Urban Vocabulary
This term describes the overall outline of a city's buildings and structures as seen against the horizon.
What is a skyline?
The process of improving an area that has been in decline through infrastructure and social investment.
What is urban regeneration?
This type of settlement is characterized by squalid conditions, overcrowding, and a lack of formal infrastructure or land rights.
What is a slum?
This adjective describes a policy that ensures fairness and impartial distribution of resources, such as housing.
What is equitable?
This adjective is used in NYC policy to describe an "awe-inspiring" building that is legally protected from being demolished, regardless of how much an investor wants to "regenerate" the site.
What is "landmarked"?
This adjective describes a living space with more people than it was designed to accommodate, often resulting in poor sanitation.
What is overcrowded?
These are two major "cons" often cited by critics of gentrification regarding the original community.
What are displacement and the loss of cultural identity? (Accept: Rising costs)
Originating in the Philippines, this term refers to leftover food scavenged from garbage, highlighting extreme food insecurity.
What is pagpag?
A neighborhood described this way lacks the necessary funding, staff, or infrastructure to support its population.
What is under-resourced?
A speaker would use this specific adjective to describe a neighborhood with a bad reputation, as opposed to an "awe-inspiring" one.
What is infamous?
While both are tall, this term typically refers to an iconic commercial building, whereas a "tower block" usually refers to a high-rise residential flat.
What is a skyscraper?
This verb describes what happens to low-income residents when property taxes and rents increase beyond their financial reach.
What is to out-price?
Tenants in disinvested rent-stabilized buildings often face a "triple threat" of these three pests, which thrive when landlords fail to seal structural gaps or provide proper waste management.
What are rats, roaches, and bedbugs?
Large-scale infrastructure projects like highways often act as this, causing the physical removal of entire communities.
What is a driver of displacement?
When a developer describes a tiny, overpriced apartment in a converted warehouse as "industrial-chic" or "efficient," they are attempting to create this type of positive tone.
Question: What is an aspirational or persuasive tone?
In urban regeneration, this term refers to the process where original residents are forced to move due to rising costs or redevelopment
What is displacement?
This specific type of project aims to improve the aesthetic appeal of a neighborhood but is often criticized for being a "surface-level" fix.
What is a beautification project?
While Billionaires' Row features ultra-luxury skyscrapers, 1 in 17 New Yorkers lives in this public housing system, which currently requires over $78 billion in repairs for basic living standards.
What is NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority)?
This term describes the presence of many cultures in one area, which can be enriched by regeneration but also suffer from social tension.
What is a multicultural neighborhood?
When a reporter says "the community is being transformed," they are using this grammatical voice to hide who is doing the transforming (likely developers).
What is the passive voice?
Using C1 vocabulary, this two-word phrase describes a fair and inclusive improvement project that would aim to fix air quality for all residents.
What is equitable enhancement?
This argument questions whether massive spending on "iconic" city centers is fair when residential neighborhoods lack basic services.
Is high investment in megacity regeneration justified when neighborhoods are under-resourced?Megacity vs. Undeveloped Neighborhoods
This specific type of building decay—common in under-resourced NYCHA complexes—results in "peeling lead paint" and "toxic mold," which significantly exacerbate asthma rates among children in the South Bronx.
What is disinvestment?
This critical question asks whether planners should focus on long-term residents, incoming investors, or city planners.
Who is the priority in regeneration projects?
This term, "affordable housing," is often considered a "misnomer" in NYC because it is based on the AMI (Area Median Income), which includes wealthy suburbs, making the "affordable" rent actually quite high.
What is a "relative" or "misleading" term?