Introduction to Semiotic Approaches to Urban Space

Abstract

Let us begin by stating what this book is not. It is not a handbook of urban semiotics. It does not intend to fill in the gaps of some neatly circumscribed debate, nor to comprehensively define every aspect of urban semiotic theory and methodology and their applications. Over the last few years, several introductory texts have been produced on urban and city semiotics, taking up the important task to enlighten the neophyte reader and provide the expert with a handy overview of concepts and arguments. Rather than introducing the reader to the field, this volume aspires to capture the echo of the current polyphony, the ongoing dialogue amongst leading voices in semiotics addressing a set of key topics: spatiality and its dispositif, the role of technologies and nature(s), the textualisations of the city and the changing discourses in culture-user interactions. In this way, the reader can get a sense of semiotic perspectives and heuristic categories that frame and question the space around us.This book considers a certain strand of contemporary debates on a topic that has inspired post-war semioticians almost as much as language: the space of the city. The early, fundamental insights on topological semiotics by Algirdas J. Greimas, as well as Juri Lotman's conceptualisation of space as a secondary modelling system, established the city as a concrete language in itself. This language of the urban makes political hierarchies and cultural values legible and comprehensible, so that the formation of material space at first sight becomes inscribed with its more complex and stratified meaning, that speaks of the desires, preferences and requirements of those who design, but also of those who live in and pass through the city.To study the city from a semiotic point of view therefore entails confronting space as a syncretic text, in which multiple languages interact. It is of course naive to think that this syncretic text of the urban ultimately produces, or reflects, a single correct signification. That would mean denying the obvious: that all people, when becoming aware of their surroundings, each have a different, embodied and pathemic, sensory perception and cultural experience, depending on their background, tastes and needs, as well as on layered aspects