URBAN SPACE AS ANTHROPOLOGICAL PHENOMENON
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2018-2-10-31
The article is devoted to the study of the main anthropological parameters of urban space. The basis for this study is the humanitarian approach in urbanistics. According to this approach, the city is a specific, complex cultural construct, embodying in its material “arrangement” the fundamental aesthetic, social and philosophical attitudes of people. This embodiment has a “two-way” character. The visual organization of urban space, on the one hand, captures cultural meanings, values, myths and priorities. On the other hand, it produces certain emotions, organizes a specific goal setting, affects a person’s life strategy and his daily activity, prescribes norms and guidelines for the person. This dual functionality of the city anchored in visual signs and markers. Any material object that enters the “fabric” of the urban environment can be read as such a sign or marker. The study of the “human” parameters of the urban space should take place in the perspective of convergence of semiotics and urbanistics in the general context of anthropological knowledge. This will allow to understand and form the urban habitat as a sphere of communicative praxis of the townspeople. The article considers three fundamental principles of organization of the urban environment: space, time and values. These principles express the basic parameters of human existence: the uneven extent of material corporeality (different semantic intensities), the historicity of being (the presence of the past and the future in the present), and normativity (value orientations). Practical axiology of urban spaces forms the separate loci in such a way that, on the scale of the general space of the city, they can become spaces of solidarity and complicity. The values of social memory, national traditions, cultural history, civic identity, personal life, constructive development (through the cultural accumulation of meanings) orient the activity of citizens on such solidarity as an integral goal. These values can unite both ordinary citizens and city government officials in their activities in the visual construction of urban space. On this path, a certain contrast can be overcome between the planned “cybernetic” activity of administrations and the spontaneous creativity of the inhabitants. This path leads to the collective urban asceticism – to caring for the city as the common “body” of its inhabitants. Urban space, which is perceived as an anthropological and not a physical phenomenon, is a visually structured sphere of human communicative practices. As a result of such practices, a general biography of the city and its inhabitants develops.
Keywords: city, urban environment, visual semiotics, axiology, humanitarian urbanistics, communicative practices, anthropology of city, space, time, values
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Issue: 2, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 10 — 31
Downloads: 2417