The Dictionary of Urbanism
Explaining the language and concepts of urbanism, urban design, planning, architecture, regeneration and the environment, The Dictionary of Urbanism is the most comprehensive and accessible resource in its field of study.
The language of urbanism is the key to thinking creatively about our urban future. The dictionary describes what urban terms mean, how they have evolved, and how they express the ideas that shape towns and cities.
The first edition of The Dictionary of Urbanism was universally praised. The second edition, now complete, is an unprecedented work of scholarship in its field. With 13,000 entries and lavishly illustrated with the author’s explanatory line drawings, it will be an enormous book. To have the impact it deserves, it needs to be both well presented and reasonably priced. To achieve that, we are seeking sponsorship from organisations that value this enterprise.
Sponsor the second edition
Organisations that would like to be associated with the publication of the second edition are invited to contact Rob Cowan on X (Twitter) or on LinkedIn.
When Rob began this ambitious project in 2000, he did not expect it to take 23 years of solid work, or that it would be such fun. The first edition of The Dictionary of Urbanism, with a preface by Sir Peter Hall, was published in 2005. It received universal critical acclaim as unique, authoritative, highly readable and, unusually for a dictionary, entertaining. The first edition was published by Streetwise Press. With little active marketing, the book became known by word of mouth, leading to sales of 3,000 copies.
The 470-page first edition consisted of 6,600 entries, with 325,000 words of text. Over the subsequent 18 years Rob has updated and expanded the dictionary, doubling the number of entries. The massive second edition, whose text and illustrations are now ready, has more than 13,000 entries and 670,000 words of text.
Illustrations
The first edition was illustrated by Lucinda Rogers. The new edition will be much more fully illustrated, by several hundred of the author’s own highly explanatory plans and pen-and-ink drawings (see illustrations).
What is the market?
The market is anyone who is fascinated by towns and cities, by the processes that change them, and by the words and phrases that we use to talk and write about them. That will include students, academics, practitioners, professionals and civic leaders in the fields of urbanism, urban design, urban planning, urban architecture, urban regeneration and the environment. The book is written in a style that is accessible to non-specialists, by an author well known for writing in plain English.
The book is intended for an international audience of people who need a reference to the meaning of specialist terms in English, as well as wanting an enjoyable introduction to the whole field.
In the years since the first edition was published, the author has added many hundreds of North American terms to the dictionary, in consultation with North American advisors. The result is that, although the author is based in the UK, the coverage of the language of North American urbanism, city planning and environmental issues is more comprehensive than in any other publication, on either side of the Atlantic.
What is the competition?
Such an ambitious single-language dictionary has never been attempted in this field. The closest comparison is with Charles Abrams’ The Language of the City, published in 1971, now out of date and long out of print. The following are titles that are in some way comparable:
| Title | Number of entries (approximate) |
|---|---|
| The Language of the City: a glossary of terms, Charles Abrams, 1971, Viking Press, New York. | 1,000 |
| Encyclopaedia of Planning, Graham Ashworth, 1973, Barrie and Jenkins. | 100 |
| Encyclopedia of Urban Planning, Arnold Whittick (editor), 1974, McGraw Hill, New York. | Unknown |
| Encyclopedia of the City, Roger Caves (editor), 2005, Routledge, London and New York entries. | A few hundred |
| Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, Ray Hutchinson (editor), 2010, SAGE Publications, California. | 170 |
| Encyclopedic Dictionary of Landscape and Urban Planning (compiled by the International Federation of Landscape Architects Committee for the Translation of Technical Terms; multilingual in English, Spanish, French, and German), two volumes, 2010, Klaus-Jürgen Evert (editor-in-chief), Springer, Berlin. | 10,000 |
| The Language of Towns and Cities: a visual dictionary, Dhiru A. Thadani, 2010, Rizzoli, New York. | 700 |
| The Dictionary of Urbanism, Rob Cowan (first edition) | 6,600 |
| The Dictionary of Urbanism, Rob Cowan (second edition, forthcoming) | 13,000 |
Reviews of the first edition
The following reviews can be read in full clicking the button below.
The author
As an urbanist, writer and editor with an international reputation, Rob Cowan has rare breadth of experience.
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Planning (director of UDS Planning; a former corporate member of the Royal Town Planning Institute; and former editor of Town and Country Planning)
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Architecture (former deputy and acting editor of the Architects’ Journal)
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Urban design (the first director of the Urban Design Group; and author of Essential Urban Design and many other titles)
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Urbanism (a founding academician of the Academy of Urbanism)
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Housing (former editor of Shelter’s magazine Roof )
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Historic building conservation (editor of Context, the journal of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation, since 2000)
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Academia (former research fellow at De Montfort University, and former visiting examiner at UCL and the University of Manchester)
