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Urban
Semiotics
Provider:
Kate Liu / ¼B¬ö¶²
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 General Introduction
 Semiotics defined:
1. studies signs relating to natural
languages as well as other cultural sign systems;
2. Systems of signification can be understood
and elaborated upon through metalinguistic operations, that is,
through access to secondary level of discourse . . .
3. Systems of signification encompass denotative
signs [and] connotative codes.
In short the universe of signs includes:
the non-physiological part of perception; conception; scientific modes
of discourse; and the value systems, or the socially constituted world
views of social subjects, . . . " (2-3)
[different definitions] Thus the
issue framed by the articulated differences in approaches to semiotics
in general becomes whether or not a unified perspective can be found
to integrate at once all the social sciences and psychology, on the
one hand, and logic and epistemology, on the other, by some general
theory of semiotics -- and whether biology, ecology, and ethology
can be included in the synthesis, . . . " (4)
[The book's] approach -- asserts that semiotic systems contain, besides denotative
codes, socially constructed values or ideologies which operate as connotative
codes inseparable from denotation. (4)
Two
separate approaches to urban semiotics:
1. purely semiotic one and focuses
on spatial systems [disregarding social context];
2. links such systems with their social contexts
through the study of the ideology incorporated in them.
Socio-semiotics, therefore, studies both
systems of denotation and metalinguistic systems in relation to the
culturally specific systems of connotation operating behind them. (5)
Critique
of Kevin Lynch and cognitive geography
Lynch['s environmental image
of city] ignored the connotative level,
There is little argument that the work of
Lynch has led to a more human approach to urban design; one that explicitly
recognizes the role of users in fathoming urban space. Yet . .
.
- cognitive mapping research relies on
a methodological individualism which accepts unquestioningly intra-subjective
pictures of the environment as the basis of urban behavior.
Thus cognitive approaches arrive at the signification of the city
through the perception of its inhabitants rather than
their conception.
- urban environment is reduced to a perceptual
knowledge of physical form.
- the famous five-fold distinction of
paths, edges, nodes and so on, reduce the use of urban environments
to activity of movement.
re-evaluating Lynch's contributions:
. . .
-- has uncovered some important
means by which inhabitants of the city organize their behavior.
Chief among these is the realization that conceptual stimuli in the
environment play a more fundamental role than mere formal perception,
so that physical forms are assigned a certain significations which then
aid in directing behavior. Urban structures act as stimuli
because they have become symbols and not because they support
behavior by facilitating movement. Thus we can say that
the image of the city is a conceptual rather than perceptual
one.
[this is where socio-semiotics comes in.]
Urban/Socio-Semiotics
--different kinds
1. architectural semiotics -- weaknesses:
monolithic view of city inhabitants by ignoring the social stratification
of signification and by clustering together finance capitalists, real
estate developers, the working class, and teenage graffiti sprayers as
the same group of inhabitants . . .
2. The formal semiotic approach -- it limits
analysis to the discovery of generative grammars underlying spatial structures.
Urban semiotics then becomes the study of spatial structures derived from
internalized grammars of patterns and designs which become externalized
through semiosis.
3. [The editors' perspective] -- urban space
is not a text but a "pseudo-text," because it is produced by non-semiotic
processes as well as semiotic ones and because there is not always a
sender in the historically conditioned built environment. A socio-semiotic
analysis of an urban sign system or "pseudo-text" would then proceed
as follows.
- On the one hand, observational data would
be collected on both the substance and form of the expression.
In the first case (substance), a description of material urban space
invested by signification would be obtained, while in the second (form),
attention would be given to the specific spatial elements which are
the vehicles of signification.
- On the other hand, cultural research
is required to document the forms and substance of the content.
Such a task requires, firstly, attention to historically and culturally
established signification, realized through research into the general
cultural traits of the society within which the settlement space is
embedded. Secondly, considerable case study research is required
to document the codified ideology structuring the signified of space.
The City and the sign.
NY: Columbia UP, 1986
- Gottdiener, M. &
A. Ph. Lagopoulos. "Introduction." pp. 1-24.
- Greimas, A. J. "For
a Topological Semiotics." Gottdiener, M. & A.
Ph. Lagopoulos ed. : 25-54.
- Gottdiener, M.
"Recapturing the Center: A Semiotic Analysis of Shopping Malls."
pp. 288-303.
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