Urban Studies

Recent developments in Australian social housing policy encompass a larger role for non-government housing providers. The new emphasis is mediated and supported by the discourse of 'community' housing. 'Community' is invoked as an ideal by liberal critics of the centralised state, and conversely, by critics of liberalism who pose it as an alternative to individualism and the abstract formalism of the liberal state. Much of the rhetoric of community housing in Australia has emphasised its claimed potential to demonstrate ways in which social housing management can be made more accountable and responsive, as well as more equitable and efficient, but the evident contradictions in the discourse raise questions concerning the reasons for, and likely outcomes of, state sponsorship of community housing. This paper employs 'textually oriented discourse analysis' to examine key policy documents which have informed the development of community housing policy in Australia, and demonstrates linkages between these discourse samples, and the international tendencies in the societal order of discourse identified by Fairclough as 'democratisation', 'commodification' and 'technologisation'.

This paper focuses on the development and dissemination of policy discourses in the context of the English planning system. The discursive subject is the identification and justification for the allocation of large sites for economic development purposes. The way this discourse has been developed in two case study areas (the West Midlands and Lancashire) is summarised, drawing out the institutional contexts of discourse development, the functions of the discourses (persuasive, co-ordinative and justificatory), the different discursive levels which are affected by changes in the discourses, the ways in which discourses are disseminated and translated from one institutional arena to another and the institutional work that discourses perform.

Towards the end of the 1980s, 'Bridgetown' local authority, having decentralised its housing administration, established a Council Tenants' Forum in one area, with tenants and councillors as voting members. The Tenants' Forum is a formal meeting open to the public and serviced by an area housing officer. In 1994 the council stated that the Tenants' Forum had "required tenants, councillors and officers to take on new roles" and that "the tenants' role has become in a truer sense that of a consumer with ability to accept or reject a service". As part of a PhD study working with the concept of a 'liminal public space' on the boundaries of 'system and lifeworld', looking at the democratic potential of the forum over a period of two years, this paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine one item of business that constituted a 'moment of crisis' during a forum meeting in 1995. The analysis reveals the inter-discursivity characteristic of the forum with consequent indeterminacy of subject positions/identities, and relationships between the members. The analysis indicates a redrawing of lifeworld-system boundaries or, alternatively, the workings of a lifeworld-system interface and the paper concludes by considering the implications of this for the democratic potential of this type of 'user participation'.

Drawing upon the work of Bourdieu, Foucault and Fairclough, this paper focuses on the discursive construction of partnership and empowerment in the official discourse of contemporary British urban regeneration. The paper argues that partnership and empowerment are not neutral terms but are discursive constructs, the meaning assigned to these terms is thus the result of the exercise of power, which in turn has a crucial role in structuring the discursive context within which urban regeneration partnerships operate. The paper's emphasis on official discourse constructs a top-down view of the regeneration process and the community's role in that process. These issues are investigated through a narrative which focuses on a key official document, Involving Communities in Urban and Rural Regeneration, providing guidance on community participation in urban regeneration partnerships. The paper concludes that the operation of these discursive constructs in urban regeneration reinforces existing social relations.

This paper attempts to demonstrate something of the potential value of an analytical focus on language-use as a method in urban studies. It sets out to do this by outlining a particular approach to the analysis of language-use and then bringing it to bear on a concrete problem which is of some significant relevance to those concerned with processes of urban change. The approach is one which is informed by the works of the 'Bakhtin Circle'. The problem addressed is that of the failure of community participation in what has been one of the flagship urban regeneration projects in Scotland over the past 10 years-the 'Ferguslie Park Partnership'. The suggestion is that an application of the approach emanating from the works of the Bakhtin Circle helps to cast some significant light on this problem. Moreover, this approach might well find a broader application in the analysis of processes of urban change.

The aim of this paper is to assess power relations between the participants involved in a newly formed, multi-sectoral, urban regeneration partnership. The paper examines the extent of 'transformation' during the progress of the partnership; focusing on identifying changes in partners' theories of the causes of the local regeneration 'problem'. It draws upon the theoretical framework and analytical tools provided by critical discourse analysis in order to explore how a focus on language use can contribute to identifying changes in assumptions and values. The overall purpose of the paper is to consider the practical usefulness of discourse theory and analysis in identifying instances of the exercise of power. It concludes that discourse analysis can help to detect ways in which power is being exercised which may not be apparent to or acknowledged by those involved in partnerships and can therefore be made to play a useful role in assessing power in partnership working.

