100 Urban Trends: A Glossary

If you asked a whole lot of people what they thought were the hot topics in cities, what do you think they would say?  The BMW Guggenheim lab travelled to Berlin earlier this year, and ran a bunch of workshops based on this question.  Responses were used to form a 100 term glossary, which provides a nice little snapshot of trends (as well as a quick source of reference for the jargon that us planners are wont to throw around).

"Their definitions aim to document and take the 'temperature' of a particular time and place—Berlin in the summer of 2012—and to understand what city experts and non-experts alike gathered to discuss: what cities were, are, and can be."

Browsing through the glossary, it's really interesting to see the range of terminology that makes the cut; including familiar things like 'decentralisation' and 'crowdsourcing' through to terms I'm not so familiar with, like 'Disneyfication', 'hackerspace' and 'upcycling'.

The terms we use show where our interests are; it would be interesting to compare this data from Berlin with similar exercises in other cities.  I wonder what would make the list in Melbourne...

See the the glossary here.