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2004 28: 101Prog Hum GeogrLoretta Lees

Urban geography: discourse analysis and urban research

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Urban geography: discourse analysisand urban research

Loretta LeesDepartment of Geography, Kings College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

I Introduction

In his 1993 book Voices of decline, Robert Beauregard argued that urban theory had failedto confront the issue of representation in any meaningful way. He proclaimed (p. xi), ifurban theory were to be advanced, and our understanding of cities improved, theorists

would have to confront the tension between interpretative strategies and objectiveanalyses (see Boyle and Rogerson, 2001: 407). It seems that we are well on our way toconfronting this tension. The impact of the discursive turn on urban research (bothpolitical economic and cultural political urban research) is growing as more and moreresearchers seek to integrate the study of language and culture into urban geographicalanalysis (for a variety of examples, see Amin et al., 2000; Beauregard, 1993; Imrie andRaco, 2003; Ley, 1995; McCann, 2004; Mitchell, 1996; Rutheiser, 1996; Slater, 2002;Wilson, 1996; Zukin et al., 1998).

This discursive turn is to be welcomed, but there are two particular problemsassociated with it. The first problem is that many urban researchers seldom

acknowledge or perhaps even realize that there are in fact two distinct, if intertwined,theoretical strands to the discursive turn in social science. Perhaps because thediscursive turn came relatively late to urban studies (see Urban Studies, 1999; Hastings,1998) and urban geography (see Lees, 2002), urban geographers have not always beenas clear about the theoretical roots and methodological suppositions of their claimsabout discourse. The second problem is that a novice seeking to undertake discourseanalysis on an urban issue would be hard pressed to find many studies that outline inany great detail how the researcher(s) have gone about their discourse analysis. 1 Thissecond problem about method, I think, relates back somewhat to the confusion encap-

sulated in the first problem.

Progress in Human Geography28,1 (2004) pp. 101107

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102 Urban geography

II The two main strands of discourse analysis

The first strand of discourse analysis descends from the long Marxist tradition ofpolitical economy and ideology critique. Here discourse analysis is a tool for

uncovering certain hegemonic ways of thinking and talking about how things shouldbe done that serve certain vested interests. For instance, Eisinger s (2000) study of thediscourse of arts and entertainment-led urban redevelopment shows how publiclysubsidized convention centres and sports arenas actually serve the interests of civicelites, business interests and the visitor class at the expense of local residents who bearthe long-term costs of increased taxes to service public bonds. In this context, discourseis almost synonymous with ideology itself in so far as it functions to conceal the powerof vested interests and to induce the consent of the dominated to their own domination(van Dijk, 1997). This rather Gramscian understanding of discourse as an instrument ofhegemony is implicit in Beauregards (1993) Voices of decline where he outlines the roleof discourses of urban decline in framing the urban policy process in the USA, and isthe dominant strand in the new urban sociology (see Gottdiener and Feagin, 1988;Mele, 2000).

More recent work in this tradition has emphasized the role of discourse coalitions inurban politics and policy (see Davoudi and Healy, 1995; Newman, 1996; Mossbergerand Stoker, 1997). Theoretically, this work takes for granted the identity of the actors inquestion and theorizes the way coalitions form not in terms of the shared materialinterests focused on by Marxist theory but through discourse and persuasion.Methodologically this involves the close semantic scrutiny of rhetoric and turns of

phrase to discover particular narrative structures, issue framings and how storylinesclose off certain lines of thought and action at the expense of others (see Fischer andForester, 1993; Fairclough, 1995). The argument, especially in the urban governanceliterature, is that the rhetoric used in policy debates influences the relationship betweenpolicy actors as much as it reflects them. The focus is on groups coming together

because they subscribe to the same terms. So, for example, a term like diversity mightserve as a powerful discursive glue because it is a term that everybody can rally around,even if when pressed it turns out that different groups understand diversity in verydifferent ways (see Lees, 2003a). For those who adopt this perspective, discourse is a

convenient method of analysis through which they can see who is on what side byfocusing on what they say their discourse (for a good example, read Wilson, 1996).Rydin (1998: 178) states:

