Urban Problem Discourses: Understanding the Distinctiveness of Cities

ABSTRACT:

Despite the insistence in interpretive policy analysis that the discursive construction of problems must be understood in terms of their historical and spatial context, it remains an open question how cities provide such a context. We argue that cities as a distinct form of sociation enable certain (discursive) actions, while restricting others. Taking both the interest of interpretive policy analysis in the social construction of political reality and holistic concepts of approaching the distinctiveness of cities as starting points, we scrutinize how the cities of Frankfurt/Main, Dortmund, Birmingham, and Glasgow provide distinct contexts for the construction of local policy problems. Based on an inquiry into urban discourses we ask, first, how problematizations involve locally specific attributions of problem causes and responsibilities for problem solving and, second, how this is related to a locally distinct understanding of the city’s past, present, and future.

Notes

The various post-empiricist approaches that are united under the term interpretive policy analysis originate with very heterogeneous theoretical developments outside of policy studies, in particular social constructionism, critical theory, and post-structuralism (Fischer, , p. 21). Therefore, the notion of interpretive in policy analysis is broader in that it covers hermeneutic and argumentative as well as discourse-analytical approaches.

See, for instance, Swyngedouw’s () reflections on glocalization or Le Galès () for the construction of cities as collective actors in a globalized economy and a weakened nation-state.

The term sociation (“Vergesellschaftung” in German) as coined by sociologist Georg Simmel refers to the mode or process that a particular social interaction assumes, whether associative or dissociative. Society is then regarded as the sum of all interactions between the individual parts that make up the whole society.

The research project Problem Discourses: The Intrinsic Logic of Cities and the Political Agenda was carried out at Technische Universität Darmstadt and Heidelberg University from 2011 to 2014 and was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); for further information see http://www.stadtforschung.tu-darmstadt.de/dfg_projektverbund_1/teilprojekte_3/problemdiskurse_1/problemdiskurse.en.jsp

The corpus in Frankfurt consists of 2,174 newspaper articles (from the local newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Frankfurter Rundschau), 10 council minutes, and 13 semistructured interviews; in Dortmund of 2,033 newspaper articles (from Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and Ruhr Nachrichten), 8 council minutes and 14 interviews; in Glasgow of 1,005 newspaper articles (Evening Times), 8 council minutes, and 11 interviews; and in Birmingham of 1,924 newspaper articles (Birmingham Mail), 11 council minutes, and 11 interviews. In the meantime we analyzed articles from the same newspapers for the year 2001 and the results confirm the findings presented in the empirical part of the article.

In our research, we combine the Foucauldian approach of treating statements in a linguistic corpus as events for which recurrent patterns and regularities can be established on the one hand, with interviews on the other hand. The latter is more usual in “hermeneutic” research. Nevertheless, we neither use the interviews in order to find some “true meaning” or “authentic intention” in what the speakers say, nor to elucidate some substantial essence of a city’s culture. Instead we treat them, first, as a further source in which typical ways of constructing problems become visible when key actors talk about the cities (including, e.g., topics that the media discourse circumvents), and, second, to check the plausibility of our findings against appraisals of insiders of the cities’ political life (for such “credibility” checks in interpretative research, see, e.g., Fischer, , pp. 154–157; Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, , pp. 106–107). To us this seems compatible with Foucault’s interpretative analytics as presented by Dreyfus and Rabinow ().

This pickle has been described for discourse analysis in general: the claim that an interpretation is dominant carries a quantifiable connotation that is at odds with the qualitative methodology of the analysis (Schwab-Trapp, , p. 179).

All quotations from the corpora of Frankfurt and Dortmund are the authors’ own translations.

In an ongoing media analysis we compare the discourses as reconstructed here for the year 2010 with patterns found in the year 2001. It is therefore evident that the portrayal of the political elite as a failure in Birmingham is not related to the party-political constellations of the city’s council.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marlon Barbehön

Marlon Barbehön is a Research Assistant and PhD student at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg. His academic interests include urban studies, interpretive policy analysis, and Europeanization. He is currently working on the discursive construction of “the middle class” in different European countries. Among his recent publications is the article (with Michael Haus) Middle Class and Welfare State – Discursive Relations (2015).

Sybille Münch

Sybille Münch is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Her research focuses on interpretive approaches to policy analysis as well as urban research. Prior to joining her department, she coordinated evaluation studies in the field of intercultural social work. Her major publication is a monograph on the problematization of ethnic segregation in Germany, the Netherlands, and England and related attempts at ethnic and social mixing in housing policies, Integration durch Wohnungspolitik? (2010).

Petra Gehring

Petra Gehring is Professor of Philosophy at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Her research interests include questions of discourse and power in a Foucauldian tradition, biopolitics, and methodological implications of “the distinctiveness of cities.” Recently she has published (with Andreas Großmann) Constructing Discursive Differences: Towards a “Logic” of Cities (2014) and co-edited (with Sybille Frank, Julika Griem, and Michael Haus) a volume on comparing cities, Städte unterscheiden lernen (2014).

Andreas Grossmann

Andreas Grossmann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. His current research interests include questions of urban discourses and of political and legal theory. Among his major recent publications is a contribution to The Impact of Idealism volumes (ed. by Nicholas Boyle et al.), German Neo-Hegelianism and a Plea for Another Hegel (2013).

Michael Haus

Michael Haus is Professor of Modern Political Theory at the Institute for Political Science, Heidelberg University. His research is focused on contemporary political theory, local government studies, governance, and statehood. Among his more recent publications are articles on output legitimacy in local democracy as well as urban leadership and community involvement.

Hubert Heinelt

Hubert Heinelt is Professor at the Institute for Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt. A former president of the European Urban Research Association (EURA), his recent publications include articles on local councillors’ notions of democracy, and the article “Local Democracy and Citizenship” in The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics. He is the editor of The Second Tier of Local Government in Europe (2011) and Metropolitan Governance: Different Paths in Contrasting Contexts – Germany and Israel (2011).