Local decentralisation-to urban neighbourhood level-has become commonly projected as an important component of urban restructuring, and in particular of new modes of urban governance. This ubiquity is founded on the mythical qualities of decentralisation. Focusing on the discursive strategies employed by two urban Scottish local authorities, this paper shows how local decentralisation can become commodified as both a good and as 'good practice'. Analysis of the texts used to advocate local decentralisation identifies the language through which the marketing of power is conveyed.

This paper applies the principles of critical discourse analysis to material produced by public landlords to inform tenants about transfer proposals. It refers in particular to the case of Scottish Homes, a quango landlord currently seeking to transfer all its tenanted housing stock to alternative landlords. It starts by setting out some background on the policy context for stock transfer in the UK as a whole and from Scottish Homes in particular. Recent Scottish Homes material is then examined with reference to Fairclough's framework for critical discourse analysis. The paper concludes that it may be too difficult for disposing landlords to counteract the strength of resistant readings from competing informal discourse, however skilful their own marketing, and that discourse analysis is a useful public policy research tool for specific pieces of discourse, particularly in helping to investigate the management of communication.

Australia's housing policy discourse contains many orthodoxies. While orthodoxies are never totally accepted within a discourse, they are the dominant notions within them and as such carry significant symbolic authority. One orthodoxy that has particular authority in Australia is the notion that there is a 'mismatch' in the housing system between the available stock and the size of households to the extent that there is significant underutilisation and underoccupancy of housing. The mismatch argument's power as orthodoxy is such that the idea is assumed in much housing policy discussion. Criticism of the mismatch orthodoxy can take many approaches, such as empirical, conceptual and discursive. The discursive critique focuses not on the empirical relationship between households and dwellings, but on the statements about that relationship. The resulting analysis shows how the mismatch orthodoxy arose in Australia and its effects on housing discourse. This paper examines the construction of the mismatch orthodoxy, from its first uses in the early 1970s to its entrenchment in national and state housing policy research in the early 1990s. It shows how the structures of the discourse construct the orthodoxy, despite empirical and conceptual criticisms of it. Of particular importance is the effect the orthodoxy has on people deemed to be underutilising their dwellings, and on how the orthodoxy affects policy interpretations, such as occupancy standards.

This paper examines contemporary housing management practice by attention to a changing discourse within social policy, emphasising duties over rights. Current policy initiatives are based upon concerns about the collapse of foundational assumptions and a perceived decline in moral responsibility. This concern is most commonly articulated in debates about the existence of an urban underclass, linked to anti-social behaviour on housing estates. The paper argues that a communitarian outlook has exerted a significant impact on contemporary initiatives incorporating a strongly judgmental bias. As a consequence, housing practice discriminates between behaviour in social housing and privately owned property. Drawing upon post-liberal perspectives, the conclusion suggests that the predominance of a deontological discourse has resulted in policies of social control of residents.

Geographical understandings of citizenship and insights from studies of post-communist transitions inform an examination of discourses and processes of urban change in the city of Leipzig, eastern Germany. Dominant public discourses shaped by citizens and elites include demands for `careful urban renewal' and 'citizen participation', rejections of party-politics in local action and collective aims of working 'for the good of the city'. All come under pressure from processes of economic liberalisation. Discourses operate through and work to redefine the positions of 'experts', 'citizens' and 'residents' in the scales of the 'city' and the 'local' and produce complex and contested relations of power and control in specific material situations where space, place and scale are more than passive containers of action.

Writers from within the Foucauldian govern mentality school have characterised recent governmental trends, associated with neo-liberal political rationalities, as manifestations of the death of the collectivist and universalist character of the 'social'. However, the unfolding of these developments varies both between and within nation-states. Drawing upon a discourse analysis of two local government texts from a local authority district in south-east England, the paper emphasises that at this local level the 'social' is reformulated rather than displaced in the way that the grand narrative of the 'decline of the social' implies. In both documents, albeit in different ways, neo-liberal discourse operates in tension with a continuing emphasis upon appearing to maintain equitable and universally legitimate service provision. This amounts not to the death, but rather to a reformulation, of the social.