Official EU documents frame cities as normative projects, not statistical zones

Evidence

It is precisely in this context that it is important to think about the manner in which the European Commission might suggest that “the past decades have seen a rediscovery of the value of urban living and a growing appreciation of quality of life in the cities of Europe” and that ” ‘Urban areas’ are a statistical concept. Cities are projects for a new style of life and work.” (European Commission, 1991:7, my emphasis) It is also precisely in this context that alongside the spaces of the city and the technologies of their representation it becomes important to interrogate the third piece of the jigsaw: the characters that explicitly and implicitly, historically and geographically, inhabit these new spaces. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s interest in how official/legal language encodes ideology — parallels the sumptuary laws and dress-panics pieces.