Glossary of Terms in Occasional Use
With Operational Disambiguation for the Attentive Citizen
The following terms appear in the analytical literature, in municipal communications, and in the prospectuses of property developers, sometimes with identical wording and entirely different intentions. The entries below attempt to clarify both usages. The rigorous definition is offered in good faith. The disambiguation is offered in the same spirit.
Authenticity
Rigorous definition. In Zukin’s (2010) account, authenticity describes the accumulated social history of a place — its working-class inhabitants, its vernacular architecture, its unglamorous service economy — which gives it distinctiveness and therefore market value, and which is progressively destroyed by the very market that has recognised it. Authenticity is not a stable property of places; it is a resource that is identified, commodified, and consumed until it is no longer present, at which point it is replaced by representations of itself.
Operational disambiguation. When a property developer describes a neighbourhood as authentic, the term functions as a forward-looking valuation rather than a description of current conditions. It identifies a place whose social character has not yet been fully converted into price, and signals the intention to complete that conversion. The resident who believes the description is a compliment has not yet understood the prospectus.
Carrying Capacity
Rigorous definition. The threshold beyond which an urban system can no longer perform its primary functions for permanent residents without measurable degradation: in services, in noise levels, in housing availability, in the spatial conditions of everyday life. The concept is derived from ecological systems theory and applied to urban contexts to describe the point at which visitor volume exceeds the system’s capacity for self-repair and normal function.
Operational disambiguation. The concept has no legally binding standing in Spanish urban planning law. When invoked by municipal authorities, it appears exclusively in documents produced after the threshold has been exceeded, as evidence that the situation was being monitored. The monitoring, in practice, consisted of the documents.
Displacement
Rigorous definition. In Cócola-Gant’s (2018) account, displacement describes the sequential process by which tourism-driven market pressure removes long-term residents from a neighbourhood — not through a single act of eviction but through the cumulative conversion of housing stock, service infrastructure, and public space into assets whose yields are optimised for a non-resident clientele. The process is sequential because each conversion raises the threshold for the next resident considering whether to stay, and because the departures it produces are individually voluntary and collectively structural. A useful further distinction, introduced in this volume, separates displacement proper — in which a competing occupant takes the space — from reduction, in which the space is removed from the category in which the resident was looking and re-entered the market under a heading she does not have the budget to read. The second is quieter, harder to document, and considerably more common.
Operational disambiguation. Institutional language prefers renewal, upgrading, repositioning, or dynamisation — terms that describe the same process from the perspective of the actor performing it rather than the person experiencing it. The resident who has been displaced does not, as a rule, describe her situation in any of these terms. She describes it as not being able to find a flat, which is accurate but lacks the administrative polish that would qualify it for inclusion in a strategic plan. The strategic plan, for its part, does not use the word displacement either, on the grounds that the word implies a subject who has been acted upon, and the plan is not organised around subjects of that kind.
Infrastructure of Affordable Sociability
Rigorous definition. A distributed network of low-threshold social spaces — bars, small shops, market stalls, neighbourhood services — whose prices are calibrated to local incomes and whose collective function is to sustain the everyday encounters on which shared civic life depends. The term is the narrator’s own construction and is not borrowed from the literature; it is used here to name a phenomenon that the literature tends to describe in its absence rather than in its presence. An infrastructure of affordable sociability is not a cultural amenity, not a heritage asset, and not a leisure offering; it is the set of places in which a student, a hospital orderly, a retired mason and a shift worker can each find, within a short walk of where they live or work, somewhere that serves them on terms they recognise. Its defining property is distribution: when it is concentrated in a few designated streets it becomes a scene; when it is distributed across a city it becomes a city.
Operational disambiguation. The word infrastructure is conventionally reserved by municipal administrations for amortisable physical assets — bridges, collectors, fibre optic, roundabouts of the kind described in Chapter 2 — whose construction can be tendered, whose maintenance can be budgeted, and whose completion can be announced. The infrastructure described here shares none of these properties. It cannot be tendered because no single actor built it. It cannot be budgeted because its cost was distributed across thousands of small decisions taken by people who did not know they were building anything. And its disappearance cannot be announced because no single closure constitutes the loss; the loss is the moment at which the resident walks the length of a street she used to know and finds that the only establishments still open are the ones whose prices have been recalibrated for someone else.
Junkspace
Rigorous definition. Koolhaas’s (2002) term for the sprawling, incoherent built environment produced by late-capitalist development: spaces that are functionally efficient for the purposes of commercial throughput but devoid of local meaning, historical continuity, or spatial identity. Junkspace is not derelict space; it is fully functional space whose function is the elimination of every quality that cannot be monetised.
Operational disambiguation. A street in a UNESCO World Heritage zone whose every shopfront sells the same variant of the same refrigerator magnet is not derelict. It is, in Koolhaas’s taxonomy, perfectly realised junkspace: organised, clean, commercially coherent, and entirely indistinguishable from the same street in Seville, Lisbon, or Prague. The World Heritage designation, in this context, functions as a quality assurance label for the undifferentiated product.
