This paper explores the contribution of Discourse Studies (DS) to urban research from two perspectives: the field of inquiry and the research corpus. It investigates which areas have utilised DS in their research and why, as well as which types of discursive modes have been subjected to analysis. An analysis of 126 publications suggests that DS has been widely utilised to investigate urban questions in urban planning and theory, urban policy, housing research, and environmental policy; this capacity can be expanded to other fields of urban research. The study also finds out that the corpus of analysis has mainly remained monomodal, limited to one item or multiple items of the same type, predominantly text-based materials. To address this problem, the corpus of the analysis should be diversified to recognize the multimodality of discourse. This entails encompassing a variety of non-verbal modes such as images, music, gestures, moving images, soundtracks, and 3D objects. The paper con...

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...