SEMIOTIC INVENTORY OF THE CITY AND THE PROBLEM OF INTENSIVE SPATIAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The influence that modern citizens have on the cities' spatial development forces city planners as well as those implementing various urban projects to pay attention to the languages describing the city, which create a dominant image of a unique space and territory. This engagement can contribute to harmonious and sustainable spatial development, but it may also hinder the implementation of any urban project. The article devoted to the analysis of the city description languages considers a number of problems associated with the understanding under what conditions the city description languages contribute to the formation of the city's identity and its authentic spatial development, under what conditions they create ambiguous contradictory images. The methodological basis of the article is the structural-semiotic approach, as it builds a system for analyzing the city as a text and the city as a text-generating mechanism, a meaning-creating system. Also the concept of urban imaginary has been used as a conceptual reference point (A. Blum, K. Lynch, M. de Certeau), which made it possible to perceive the urban imaginary as a product of perception of urban reality, designed in the form of various interpretive schemes and texts. Semiotic inventory, related to the spatial system of the modern city, is necessary to understand the following: how the new symbolic order of the city and its new symbolic universe will be «produced». The research results presented in the article are based on mental maps analysis and digital phenomena which made it possible to recreate the contours of the visual image of the Siberian city (as a holistic formation) with a certain system of meanings coding. For more accurate perception of the city phenomena the methods of field observation was used. The theoretical substantiation of what the features of the urban text are on which this design can be based is given. It is the urban text that acquires special significance in the modern era of reality construction.

Keywords

• urban text
• local text
• visual research
• semiotic approach
• culturally determined design
• language of city description