This article is dedicated to the idea of the city. We put the ‘the’ city because it can be any city in general and it can be any particular city but by putting ‘the’ we have the idea of urban in mind. It can be any and every city. This theme I found very important because the city exists as the humans and by understanding the idea of the city we understand the idea of humans. The city explains the man as well as the man forms the city.

          The subject of this text is whether is it possible to read the city or not.  We will try to read the city using the sociological theory of Henri Lefebvre and his idea of production of space, where he divides space into spatial practice, representations of space and representational space. When trying to answer the question of this article we divided it into three parts, but before starting with these three major chapters we introduce the reader to the idea of what the city is, providing the number of ideas that different theoreticians have. The chapters that form this text are divided into architecture, public space and the so-called life of the city.

About the City

       The contemporary world is the world of the cities. It has become almost synonymous with the human habitat. It is the hub of culture, the epitome of society, the framework of our interaction with both natural and social world.

City can be understood in terms of geography and territory – spatially in essence. It has a spatial (geographical) centre and it has its periphery, it has its relatively clearly established borders and physical landmarks (parks, lakes, buildings, hills, roads, etc.). It can be captured and represented by a geographical map and it is treated by geographers, architects and urban planners. City is also perceived as a network of social interactions. It is made of its citizens and their interactions. It grows, develops and dies together with its citizens. Furthermore, those interactions often shape the physical appearance of the cities. The specific places are, or look the certain way because of the interventions of its inhabitants. History (the role of the city in the region, the dominant economic activity of its citizens, wars and destructions, demographic changes, ethnic composition, etc.) shapes the cities and its appearance. The architecture and landmarks of the city change through time and the sole function of guided tours, travel guide books, city history books for tourist, postcards, cultural monuments and memorabilia artifacts aim at capturing and communicating this changing dimension of the city.

This brings forth a number of questions. What is the city and how do we perceive it? What constitutes a particular identity of the city, what does identity matrix of the city look like? What does it mean to us and to what extent does this perceptions shape the city? What kind of interchange do we engage with? Can the city be read and interpreted? I aim to try to address these questions, not by providing answers but probably by posing more questions.

The city has been thematized in number of ways. It is an object of different studies by historians, sociologists, philosophers, economists, urban planners. I aim to pursue “reading” of the city as of the mental image we have of the city. Reading the city won’t be an easy thing to do having in mind that city is a never ending story. 

      

Understanding the City

What is the city? Posing this question is no mere caprice or intellectual pastime. It may be that the city is not what we thought it was, or even that it has ceased to exist. Not that this would be a catastrophe because it is in the nature of things to be born, to grow and to die. It is difficult for human beings to change their words and there are times when events change faster than words: yet we keep using the same words to describe things that are no longer what they were [1].

Belgrade architect Milos Bobic understands city as the arena – a battlefield of conflict of different cultures, simultaneous struggle for survival and dominance. By its nature arena is a place of calculation, and the game, parade or revel has its stereotypical manifestations. Urban arena is a reality-life itself. It seeks a new opportunity, check the personal abilities and power. Often is a place of brutal struggle of replacement of one ideology to another [2].

After Mumford and Spengler the question ‘Is the city synonym for civilization?’ doesn`t seem very original but it is very common in every investigation of city. With Robert Park and his ‘city is natural habitat of civilized man’ Spengler renamed it in ‘world history, history of cities. ‘If civilization is eternal searching for human achievements then city is its material and spiritual mirror’, and “in the rhythm of city life materialization and spirituality comes one after another in constant moving”-Lewis Mumford [3]. The idea of human is best explained in the investigating the role and the history of human settlements. Throughout the history the development of the man and humankind was best represented through the development of the city.

According to Lefebvre it is a consequence of relations between its inhabitants, or more specifically a product of social relations. In his books “The Production of Space’ and ‘Writings on Cities’ he attempts to explain that space is produced and that the city is therefore an ‘oeuvre’ a spatial and social product of human relationships. Trying to find a unitary theory of space he tries to accommodate theory and practice, and merge the mental with social, as well as philosophy with reality. He therefore divides social space into three conceptual fields:

-the spatial practice,

-the representation of space,

-representational space. [4]

‘Representational space’ is a space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also some artists, writers, philosophers who describe space. Therefore, representational space tends toward system of non-verbal symbols and signs. This is the dominated space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate [7].

These three concepts form, according to him, a dialectical relationship within the triad of the perceived, conceived and the lived., where the spatial practice is perceived, representations of space is conceived and representational spaces is lived. These three concepts are inseparable one from the other, they are interconnected and even when they seem abstract their usage can be transposed in praxis. This triad explains the interrelation between city/citizens and for the purpose of this work they represent our focal point in understanding the process of reading the city. As citizens are treated as both producers and users of space their relation in one way or the other of this triad change the perspective of the city/citizens relations.

