What is wrong with urban regeneration practices? Towards a Foucauldian analysis of urban regeneration documents.

Abstract

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.