Metaphors in policy discourse about urban development

Metaphors have long been recognised a key role in conceptualising space (Nientied, 2016), particularly in the case of cities, which have been shown to be especially prone to extremely varied metaphorical representations (Gerber and Patterson, 2014). The choice of metaphor(s) through which cities are represented has a framing effect (Entman, 1993) on discourses on and around the city, constraining the way the urban environment – and its related challenges – is interpreted and understood, including envisaged solutions to such challenges. As texts offering solutions to perceived urban problems, policy documents concerning urban development can be considered privileged loci for the investigation of metaphors of the city and their attendant discourses. In recent years, discourse analytical approaches to policy analysis have been gaining traction, with a growing awareness of the meaning creation involved in policy design (Colebatch, 2006; Marston, 2004 and above all Bacchi, 2009). We argue that such meaning creation rests on and reproduces recurrent city-related tropes. In this presentation, we analyse a corpus of EU documents related to various aspects of urban planning with a view to identifying underlying metaphors of the city whose pervasive deployment informs policy framing. To do so, we adopt a top-down metaphor-detection approach based on existing repertoires of metaphors of the city which we combine with a corpus-based approach aimed at identifying additional lexical features that can be argued to be indexically linked to recurrent metaphorical constructs. We argue that through Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004) it is possible to achieve an understanding of the metaphorical framing of urban policies that can shed light on the ideological underpinnings of such policies, thereby potentially fostering a more productive debate on the future of European cities.