Language of the City

When trying to decipher the reading of the city one has to have in mind what is the language the city speaks?

When we come to the point of observing the language of the city we first have to have in mind what we label as a language itself. Language is a basic tool of every communication so we here don’t intend to explain of different approaches in understanding of specific language connected to the urban life or life in a city, such as street language or slang or colloquial but by the notion of language we here understand all the elements and phenomena of the urban culture and its different performances. The Roland Barthes’s idea that ‘the city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants; we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it, is truly and mostly clear if we take into investigation all that surrounds us in the context of visual culture of the urban.

Posting the triad concept of Lefebvre’s production of space in the context of the language of the city we come to the idea that architecture, public spaces and ‘life of the city’ constructs the tools for city reading. Architecture as perceived, public space as conceived and so called ‘life’ as lived. Of course we have to have in mind that this separation is not strict as all three of these elements overlap and one form part of another, but in helping to understand the city we had to take them as determined ‘whole’.

As Lefebvre said every language is located in space; every discourse says something about space (place, set of places, of city); and every discourse is emitted in space [8]. Distinctions must be drawn between discourse in space, discourse about space, and the discourse of space. Even that we cannot concede with the classical philosophy’s ‘true space’ we are aware of the ‘truth of space’. For him the theory of space describes and analyses textures, and the production of space lays hold of such structures and integrates them into a great variety of wholes (textures). Language, the vehicle of understanding gives rise to an understanding of itself which is an absolute object [9]. 

Architecture

In the context of Lefebvre’s idea of space architecture is understood both as spatial practice and representations of space. Having in mind that architecture has its functional and representative characteristic we can relate the functional to spatial practice and representative to the aesthetics of architecture.

Spatial practice is perceived according to Lefebvre, the functional characteristic of the architecture is related to it in the sense of routine we have in the city, the networks we make in consuming one place. Architecture functions as something given, as a fact, serves just for counting the number of the links and nets citizens make during their use of the city. What interests us more is the representative characteristic of architecture as according to Lefebvre’s production of space is the production in sense that it is the urban product.

We (people, citizens) produce spaces – we create places – we therefore form architecture. We find architecture important for our topic to discuss, because the language of architecture forms a part of language of the city, and decoding it we are able to decode the language of the city. What does this means? Architecture explains much more than just a new style in architecture; throughout history great monuments had important role in discovering and explaining of the society they were built in, of its people, political atmosphere, the level of civilization and culture.

Therefore we start this work explaining the postmodern architecture because it plays an important part in creating and mapping those images of contemporary cities we have in mind.  We find adequate for the purpose of our work to start with the postmodern architecture as it is the last determined style in the history of architecture and the interaction the man with its surroundings became much more fluid after evolvement of the mixture of styles in the architecture.

After the death of modern architecture in 1973 (Jenks) the postmodern architecture came as the result of the ‘crisis in architecture’ [10]. Through the theoretical ‘inhibitions’ of modern architecture against past forms and the actual plurality of its modes that had already been developed by Paolo Portoghesi, Jenks and others [11], it was the convergence of Jenks’s search for a multivalent or multicoded architecture with certain practices of the 1970s that enabled the theorization of postmodern architecture as distinct, articulate, and affirmative position rather than a reaction formation against modernism or synonym for the contemporary. In a way a contemporary architecture is therefore a schizophrenic one, because with the postmodern architecture the language of architecture gets its own semiotics and the usage of multiple codes provoke the architecture to become a bit schizophrenic as theoretician Srecko Horvat points out in his book Signs of postmodern city [12].

The postmodern architecture is concerned with the complex texture of reality in order to reach its ‘disinterested fulfillment’. While Jenks’s manner of reading buildings as similes and metaphors sometimes results in a kind of architectural Rorschach test, his work also initiated a powerful new mode of perception that Frederic Jameson later summarized as ‘difference relates’ [13].

Paraphrasing Robert Venturi’s notions of inclusive architecture as an absorption of conflicting codes in creating “difficult whole’’ [14] we get the idea of the current city. “Difficult whole”- difficult as it is more difficult to design works which unify disparate material than to unify already homogeneous meanings and styles [15], whole - as the city as a vivid being presents a space, body, organ etc., no matter how open and spread it has its own wholeness. Somebody calls it difficult, somebody schizophrenic etc, but for the postmodernism it is known that it is mix of everything and the phrase ‘everything passes’ confirms its style. Not only architecture but also in other arts, film, applied and performance arts.