Here there is an emphasis on the constraints imposed by linguistic structures and on the potential forusing those structures purposively, in a dialectic manner reminiscent of structuration theory; discoursesare reproduced through communicative action by actors and, in using the resources of available linguisticstructures, actors can reshape those structures. As a result, language can influence the policy process ina variety of ways: it can alter perceptions of interests and issues; it can define the object of policy attention; itcan promote particular policy agendas; it can shape the nature of communication between actors; . . . it cancement coalitions or differences between actors; and it can be diversionary, resulting in a form of symbolicpolitics.

The second strand in discourse analysis draws on poststructural theory, and inparticular on the work of Michel Foucault. Here discourse is part of a process throughwhich things and identities get constructed. In Foucauldian terms, discourses are notsimply reflections or (mis)representations of reality; rather they create their own

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regimes of truth the acceptable formulation of problems and solutions to thoseproblems (Foucault, 1980). As Stenson and Watt (1999: 192) argue:

Discourses create, inter alia, a cast list of political and economic agents which government must consider, objectsof concern, agendas for action, preferred narratives for making sense of the origins of current situations,

conceptual and geographical spaces within which problems of government are made recognisable. They alsocreate a series of absent agendas, agents, objects of concerns and counter-narratives, which are mobilised out ofthe discursive picture.

This constructionist perspective is founded on Foucaults (1977) notion that language,knowledge and power are all interconnected through discourse.

This is arguably the dominant strand of discourse analysis in critical humangeography, which has drawn on work in cultural studies, feminism and postcolonial-ism to explore the constitutive nature of discourse (see Gregory, 1994). In this view,language actively constructs actors and the relations between actors (Rydin, 1998: 178).

Thus it provides a theoretical challenge to the assumption of the first strand ofdiscourse analysis about the pre-given identity of political actors. In terms of method,however, this poststructuralist approach has not always been as empirically rich orsensitive as the first strand, with its careful attention to who said what to whom, where,when and how. Instead the focus of this second, poststructural strand of discourseanalysis is on wider constructions of the urban/the city in rhetoric (e.g., Dowling,1996; Lees and Demeritt, 1998). This methodological difference is partly a function ofintellectual style and tradition, with the first strand of discourse analysis based in theempiricist traditions of sociology and the second drawing on postpositivist theoreticalcurrents in cultural studies. Yet it also has a theoretical dimension. One reason that

work in this second strand of discourse analysis has been less concerned with theempirical detail of who does the constructing (who says what) is because of a belief thatpower is all-encompassing and that the linguistic structures of discourse precede andhelp to construct agents as such.

In practice, these two strands of discourse analysis have long been mixed. Indeed,perhaps the most influential example of discourse analysis is Edward Saids (1978)Orientalism, which tried to blend Gramscian ideology critique with poststructuralunderstandings of discourse as constitutive. In urban geography/urban studies, RobertBeauregards Voices of decline provides a useful illustration in this book there is both

an implicit Gramscian-type discourse analysis and a more explicit Foucauldian-typediscourse analysis (see Boyle and Rogerson, 2001, for an excellent review of theFoucauldian strand). However, Said was explicit about the tensions involved inmelding these two theoretical traditions. As relative latecomers to discourse analysis,urban geographers have not always been as clear. There are important theoreticaltensions between the idea of discourse as constitutive and a commitment to agency thatgeographers have sometimes not even acknowledged (although working in environ-mental science Hajer, (1995), offers a useful framework for integrating both strands ofdiscourse analysis).2 While these are theoretical tensions, they find their clearestexpression in questions of method.

