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Urban Space, Representation, and Artifice

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Knowledge, Technology & Policy

Abstract

This article offers a semiotic approach to modes of representation and organization of urban space. With point of departure in the art historian Donald Preziosi’s account of art history as episteme of modernity, the aim is to characterise codes that regulate the representations of urban space in a development from modernity towards a post- or hypermodern condition. In order to understand especially developments in aesthetic representation, Roman Jakobson’s semiotic mode of “artifice” is reintroduced. It seems that the application of this semiotic mode is highly relevant to the understanding of aesthetic representation in general but also and especially to the understanding of the aesthetics of three-dimensional artefacts. The article concludes with a tentative matrix of urban spatial trends and a perspective to the impact of changes in communications technology on the developments of urban space. Although the article has a theoretical scope, it refers to a number of examples from and observations in the urban environment.

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Notes

  1. A pantograph is a drawing instrument to magnify figures by tracing the original figure which will be reproduced at a larger or smaller scale. Pantography: “A general description; entire view of an object.” Webster’s 1998.

  2. Among several documentations of urban changes, Sassen (1991), Sorkin (1992), Koolhaas et al. (2001), Raahauge (2006) can be mentioned.

  3. See, e.g. Nöth (1990: 94), Mitchell (1990).

  4. Johansen and Larsen (1994: 28). Giraud (1971) distinguishes between logical codes and expressive codes. Logical codes are objective and rely on strong conventions requiring decoding. Expressive codes are subjective and rely on weak conventions and require decoding or interpretation.

  5. “Exhibition categories and displays offered a division of the world into centres and peripheries according to the vocabulary of industrialism. Visitors could then reflect on the diffusion, or “progress”, out from Europe of new machinery and on its colonial applications or, in the rare case, local generation. The vastness of the collections provoked awe and the comparison of the levels of technological productivity and distribution among the participating nations and their colonies, creating distinctions which remain common today with those using machines to measure man and society” (Hoffenberg 2001: 176).

  6. It is beyond the scope of this article to deal with the radical implications of the cultural effects of this code. However, its modern optics implied a separation of the subject from its integration into an immobile hierarchical social order of the previous feudal epochs. The consequences of this liberalisation or emancipation are multifaceted. Among other things it institutes a profane horizontal gaze scanning and scaling its surrounding. This profane gaze deviates radically from a clerical, vertically upturned gaze. Clearly, the Crystal Palace was not a cathedral for steady, vertical devotion but an erection meant for horizontal movement, selection, and individual estimation.

  7. Semiotic neighbourhoods are typically located in large cities. They are: “[…] characterized by a high concentration of semiotic businesses that live by selling and manufacturing signs rather than merely functional goods and services. Two types are distinguished: traditional luxury areas and designer shop and restaurant areas. A typical semiotic neighborhood has a concentration of designer shops, architectural offices, and interior decoration shops” (Koskinen 2005).

  8. Local and global often contracted into “glocal”.

  9. Numerous cultural theorists have pounced upon this characteristic, among them Anthony Giddens (Giddens 1991) and Paul Virillo (Virillo 1997).

  10. According to Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier (Fauconnier 1985; Fauconnier and Turner 2002) and other proponents of cognitive semiotics human beings understand and appropriate the world through meaning construction, i.e. through the blending of mental spaces. Blending is a process of conceptual mapping and integration that pervades human thought. A mental space is a small conceptual packet assembled for purposes of thought and action. Appropriation takes place through projection of mental packages, i.e. metaphoric conceptualisations, upon the world.

  11. “Ostension occurs when a given object or event produced by nature or human action (intentionally or unintentionally and existing in the world of facts as a fact among facts) is ‘picked up’ by someone and shown as the expression of the class of which it is a member (Eco 1976: 224–225).

  12. Cf. the item of “Chef Trends (Trends in Management)” on DR1 TV-News on 12.09.2004.

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  1. Department of Communication, Aalborg University, Kroghstraede 3, DK-9220, Aalborg Oest, Denmark

    Peter Allingham

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Allingham, P. Urban Space, Representation, and Artifice. Know Techn Pol 21, 163–174 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-008-9061-9

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