On one hand we have the appearance of postmodernism as way of life and it gets closer to the people as it is for everybody, with no more elitism. As Jane Jacobs would say ‘cities have the capability of providing something for everybody only because and only when they are created by everybody [16]; on the other according to Lyotard postmodern buildings characterizes the sublime of the un-representative and the difference between modern and postmodern is in the notion that postmodern has ability to present the un-presentable. For him something is modern only if it was postmodern first. Postmodern as a paradox of ‘prefuture’, that comes after the modern aesthetics as the aesthetic of the sublime but still nostalgic [17].

The above mentioned has shown us one of the approaches of observing the architecture in the context of spatial practice. There are lots other ways of ‘reading’ architecture; for example for Eco architecture is seen as an act of communication, a message, of which the parts or the whole can perform the double action of every communication, connotation and denotation. A word or a phrase can denote something.

Eco basis his semiotic theory on codes – he underlines the differences between specific and general codes, where specific refer to the language codes of particular language while the general refer to the structure of the language as a whole. Of course the codes are observed within the cultural context. He then goes even further pointing that architecture function as form of mass communication.

In architecture it seems at first that the inherent function of every item prevents us of regarding it as a message; as a medium of communication (a staircase is used for going up, a chair for sitting); if architecture communicates something, it is in the form of a symbol… Aside from this, points out Eco, a product of architecture or design is simply like mechanism that suggest a function and acts on the user only as a stimulus that requires a behavioral response [18].  In other words this duality of functions in architecture – the conventional use of the object or its first elementary meaning and its secondary functions- its related meanings, based on cultural conventions and mental and semantic associations form the object as a system of signs, a message.

Therefore architecture is understood as dialectic between these two functions (architecture as a functional object and architecture as symbolic object) and the history of civilization is mostly readable through reading of these messages of objects or history of humankind. These two functions of every object are important for reading and posting one object in time and place.  Good examples here would be Greek and Roman temples where their first function was to provide places for gathering people for religious events and are nowadays readable mostly for their particular sense of harmony, rhythm and monumentality.

These changing of message they provide here relay on Roland Barthes who in Elements of Semiology came to the idea that as soon as the society can be said to exist, every use becomes the sign of that same [19]. We experience architecture as communication, even while recognizing its functionality. Or as Barthes would say every usage is converted into sign of itself.

On Public Spaces

According to Lefebvre representation of space is the conceived element of his triad. We therefore take public spaces as the representations of space in the context of the city. As it has already been said for the architecture that they have their practical role in the context of the daily routine people make [20] and those nets they make, the spatial practice of public spaces are places of those networks where this routine takes place. The representations of space in the context of public spaces are the images that are incorporated in the identity of the city.

Cinema Studies Professor Howard Besser in his article “Intellectual Property- The Attack on Public Space in Cyberspace’ understand that public spaces have played a fundamental role throughout history, from the time that humans first defined private spaces, public spaces have served as places where people have come together to exchange ideas. From the ancient Greek's Agora to the Middle Ages' Commons to early 20th century American urban streets and parks, public spaces have been centers for free speech and public discourse [21].

A public space may be a gathering spot or part of a neighborhood, downtown, special district, waterfront or other area within the public realm that helps promote social interaction and a sense of community. Possible examples may include such spaces as plazas, town squares, parks, marketplaces, public commons and malls, public greens, piers, special areas within convention centers or grounds, sites within public buildings, lobbies, concourses, or public spaces within private buildings [22].

In that sense great example is the city of Copenhagen [24]. The project from the early sixties XX century where they wanted to clean the streets from high number of vehicles and transform it into a pedestrian zone, has changed the complete image of the city that much that now it is, the centre of the city where the public spaces are highly consumed. In the beginning the idea didn’t seem appropriate to most of the citizens because they thought that for a northern city as Copenhagen is, the idea of piazzas and squares like that is usual in Italy for example and that for Copenhagen it would be absolute failure, but after sometime, the idea of spending time outside and making street and square a place for leisure and entrain changed the idea of using public space in the mind of the people. Nowadays Copenhagen is a place where the so called ‘Old City’ is a open area full of cafés, restaurants, kiosks with handmade things, safe place welcomed for everyone, children, elders, young, anyone can find him/herself pleasant place for time spending. 

For architect Stephan Carr public space is the stage upon which the drama of communal life unfolds. ‘The streets, squares, and parks of a city give form to the ebb and flow of human exchange. These dynamic spaces are an essential counterpart to more settled places and routines of work and home life, providing the channels for movement, the nodes of communication, and the common grounds for play and relaxation. There are pressing needs that public space can help people to satisfy, significant human rights that can be shaped to define and protect, and special cultural meanings that it can best convey” [25].

