Some of you might have heard of the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Basically, it's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in published books (Google books database has over 20 million scanned books).
So this time, I have used it as as a proxy for the popularity of famous watchwords in Urban Planning, such as smart growth, compact city, new urbanism, creative class and world city.
Here is what I've found. You can click on the image to enlarge it or you can click here and try your own combination of words.
[Click on te image to enlarge it]
Perhaps you might ask 'why would someome do that? for what purpose?' the ultimate answer!
You may also play around using google trends, which shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume in google's search engine.
