Urban design practices are hard to analyse and critique. In this paper, we suggest that part of the difficulty can be alleviated if one problematises them as having a “positivity”. That Foucauldian notion refers to the discursive rules that must be met in order for a statement to be considered as “knowledge” in a specific discipline and at a specific time in history. We then describe the “archaeological” method that Foucault developed to analyse “positivities”. Applying this method to the analysis of a multidimensional diagnosis document produced by a team of consultants in the first stage of an urban regeneration project, we describe the discursive rules of construction that seem to underlie the reasoning displayed in the document. The findings cannot be generalised but they provide strong hypotheses for future inquiry into urban regeneration discursive practices.

This article addresses a paradox: whereas urban projects are meant to have a specific local (historical, geographical, and cultural) color, the projects themselves and the discourse about them are highly standardized. Collected through semi-structured interviews, the discourses of the designers (architects, urban planners, landscape architects, promoters, and project managers) of two urban projects in France are scrutinized using discourse analysis (textual statistics) and content analysis (qualitative approach). First, the study reveals the uniformity of these actors’ discourse: textual statistics show a striking similarity in discourse across the two sites even if the differences among professions are more apparent. Second, it highlights the role of local specificities within this uniformity: the qualitative analysis shows that the discourse remains standardized despite its purpose to highlight singularities. Finally, the paper reveals how the actors themselves perceive this parad...

The application of the psycho-social paradigm of social representations in geographical studies is rather recent. However, this approach is considered to complement the work conducted in social geography where non-directive interview methods are often used. The main hypothesis of this paper is that mobility practice is not only influenced by the accessibility to transport infrastructures, but also structured by social representations about mobility, housing, and job. Based on a corpus of semi-structured interviews with 69 Franco-Luxembourgish cross-border commuters, the Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) is employed to explore relations between different types of social representations and mobility practice. This mixed method allows to integrate both quantitative statistical data and qualitative discursive data. It is concluded that social representations can be envisaged as a theoretical approach to understanding mobility practice, and that the daily mobility practice is social...