Phenomenology of the spatial cultural-historical unit: The example of the area around Dositej's Lyceum in Belgrade

Abstract

This paper analyzes the phenomenological perspectives of the socio-cultural understanding of urban heritage, which is normatively determined according to the type of spatial cultural-historical unit. Proceeding from the assumption that the spatial cultural-historical unit of the area around Dositej's Lyceum in Belgrade can be understood as a museumized space, its complexities will be considered through Focault's theoretical perspective of heterotopia, while its circumstance of socio-cultural semi-peripherality will be considered in regard to the concept of social production of space espoused by French urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre. It is concluded that the complexity of the values and properties of the urban heritage area - semantically determined by Dositej's Lyceum - offers deeper critical modalities of reflection that not only contribute to the clarification of the functional characteristics of the normative and institutional role of this basic instrument for the protection of spatial complexity, i.e. that conceptually denoted as the spatial cultural-historical unit, but, on a specific spatial example, they reveal the breadth of possibilities of synchronic and diachronic perspectives that such instruments - almost as a rule - always contain or acquire throughout their applicational histories.

Keywords

• spatial cultural-historical unit
• area around dositej's lyceum
• spatial heterotopia
• multiple chronotopes
• semi-periphery
• social production of space