Enunciating city spaces: performativity and urban semiotics

Michel de Certeau's L'invention du quotidien (1980) has been one of the seminal works of urban semiotics, the first one proposing to consider the city as a text – a complex, ever-changing, one with multiple-authors, but still a text. This analytic approach to cities is at the basis of several works of urban semiotics, both theoretical (such as those in Marrone & pezzini 2006 "Senso e metropoli. Per una semiotica posturbana" or Volli 2008 "Il testo della città — problemi metodologici e teorici” etc) and analytical (Marrama & Roelens 2016 "Psicologia di Parigi" or Marrone 2010 ""Palermo. Ipotesi di semiotica urbana etc.). De Certeau also suggests that moving through the urban spaces is a way of enunciating the city text, that in that manner is actualized, but also modified. Tracing trajectories in the urban space, acting and performing in it, in facts, is an act of urban reading and of urban enunciation, both requiring a semiotic competence (a urban literacy) and capable to confer new meaning to the surrounding space. This paper aims at outlining how different ways of acting and crossing the city can affect the meaning of urban spaces. The ensemble is wide, ranging from traffic behaviours (using private cars vs public transportation or cycling) to social phenomena (both macro – such as criminality or tourism – and micro – such as clothing or same-sex couples displaying public affection), from forms to political engagement (protest marches, sits -ins) to increasingly common playful behaviours (AR games such as Pokémon Go, flash-mobs, parkour, etc). These actions all contribute to confer meaning and connotations to city spaces, creating gay-friendly neighbourhoods, scary suburbs and pedestrian areas or resemantising public spaces and transforming them in playgrounds or political battlefields. The city, then, is not only a text with countless material authors, but it is also subject of a polyphonic enunciation, of a chorus of behaviours, paths and actions that intertwine themselves in the urban fabric leaving behind traces of meaning – sometimes ephemeral, sometimes lasting. The goal of the paper, then, is to bridge between urban semiotics and semiotics of performance in order to propose a more comprehensive semiotic gaze on cities and citizens.
Country: 
Finland
Theme And Axes: 
Semiotics of performativity
Semiotics of spatiality (geographies, territories, borders)
Institution: 
Gamification Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Communications, Tampere University
Mail: 
mattia.thibault@gmail.com

Estado del abstract

Estado del abstract: 
Accepted
Desarrollado por gcoop.