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III From methodology to method and back again

Urban geographers (and indeed geographers more generally) do not spell out veryclearly how they have gone about their discourse analysis, and as a consequence there

is a tendency to skirt over their theoretical/methodological assumptions. I certainly feelthat way when looking back at some of my own work. For instance, my recentdiscussion of the British governments Urban Task Force Report and the Urban WhitePaper (Lees, 2003b) only skirts over method. As Rydin (1998: 177) has pointed out,although urban policy commentators recognize the relevance of language, most com-mentaries lack a methodology for analysing language. My reticence to discuss methodin any detail stemmed in part from the space constraints of a book chapter but was alsodue to the fact that I was straddling the two strands of discourse analysis outlinedabove, making it difficult to describe my method. However, just because it is difficult todescribe discourse analysis in terms of method and I do think that discourse analysis

is a craft skill, something like bike riding . . . which is not easy to render or describe inan explicit manner (Hoggart et al., 2002: 165) doesnt mean that we shouldnt try.

This paper, however, is not the place for a detailed outline of the different methodsassociated with discourse analysis. So here I offer only a very brief sketch. Generally,when undertaking discourse analysis, researchers seek to highlight two things: first, theinterpretative context, that is the social setting in which the discourse is located; second,the rhetorical organization of the discourse, that is the argumentative schema thatorganize a text and establish its authority (Tonkiss, 1998: 24950). Fairclough (1992)offers a useful three-dimensional framework of analysis text analysis, discursive

practice and social practice. The textual analysis scrutinizes the vocabulary, grammarand text structure. In terms of discursive practice the context in which the policystatements are made are considered, as are their links to other debates and literatures.In terms of social practice, the more general ideological context within which thediscourses have taken place are conceptualized (see also van Dijk, 1997). Yet suchmethods only focus on spoken and written discourse. Associated with the interpreta-tive and psychic turns in urban geography (see Lees, 2002) I suspect studies of the per-formative role of language will increase in urban geography. Such work will no doubtlearn from the sociologist Erving Goffmans study of spoken interaction (see Goffman,1981). Some urban geographers, in the vein of Goffman (1959; 1970), are alreadyexploring how we present ourselves (perform) in the city. Gary Bridge, for example,follows de Certeaus (1984: 97) treatise that [t]he act of walking is to the urban systemwhat the speech act is to language or the statements uttered (see Bridge, 1997; 2004).

In addition, a more detailed discussion of method would force urban geographers(and indeed all geographers) to confront the theoretical assumptions about what kindof constructionism they want to work with. The term construction can be used todescribe a range of quite different approaches, ranging from the radical claim thatnothing exists outside of discourse to a more epistemologically conventional stance inwhich constructed is synonymous with ideological mystification and used as a term of

refutation to dismiss statements that do not refer accurately to an objective reality foran informative discussion of linguistic constructionism (albeit about nature), seeDemeritt (2003).

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IV Critical urban research and discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis for authors such as Fairclough (1992) is about providing aframework for linking the properties of discoursal interactions and texts with features

of their social and cultural circumstances. Although important, for a critical urbangeography (see Lees, 2003c) such a project is a rather benign form of social scientificresearch. Although many of the urban studies that undertake discourse analysis areinterested in urban social justice (focusing on substantive concerns such as citizenship,community, urban governance, planning, policy processes, power, etc.), some critics(e.g., Merrifield and Swyngedouw, 1996) charge that talking about social justice is notenough, and as critical urban researchers we need to create it. As Merrifield (1995)argues, most discursive analyses are not actively engaged enough and so cannot beutilized in urban activism. So I leave this commentary reminding critical urbanresearchers that in writing about social justice in the city we need to start with the

discursive, but then we need to move away from it because talking about social justiceis not enough we need to create it! Here discourse analysis could be used as the firststep in an action research agenda rather than as an end in itself, as has tended to be thecase in most contemporary urban research to date.

Notes

1. This has been brought home to me recently first, from struggling to write about themethodology of discourse analysis in a recent methods textbook I co-authored (Hoggart et al., 2002)and, second, at the 2003 Association of American Geographers Conference in New Orleans, where Iwas an invited discussant for the session Spatiality, Discourse and Urban Life (organized by JenniferSpeights-Binet and Eugene McCann) out of sixteen papers, not one outlined in any detail how theyhad gone about their particular discourse analysis.

2. Thanks to David Demeritt for pointing me towards Hajer.

Loretta Lees 105

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