Cityscape as a cultural value

Abstract

The article analyzes cityscapes from the point of view of their value for the formation and preservation of the spatial and temporal unity of the cultural landscape of the historical city. The author distinguishes between cityscapes (urban views) as images of any urban location or composition and cityscapes (urban views) as configurations of architectural and other material spaces that we can observe in a real urban environment. The cityscape is defined in this article as a freely perceived, “readable” architectural urban composition, having high artistic significance and “supporting” the surrounding urban tissue, being the most important factor in the activity of citizens and guests of the city, and is also “responsible” for a specific identity urban space as a whole. A cityscape usually consists of several spatial patterns. The space of a traditional Russian city is formed as a system of urban views that reveal both its geographical design and its sacred semantics. Damage (destruction) of one or more cityscapes leads to degradation of the urban environment as a whole. The author defines the main reasons for the destruction of cityscapes and determines the consequences of these processes. The author concludes that cityscapes (urban views), as spatial structures that form the supporting frame of the visual environment, are a fundamental part of the entire cultural structure called ‘the city’. The system of urban views carries several integration functions: logistic, aesthetic, semiotic, local-historical, cultural-identification, and social. The system of cityscapes directly reveals the specifics of the city. The preservation of cityscapes as fundamental pillars of the urban environment and as cultural heritage values ensures the actuality of the historical past, the spatiotemporal unity of an identical urban environment, and also instills in citizens a sense of belonging to their city, which exists only in a ‘long time’ of culture.

Keywords

• historical city
• visual environment
• cityscapes
• visual frame of the city
• cultural heritage