About Us

Urban Lexicons invites creative doers and critical thinkers to help set
the direction for an emerging area of people-led, place-based activity
and learning.

This growing community of practice and research was initiated between Central Saint Martins Research Associate Rosanna Vitiello and Research Fellow Marcus Willcocks. This community is connected by events, workshops, action research, and community-led pilots.

We began with a mash-up between the disciplines of socially responsive and story driven design to explore the opportunities to bring people, soul or character back into the processes of urban evolution.

Urban Lexicons draws inspiration from an ongoing body of research and design responses, first initiated by Rosanna Vitiello and Marcus Willcocks in 2008. It builds on voice, city stories, street character and how collective create urban languages that we can connect to and converse with, through words and through everday activity.

Outputs include ...

How the City Speaks to Us, and How We Speak Back: Rewriting the Relationship Between People & Place (chapter) - exploring how placemaking should open the conversation between citizens and the city, creating more equitable local places as our post-Covid world emerges. This is the final chapter of The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, available here.

Local Legends (curated interview series) - exploring how the power and poetry of narrative helps us make better places, through interviews, events and site stories.

The Difference is in the Detail (paper) - exploring the potential of detail as a place branding tool and its impact upon our perceptions and responses.

Destination Branding and the Urban Lexicon (chapter) - exploring how the character of city streets should inform and express a place brand.

Unravelling the Urban Lexicons of our Everyday Environments (book) - exploring how signs of love, life, welcome, and character support positive relationships with places.