The Right to a City without Advertising: How Discursive Contraction Disempowers Local Communities

How can we develop, strengthen and enact democratic voice in the governance of urban public space? While many agree that local communities need a right to the city, this paper explores a long-standing regulatory mechanism within English urban governance that enables - but rarely enacts - such a right. The Area of Special Control of Advertisements (ASCA) powers in the English planning system allow local authorities the legal capacity to prohibit almost all forms of outdoor advertising within a designated zone, thereby restricting corporate use of urban public space for profit. Using documents from a national census of local authorities, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of ASCA reviews which reveals how this right to the city is discursively sacrificed. We develop the concept of discursive contraction to describe the ways planning discourse recruits yet restricts the range of legitimate actors, meanings, and outcomes associated with public space regulation. Three discursive practices underpin the contraction that, in this case, delegitimizes, forecloses, and subsumes civic reservations: 1) invisible actors, active documents 2) consistency as a governing logic and 3) the urbanisation growth assumption. We conclude that, in an age of fragmented urban governance, discursive practices are an increasingly important mechanism of power that require renewed critical analysis.