TOBIAS CHILLA: ‚Stadt-Naturen’ in der Diskursanalyse. Konzeptionelle

Hintergründe und empirische Möglichkeiten

Urban research has questioned the conceptual dichotomy of ‘city’ and ‘nature’ in many respects. However, most debates on suburbanisation, urban ecology or ‘Zwischenstadt’ are confined to material aspects and ignore the discursive dimension. A constructivist perspective provides the opportunity for a deeper understanding. This paper refers to the debate on the ‘social construction of nature’ and discusses its application for the urban context.

Obviously, ‘urban nature’ is not only physically modified by planners, dwellers and architects. Different meanings of ‘nature’ are also framed within political and societal debates in order to achive particular goals, to exclude alternative ways of handling environmental issues etc. Discourse analysis helps to understand how selected topics are put onto the agenda, how they are ‘framed’ and reveals the supporting storylines, semantic fields, visualisations, etc.

After exploring basic concepts of ‘socio-nature’, methodical and empirical questions will be addressed on the basis of selected empirical studies. Calling for a more frequent application of the constructivist perspective on ‘urban nature’, the article proposes a research framework that is based both on general methodolocial debates and on existing studies. Finally, the potential and limitations of this perspective will be discussed

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