Urban Design Practice Flashcards

A collection of vocabulary terms and key concepts covering global urban design tools, history, and development strategies discussed throughout the lecture series.

SDG

Sustainable Development Goals; a framework of goals for global development often integrated with urban reconciliation of built and natural environments.

ESG

Environment Social Governance; a set of factors (Environmental, Social, and Governance) used as a method design for achieving development goals within cities.

Informal Settlements

Slums or neighborhoods characterized by inadequate housing, lack of basic services (water, sanitation, energy), and a lack of tenure security, housing approximately one billion people globally.

Tenure Security

The legal or social protection of individuals' rights to live in their homes; its absence often inhibits community initiatives and private investments in informal settlements.

Micro/Temporary Programs

A form of urban appropriation that reactivates residual spaces for a limited time, often through nomadic urbanism and bottom-up individual ideas.

Structuring Axes of Urban Transformation

A growth model in São Paulo centered on public transportation to minimize commutes by optimizing land use in highly accessible areas near trains and subways.

MiniPublico

A participatory deliberation methodology used in São Paulo where a representative group of the local population consults on regional and four-year budget planning.

CEU (Centros Educacionais Unificados)

Complexes in São Paulo that combine schools, daycare, libraries, and sports areas, acting as 'Centers of Urban Structuring' within peripheral neighborhoods.

Polykatoikia

A multi-story housing typology in Athens produced by a property law that allowed landowners to trade buildable ground tax-free for built indoor space.

User-Generated Urbanism

Small-scale architectural solutions and grassroots initiatives, such as self-managed parks or alternative economy networks, emerging in response to urban crisis.

Natives Land Act of 1913

A South African law that reserved 7.5% of land exclusively for black Africans, who represented 85% of Cape Town’s population at the time.

RDP (Reconstruction and Development Program)

A post-apartheid democratic government project in South Africa focused on large-scale housing delivery to the poor through fixed-price private developers.

Empower Shack

A housing project in Cape Town focused on densification, reblocking, and integrating built environment infrastructure with social livelihoods.

Piques

Intermediate spaces around the Santiago Metro (connecting tunnels or ventilation) that represent potential sites for community projects like libraries or bars in the periphery.

Commissioners Plan of 1811

The planning document that laid out the horizontal grid system for Manhattan, defining its modern building blocks at $220 \times 60\,m$.

1916 Zoning Law

New York City regulation that defined building typologies by regulating height and setbacks and designating land uses to ensure light and ventilation.

Friends of the High Line

A non-profit organization that successfully advocated to transform an abandoned elevated railroad in New York into linear public parkland.

SEZ (Special Economic Zone)

Quasi-autonomous areas in China, like Shenzhen, with special administrative rules designed to serve as economic experiments and trading gates to the world.

Hukou

The Chinese household registration system that grounds individuals to their birth locales, often excluding migrant workers from urban citizenship benefits.

Chengzhongcun

Also known as 'urban villages'; former rural villages in China that become enclosed by urban developments, operating outside formal administrative regulations.

Woshoulou

Known as 'handshake buildings'; structures in Chinese urban villages built so close together that they touch, illustrating extreme density.

Non-Aligned Modernity

A period in Sarajevo (Yugoslavia) where architecture and urbanism were used to build a new society based on collectivization and self-management principles.

GUP (Generalni Urbanistički Plan)

The General Urban Plan established in Sarajevo in 1961, driven by the socialist institute of planning.

Urbicide

The systematic destruction of cities and urban societies under a military regime, specifically targeting the middle class and civil society through demolition.

Barbacoas

Inverted architectural transformations in Havana where high ground-floor rooms are subdivided horizontally using makeshift materials to increase living space.

Ford T

The iconic mass-produced vehicle model that transformed Detroit into an industrial machine-city primarily based on the automobile industry.

Donut City

A term describing cities like Detroit where the city center decays and loses its tax base while growth is pushed to the suburban edges.

Hoodle Grid

The grid layout used in the founding of Melbourne that initially lacked public squares or places for civic collectivity.

Small Homes Service

An initiative established by Robin Boyd in 1947 to provide standard, architect-designed home plans at a low cost to address Melbourne's postwar housing shortage.

Nightingale Model

An architect-led development model in Melbourne that removes the developer from the equation to build affordable and sustainable multi-residential projects.

Spanischbrötlibahn

The first railway line in Switzerland (1847), connecting Zurich with Baden and marking the start of Zurich's commercial expansion.

Neu-Oerlikon

A notable example in Zurich of re-densification where former industrial manufacturing sites (such as MFO) were converted into a living and working district.

Hobrecht-Plan

A 1862 plan for the expansion of Berlin designed for 1.5 to 2 million citizens, incorporating existing roads and railways into a large parcel system.

Urban Pioneers

Individuals or small-scale offices in Berlin that proactively use abandoned land or empty buildings for temporary, creative, and experimental urban projects.

Risky Areas

A legal designation used under the 2012 Disaster Law in Istanbul to bypass property rights and unlock high-value land for development under the guise of seismic safety.