Glossary

The Glossary is presented in relation to the sequence in which the key concepts of the book are presented.

Introduction

Digital as used in the title and the book refers not only to the technical aspects of computer modelling software, programming and scripting, but also to the broad and accessible array of popular digital technologies: web browsers, workflow software, open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining, insourcing, informing, and a new generation of digital, mobile, personal and virtual technologies.1

Modelling is used in the title and the book in every sense of the word. Designers use the term to refer to a 3-D miniature, this year's new car, and a person who shows off new clothes. A science model is a quantitative demonstration of a theory of how something functions. For policy makers, a model is a picture of how the environment ought to be made, a proscription of a ‘good’ form or a ‘fair’ process which is a prototype to follow.2

Urban design refers to the academic and professional discipline formed between architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. It includes both the concerns that architects and landscape architects have for the built environment, and the social, economic and policy concerns of planning.

Spectacle/spectacular/spectacularisation is introduced in the sense Guy Debord has popularised it as a reading of an entertainment- and media- centric society lulled into passivity by the dream world of high production value imagery. ...

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