Urban regeneration vs gentrification: framing discourse about urban development through metaphor

As figures of speech that allow for one thing to be understood in the terms of another (Lakoff, 1993), metaphors work particularly well in familiarizing language users with complex concepts like urbanism, architecture and urban development while also providing cognitive support to the processing of spatial concepts (Niented, 2016). The foregrounding of specific aspects of a topic inherent to their functioning entails that metaphors can emphasize (or minimize) certain elements of a target domain depending on the choice of source domain, which proves especially relevant when dealing with social issues (Charteris-Black, 2004). This inevitably produces a framing effect which influences the perception of the topic(s) involved by identifying problems and their causes, suggesting possible solutions and evoking moral evaluations (Entman, 1993). The expression ‘urban regeneration’ itself is a metaphor that can carry multiple, but invariably positive, meanings, with spiritual, biological, sociological, as well as political undertones (Furbey, 1999). The term ‘regeneration’ is not, however, the only option when conceptualizing urban development; different stakeholders may adopt different terminology – ‘gentrification’ being probably the most widespread alternative – to promote a contrasting point of view centered on class-struggle discourse (Dimitris Kitis, 2024). Starting from common conceptual metaphors used to frame the city and urban regeneration (as identified by Nientied, 2016), this paper aims to investigate large corpora datasets of general English, such as enTenTen21 on SketchEngine, following a top-down metaphor-detection approach to investigate - from a critical discourse analysis perspective - the overall representation of urban development in contemporary English-language discourse through the identification of recurrent metaphors used both within the discourse of regeneration and that of gentrification. More specifically, the study aims to compare metaphorical constructs associated with gentrification with (better known) metaphors of urban regeneration, offering a critical reflection on the way in which these two contrasting framings are played out in discourse.