The Blended City

The project addresses a key urban imaginary of our contemporary moment: the ‘blended city’ – a floating signifier deployed in different ways by different actors for different agendas. The term’s ubiquity and agency is matched by its vagueness and potential misinterpretation. The project will apply discourse analysis and mapping methods to articulate alignments and misalignments in this term’s use between, urban theory on the one hand, and public debate, political discourse, professional planning discourse, and urban metrics on the other.