Introduction

Urban space is not merely a physical outcome of planning and design but is produced through intertwined institutional, discursive, and socio-political processes. Planning documents play a crucial role in this process by defining spatial problems, legitimizing particular forms of knowledge, and establishing frameworks through which urban space is interpreted and transformed. From a Foucauldian perspective, these processes are inseparable from relations of power and knowledge, through which certain interpretations of space become legitimate while others remain marginalized.

This issue is particularly significant in historically and symbolically contested urban spaces, where heritage, collective memory, development objectives, institutional interests, and everyday practices intersect. Atiq Square in Isfahan represents such a context. Despite the emphasis placed on revitalization, urban identity, and the recovery of urban life, the institutional and discursive rationalities embedded in the official documents governing its transformation require critical examination. Accordingly, this study aims to critically explore the institutional-discursive construction of space in official urban planning documents related to the revitalization of Atiq Square. It specifically seeks to identify the dominant spatial rationalities embedded in these documents and trace how they are translated from policy discourse into planning, design, and implementation practices.

Methodology

The study employs a qualitative and critical research approach based primarily on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), complemented by a Foucauldian interpretation of the power–knowledge–space relationship. The empirical material consists of mid-level and executive official documents associated with the revitalization and urban development of Atiq Square, selected to capture the institutional translation of spatial policies into planning and implementation practices.

The documents were systematically examined through open, axial, and theoretical coding using Atlas.ti. The analytical process followed Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, encompassing text, discursive practice, and social practice. At the textual level, recurring concepts, problem framings, and normative statements were identified. At the level of discursive practice, attention was given to how spatial meanings and planning rationalities were produced and reproduced through institutional and technical representations. At the level of social practice, these discourses were interpreted in relation to broader structures of governance, power, managerial rationality, and spatial regulation.

Discussion and Results

The findings reveal a hierarchical process of discursive reproduction through which dominant rationalities are progressively translated across institutional levels. At the policy level, a development-oriented discourse centered on efficiency, order, revitalization, productivity, and spatial improvement constitutes the dominant framework for defining the project. Within this discourse, space is primarily constructed as an object to be optimized, reorganized, and regulated.

At the planning and design level, these rationalities are reproduced through technical representations, regulations, and spatial prescriptions. Managerial and technocratic forms of knowledge acquire a privileged position in defining the identity, function, and appropriate organization of the square. Consequently, the plurality of spatial meanings is selectively translated into categories that are more readily measurable, governable, and designable.

At the implementation level, mechanisms of surveillance, standardization, regulation, and control consolidate this discursive order through physical interventions and executive practices. Thus, the material transformation of Atiq Square appears not as an isolated physical intervention but as the final manifestation of a broader process in which space is first discursively defined, institutionally authorized, technically represented, and ultimately regulated.

The findings consequently reveal a vertical chain of discursive reproduction from policy to planning and design and from design to implementation. This chain demonstrates how power operates through the normalization of particular ways of seeing, classifying, and intervening in urban space. From a Foucauldian perspective, the official documents constitute a power–knowledge assemblage through which spatial decisions are rendered legitimate and particular interpretations of place are institutionalized.

The critical significance of this process lies in its implications for spatial alienation. When the authority to define and interpret space becomes concentrated within institutional and technocratic structures, alternative meanings rooted in everyday experience, collective memory, and citizen agency may be marginalized. Spatial alienation can therefore be understood not only as a physical or social condition but also as an institutionalized asymmetry in the production and interpretation of spatial meaning.

Conclusion

The study demonstrates that the transformation of Atiq Square cannot be understood solely as a physical redevelopment project. Rather, it represents an institutional-discursive process in which policy rationalities, technical knowledge, planning representations, and implementation mechanisms collectively produce and stabilize a particular spatial order.

The main theoretical implication is that official planning documents should be understood as active instruments of spatial production and discursive governance rather than neutral representations of planning decisions. The findings further suggest that overcoming institutionalized spatial alienation requires a shift from the dominance of disciplinary and managerial rationalities toward a more interpretive and plural understanding of space.

In this framework, spatial readability should not be reduced to a visual or morphological quality. It can instead be understood as a socio-spatial capacity grounded in citizen agency, interpretive plurality, lived experience, and the coexistence of multiple meanings. Re-reading urban space as a polyphonic text may therefore contribute to redistributing interpretive authority and opening institutional planning toward more dialogic forms of spatial production.