IT MAY be only the middle of January, but architects and planners are already gearing up to foster civic pride in the banlieue — keeping an eye out for claim-happy neds along the way. Confused? You need the Dictionary of Urbanism, which has announced 12 urban buzzwords to watch out for this year.
Some, like civic pride, sound familiar, but the dictionary’s author, Rob Cowan, points to its comeback at the hands of the communities minister, David Miliband. Banlieue, the French term for suburbs, has also gained currency over here after the riots in Paris at the end of 2005. And ned, the Scottish word for a layabout or hooligan, is “spreading south”.
Claim-happy — the tendency for people to sue, is also going to be big this year, Cowan says, with designers “excessively cautious” about providing anything that could lay them open to a legal claim.
“Some of the terms, like naked street [no signs and markings] add to the richness of the language. Others have done nothing but help [to] bamboozle us with jargon,” says Cowan, who calls the Royal Town Planning Institute’s attempt to define the term “public involvement” “desperate”, having no truck with their definition of “effective interactions . . . on a continuous basis”.
www.urbanwords.info