, filters particles and raises house prices on the street where it stands.
Waste · 11 videos: Urban waste is everything the city discards —packaging, food, rubble, appliances— and managing it is the most expensive municipal service after water.
Water · 12 videos: Urban water is a cycle the city broke: it is brought from far away, used once, discarded through the sewer and ignored when it falls from the sky.

Technology & power

Algorithms · 8 videos: Urban algorithms are the automatic rules that decide things in the city without anyone seeing them: where police patrol, which area the ambulance serves first, who is allocated a home, what price the platform shows.
Artificial intelligence: Artificial intelligence applied to the city is the use of models that learn from data to predict, classify or generate: forecasting transport demand, detecting buildings from satellite, simulating a plan's effect, managing traffic.
Colonialism · 27 videos: The colonial city is one a power built or reorganised to administer someone else's territory: a grid laid over the earlier city, a European quarter separated from the native one, a port facing the metropole.
Geopolitics · 13 videos: Urban geopolitics studies the city as stage and weapon of power between states and within them: the besieged, divided, fortified city; the capital built from scratch to found a nation; the port or financial node powers compete over.
Global city · 21 videos: The global city is, in Saskia Sassen's formulation (1991), the one that concentrates the command functions of the world economy: headquarters, finance, advanced services, and with them a workforce polarised between highly paid professionals and precarious services.
Platform urbanism · 4 videos: Platform urbanism describes how digital companies —for holiday rentals, ride-hailing, delivery, parking— reorganise the city without building anything: they turn flats into hotels, cars into taxis and pavements into warehouses, capturing the value while the cost —prices, traffic, precarity— is paid by the city.
Smart city · 7 videos: The smart city is the promise of running the city with sensors, data and algorithms: adaptive traffic lights, bins that call for collection, platforms that integrate services.
Surveillance · 15 videos: Urban surveillance is the systematic observation of space and of those who use it: cameras, facial recognition, plate readers, phone tracking, drones.
Urban data · 4 videos: Urban data are the records the city generates by functioning —transit cards, sensors, phones, cadastre, social media— that make it visible in real time and at the scale of the individual.