Discourse Analysis of a Modern city: Representation of shanty town and the advent physical texture

Discourse Analysis of a Modern city:Representation of shanty town and the advent physical textureGiven post structuralism and Michel Foucault school of thoughts, the present study aims to overview the emergence of modern city in Ahvaz, genealogically. Foucault argues that “we must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them”. It can be declared that city, as a spatial-social reality, is the product of particular discourses. We conceive and interpret the objects (places) only through discursive relations, to the degree that the identity of a certain person or a certain place is established through power-knowledge relations, linguistic signs, otherness, antagonism, exclusion, etc. The result indicates that the essence of Iranian modern city has come to existence through special discourse. And the identity of city has been on the presence of the "others". Initially, the story and process of "becoming" a modern city in Iran has taken its physical frame based on centralization. On the contrary, the "others" has condemned and represented itself in various labels such as shanty town. Therefore, the identical basis of current cities in Iran is taken into account as an inevitable and absolute fact.