The city as text: Constructing Dublin's identity through discourse on transportation and urban re-development in the press

This paper illustrates how the project of 'redeveloping' Dublin city has been influenced by a set of symbolic and referential functions that may be collectively called insularity. In its political configuration, this insularity constitutes a desire to debase, rather than explore alternative realities of political deliberation on transport and urban renewal issues. In its relatedly cultural form, it aspires to preserve tradition for tradition's sake. Insularity is both perpetuated and upheld through a public discourse on the city that is played out between competing social actors. This paper uses a text-oriented discourse analysis to examine a section of that discourse in the Irish Times between January 1991 and December 1995 to demonstrate how broader ideological codes that perpetuate structural relationships of inequality find expression through discursively-elaborated urban development issues.