Words help us to make sense of what happens in the city, and the words we use to describe urban places imply a specific outlook. This book offers 77 concepts in the hope that they will stimulate new ways of describing and narrating European cities. The concepts are less obvious, “minor” terms that can nevertheless be used to write European cities anew, in ways that emphasize the local, alternative, disenfranchised, and overlooked. Minor concepts can reveal blind spots in urban discourse, or bring insights from one discipline or language to another.

Vademecum means walk with me, and we imagine this book as a field guide you can carry in your pocket while you explore real-life urban places. The arbitrary number of 77 terms captures a particular moment in a experiential collective process among 40 European researchers during the COVID-19 lockdown. This process brought together perspectives from different disciplines and urban settings—from Lithuania to Portugal, from Ireland to Croatia.

An incomplete and open-ended book, it is also an invitation for readers to add their own “minor concepts,” to open new perspectives and write urban places anew.