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Review in Context, the journal of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation

November 2005

Review by: Hank Dittmar, chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment and chair of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Robert Cowan’s The Dictionary of Urbanism is not a book you can read in one sitting. Like Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater Zyberk’s The New Civic Art (which as a visual compendium of urbanism is an excellent companion to this volume), The Dictionary of Urbanism is best approached like a snack food. But like a snack food, one finds oneself returning to it again and again, almost as a guilty pleasure.

Partly this is due to Rob Cowan’s sly sense of humour, recognisable even to this supposedly irony-challenged American. His jokes pervade the entire book, complementing the complete and serious definitions in a delicious manner. Partly the guilty pleasure comes from Lucinda Rogers’s line drawings of urban scenes and noted urbanists. They enliven the volume and add another layer of commentary.

But mostly my unalloyed pleasure at this book derives from Cowan’s incredibly broad-church approach to urbanism, and his clear and concise definitions. Any dictionary that contains on the same page a reference to R&B legends Martha and the Vandellas, Marxism and master plan deserves one’s custom.

When one digs into the actual definitions, one is rarely disappointed. Sure, I was a little miffed when Cowan’s definition of ‘new urbanism’ devoted as much attention to the criticisms of libertarian academics as it did to a discussion of the tenets of the movement, but I was also pleased that he took the trouble to include the entirety of the Charter of the New Urbanism. For a recent immigrant to this country, his definitions relating to the planning process and the Sustainable Communities Plan are quite useful, although one wonders how often they will require updating – but Cowan promises to do that through a website (www.urbanwords.info).

Cowan acknowledges that it is difficult to pin precise definitions on many of the terms used by planners and architects when speaking of the city. Not only do people have different meanings for the same term, I am convinced that people deliberately use words in new ways in order to appropriate useful words (and the values associated with them) for new purposes. In other words, I am convinced that when Richard Rogers and I talk about density, we are not talking about the same thing.

This volume deals with that dilemma in the way that dictionaries often do: by providing alternate definitions. This is a neat solution for the lexicographer, but a lousy solution for the profession, which badly needs to start by agreeing on the meaning of words for various bits of the city, as a first step for beginning again the effort to plan the town and country in a coherent way. Of course this is a problem for a consensus process, and it can not be solved by a single author.

Only one other quibble arises with respect to The Dictionary of Urbanism: the fact that many of the design terms could be better described with a drawing or a photograph. In such a richly illustrated book, it should have been possible to define a few key terms with a line drawing or a chart. Including images of this kind would have reduced the ambiguity that is always introduced when one talks about a visual and physical subject in purely written ways.

My colleague Ben Bolgar is fond of showing a slide of the tower of Babel when he speaks about the need to supply participants in the process of designing their communities with a grammar and a vocabulary of design. The Dictionary of Urbanism goes a long way toward meeting that need. In the too many months since I agreed to write this review, this book has been – and continues to be – a useful reference.