Language, Change and Cityscapes: An Introduction

Discourses in and about the city embody, narrate and portray its past, present and future, and the people living such a linguistic landscape. The city’s cultural, discursive and spatial contours, features and images are constantly (re)imagined, (re)produced and (re)framed in private and public communication. This edited collection gathers together a series of interdisciplinary research about discourse(s) in the context of global cities, thus analysing and discussing the common or distinctive features of contemporary urban areas, seen as networks of spatial and symbolic nodal points and peripheral discursive ‘zones’. The chapters showcase a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches to investigate spaces from a dialogic perspective (i.e., as sites of negotiation and (re)mediation), thus offering a set of compelling models for future research in urban discourses.