Non-Place
Rigorous definition. Augé’s (1992) term for spaces of circulation, transit, and anonymous consumption — airports, motorway service stations, shopping malls — that lack the relational, historical, and identity-forming qualities that define place in the anthropological sense. A non-place is not an absence; it is a fully constituted space whose constitution specifically excludes the possibility of belonging.
Operational disambiguation. A historically significant street can simultaneously be a place of memory and a non-place of souvenir commerce. This is not a paradox but a description of what happens when the surface of a place is preserved and its social content is replaced. The stones remain; the neighbours do not. Augé would have recognised the result immediately; he would not have found it comforting.
Perimeter
Rigorous definition. A distributed micro-economy of neighbourhood provisioning organised around an anchor institution — a hospital, a faculty, a stadium, a transit node — and sustained by a recognisable repertoire of bars, small shops and rhythms whose prices are calibrated to the habitual clientele of that anchor. A perimeter is smaller and less formal than a barrio, more functionally specific than a district, and considerably more fragile than either.
Operational disambiguation. The term is preferred to the official designation barrio funcional, which the municipal apparatus tends to deploy at the moment it has already decided that the perimeter in question can be substituted by something else, and which therefore arrives, as a rule, slightly too late to be of use to the people the perimeter was serving. A perimeter is not charm, not heritage, and not picturesque; it is provisioning, and the test of whether one still exists is whether the people who depended on it still recognise their own prices on the menu.
Provisional
Rigorous definition. In planning and construction contexts, a temporary measure adopted under conditions of urgency or operational necessity, with the explicit intention of reversal once the precipitating circumstances have been resolved. The provisional measure is distinguished from the permanent intervention by its declared temporality and the conditions attached to its removal.
Operational disambiguation. In practice, provisional measures in urban heritage contexts have a documented tendency to become permanent at a rate approximately inversely proportional to the number of times the word provisional appears in the authorising decree. The 2026 asphalt overlay of a cobbled street in Segovia’s UNESCO-listed historic centre — described by the responsible Councillor as “meditated, prudent, adequate, and accurate” (González-Salamanca, 2026), and by heritage specialists as “absurd, disproportionate, and without reasoned justification” — offers a compact illustration of the lifecycle: emergency decree, institutional criticism, promise of reversal, and subsequent silence at intervals inversely proportional to the political cost of fulfilment.
Right to the City
Rigorous definition. Lefebvre’s (1968) political and philosophical claim that the inhabitants of a city have a collective entitlement to participate in the production and governance of urban life — not merely to occupy space, but to shape it. The right to the city reframes urban justice as a collective entitlement rather than a set of individual property rights, and implies that the reconfiguration of urban space in the interests of capital is a form of dispossession, whether or not any individual resident has been formally evicted.
Operational disambiguation. The right to the city is not enforceable in any court of which the narrator is aware. It is, however, the most precise description available of what is being withdrawn when a city is reconstituted as a platform of value extraction: not merely the bar, not merely the hardware shop, not merely the affordable flat, but the accumulated claim — informal, unarticulated, and entirely reasonable — to live in a place that continues to be organised around the needs of the people who live in it.
Threshold
Rigorous definition. The point past which an urban system continues to operate but no longer operates for the same constituency. It is not a moment of breakdown, it is rarely announced, and it is the cumulative result of decisions taken at different times, by different agents, mostly within the law and largely in good faith. Its distinguishing property is that it can only be recognised in retrospect and by exclusion: by the time it has been crossed, the people for whom it mattered are typically no longer in the room to confirm the crossing.
Operational disambiguation. The term is to be distinguished from the use favoured by tourist boards and municipal communications departments, in which a threshold is something one is congratulated for having crossed — the millionth visitor, the tenth consecutive year of record arrivals, the entry of a new district into a curated itinerary — and in which the crossing is invariably presented as an achievement rather than as a quiet subtraction. The two senses share a word and nothing else.
Value Extraction Platform
Rigorous definition. Following Harvey (2012), a configuration in which the physical and social infrastructure of a city — its streets, historic fabric, cultural institutions, proximity services — is reorganised to maximise the capture of economic rent by capital interests that need not be, and typically are not, domiciled in the city in question. The platform metaphor implies not a single actor but a system: a set of legal, regulatory, and market arrangements that produce extraction as their normal output.
Operational disambiguation. The platform is not a conspiracy. It requires no coordination among actors, only a shared interest in the continued rise of property values and a regulatory environment that treats this interest as equivalent to the public good. The ordinary citizen participates, typically without awareness, each time they use a short-term rental platform, attend a ticketed cultural event in a repurposed public building, or accept that the bar they preferred has closed because that is simply how things go. The last clause is the one that deserves scrutiny.