(유) Linking Discourse and Space 외 3

 

 

(유) Linking Discourse and Space: Towards a Cultural Sociology of Space in Analysing Spatial Policy Discourses

 

Tim Richardson and Ole B. Jensen

 

Summary.

 

The aim of this paper is to explore how spatialities are ‘constructed’ in spatial policy discourses and to explore how these construction processes might be conceptualised and analysed. To do this, we discuss a theoretical and analytical framework for the discourse analysis of socio-spatial relations. Our approach follows the path emerging within planning research focusing on the relations between rationality and power, making use of discourse analytics and cultural theoretical approaches to articulate a cultural sociology of space. We draw on a variety of theoretical sources from critical geography to sociology to argue for a practice- and cultureoriented understanding of the spatiality of social life. The approach hinges on the dialectical relation between material practices and the symbolic meanings that social agents attach to their spatial environment. Socio-spatial relations are conceptualised in terms of their practical ‘workings’ and their symbolic ‘meaning’, played out at spatial scales from the body to the global—thus giving notion to an analysis of the ‘politics of scale’. The discourse analytical approach moves away from textually oriented approaches to explore the relations between language, space and power. In the paper, we use examples of the articulation of space in the emerging field of European spatial policy. It is shown how the new spatial policy discourse creates the conditions for a new set of spatial practices which shape European space, at the same time as it creates a new system of meaning about that space, based on the language and ideas of polycentricity and hypermobility.

Spaces, then, may be constructed in different ways by different people, through power struggles and conflicts of interest. This idea that spaces are socially constructed, and that many spaces may co-exist within the same physical space is an important one. It suggests the need to analyse how discourses and strategies of inclusion and exclusion are connected with particular spaces (Flyvbjerg and Richardson, 1998, pp. 9–10).

 

 

 

A Conceptual and Analytical Framework for Interpreting the Spatiality of Social Life

Lee Pugalis

 

Abstract

 

This paper provides a framework for understanding the phenomenon of the discursive-material production of space, and also, for considering how unknowns may be organised. Language is instrumental to the production of place but has been overshadowed by investigations of material transformations. This is partly being redressed by the ‘linguistic turn’ in urban policy analysis over recent decades which recognise the performative aspects of language. However, the methodological ‘gap’ between discursivities and materialities remains as too often analysis of urban policy discourse has taken an aspatial analytic approach. Representations of space cannot be divorced from spatial practices and vice versa. Based on my premise that many visions, plans and strategies never materialise, and even some that do materialise have little bearing on what is produced, a mixed-method approach is required that considers the recursive interactions between spatial practices and representations of space.

Grounded in the theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, which conceptualis space as a social process and broaden discourse to embrace spatial practice respectively, I devise a conceptual and operational analytics which I refer to as interpretive-spatial analysis with the goal of helping to bridge the problematic ontological, epistemological and methodological divide between discursivities and materialities.

 

 

 

THE POLITICS OF SPACE AND TIME WITHIN MARKET-CENTRIC URBAN POLICY: THE CASE OF THE BONNYRIGG LIVING COMMUNITIES PROJECT

 

Dallas Rogers

Abstract

This article provides a discourse analysis framework that explicitly interrogates how conceptions of space and time are implicated in the discursive processes of urban policy making. Urban policy increasingly delineates social subjects and geographical space according to internationally mobile discourses of urban and social pathology, but local actors construct these discourses as localized urban ‘realities’ with corresponding market-based solutions. Reporting on a five-year study of the Bonnyrigg Living Communities project in Sydney, Australia, the analysis demonstrates how employees of the state-, non-government- and private-sector institutions reimagined and (re)coordinated time and space within this public housing estate redevelopment project, according to market-centric logic. Using the spatial metaphor of ‘invited space’ (Cornwall 2004) and the temporal metaphor of ‘imaginary time’ (Hawkings 1988), the analysis shows market-centric approaches reconfigure and demarcate space and time in specific ways. These allegorical forms showcase the power relations inherent to the structure of market-centric policy formation.

 

Tim Richardson, "Foucauldian discourse: Power and truth in Urban and regional policy making", European Planning Studies Volume 4, Issue 3, 1996 pp.279-292

 

 

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of Michael Foucault's work on discourse, knowledge and power for our understanding of the policy process, and for planning theory. A recurrent weakness in planning theory is its failure to address issues of power. In particular, the recent turn to argument in planning theory, grounded in Habermasian Communicative Rationality, is marked by power‐blindness. The importance of a focus on power is discussed, focusing on the sociopolitical contexts of planning, theory in planning and the inter‐disciplinary nature of planning. The paper concludes that the turn to argument risks rendering the policy process vulnerable to the influence of power. Foucault's work suggests an alternative planning paradigm which unmasks and challenges power and brings the possibility of empowerment.

 

 

The Field of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis: Structures, Developments and Perspectives

 

http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/234/517