Ten theses for a semiotic study of the city: notes, observations, proposals

Abstract

Studying the city, examining it, interpreting it, representing it, talking about it has been the task of many: inside and outside academic walls and literary circles, film studios and council chambers, painters' workshops and advertisers' brainstorming rooms, philosophers' workshops and psychoanalysts' couches. The city expands and contracts in many ways, moving from its empirical and immediate manifestations to its figurative and conceptual ones, coming ultimately to signify everything and its opposite: culture or nature; order or disorder; civilisation or barbarity; reason or affection; good manners or the loss of good behaviour; and so on. It depends, of course, on the con/text in which the city appears.