Public Art

Every art or object of art put in the public space after sometime incorporate itself into the public space, and forms a part of the same public space, and in a way can’t be divided from that place. The importance of public art lies in the fact that as much as it is incorporated, the more effective the public space is and both its representative and practical point are confirmed. Its importance lies, as well, in its activist and political function, because often public art makes the importance of public space.

Sociologist Sharon Zukin understands that “by the 1990s, that making a place for art in the city goes along with establishing a place identity for the city as a whole. No matter how restricted the definition of art that is implied, or how few artists are included, or how little the benefits extend to other social groups outside certain segments of middle class, the visibility and viability of a city's symbolic economy plays an important role in the creation of place” [26].

The one who orders the work claims theoretician Stevan Vukovic “places it in the frame important for him, in accordance with his own strategic aims and scale of cultural values for that work to have a certain role for him, for the place, for the whole community and the client (the one who orders it) is the one behind and above the whole process” [27]. In other words he who orders it is just taking part in the race for obtaining the power (and some kind of domination) and participating in the social realm and democratic sphere.

Throughout the whole twenty century experimental visual arts, from performance to the event or happening, installations or actions, publicly specific interventions and public projections, street and guerilla art, participating art and art with local communities developed strategy of winning public city spaces and obtaining the public role. Since the first decade of the XX century the idea that visiting the museums and galleries assume access to the very limited forms of cultural capital and the forms of direct democracy in the cultural field, can’t be achieved within a museum or gallery space, even in the classical bourgeois salon.[28] Art then began to abandon institutional frameworks and enter the public and like that began to be widely acceptable (not only for the museum visitor but for everyone, dwellers, passers-by, workers and all of the consumers of the city).

Life of the City

The so-called ‘life of the city’ is dedicated to the ‘lived” concept of Lefebvre’s production of space. The concept of the ‘lived’ belongs to the third part of Lefebvre’s triad in understanding the social space, where he relates it to the representational space. Here the representational space he refers to the more spontaneous and more intimate interactions of people with its surrounding in the high number of different performances. In a way these performances had been explained in the context of public spaces where human interventions as graffiti, jamming, stencils are the expressions the inhabitants have with their city, but the concept of Lefebvre’s triad goes even further explaining that the concept of lived has a tendency of going to the system of non-verbal signs. In that sense he thinks that this concept creates the imaginations that everyone of us has for ourselves.

In that sense Roland Barthes helps to decode these approaches. His idea that ‘the city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language [30]: the city speaks to its inhabitants; we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it, is truly and mostly clear if we take into investigation all that surrounds us in the context of visual culture of the urban.

What I mean by this and paraphrasing Roland Bathes and his theory of semiology in the context of urban, that recently the ‘urban landscape has changed a lot’ and the relation between signifier and signified in the context of the city can be transposed in the relation of city/citizens in a way of its appearance with citizens. Why do we post signifier/signified relation here? Because when trying to read the city it is important to get in closer relations to every element that constitute readability (!) of the city, so here we develop the idea of visual interventions of the citizens and their constant change of the image of the city where we have this fluidity and where we can understand city as an unfinished process. This explains that in the context of city/citizens relation these visual images are explanations of what we call the language of the city. In its wider context the language includes architecture and public spaces but its language specific is the visual culture of a certain city. Language or in other words the ‘lived’ of the city (Lefebvre).

Life of the city is the most elusive as we accept all that surround us as ‘the lived’ of the city. We wander around reading, accepting, living different approaches and every time (every day) we can change and intervene in what we accept as ‘the life of the city’. As Walter Benjamin would say we, citizens are some kind of flaneurs that wander around and every circle we make and every action we undertake we change the complete image of the place, the city and as the move is something profound to people we therefore accept the place as a constant on-going project of every citizen as well as of the population in whole.

Notes

1.- Josep Ramoneda, A philosophical Idea of the City, Conference lectured at Yale University 2003, http://www.publicspace.org/en/text-library/eng/7-una-idea-filosofica-de-ciutat

2.- Milos Bobic, Grad izmedju arene i scene, in Urbani spektakl, Clio, Beograd 2000, 16p

3.- Ljubinko Pusic, Citanje grada, izmedju duha i materije, Prometej, Novi Sad 1996, 11p

4.- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publisher, Oxford 1991, 33p

5.- Ibid, 38p

6.- Ibid, 39p

7.- Ibid, 39p

8.- Ibid, 132p

9.- Ibid, 133p

10.- Srecko Horvat, Znakovi Postmodernog Grada (Prilog semiologiji urbanizma), Naklada Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb 2007, 8p

11.- Architecture Theory Since 1968, edited by K. Michael Hays, Columbia Book of Architecture, the MIT Press 2000, 306p

12.- Srecko Horvat, Znakovi postmodernog grada (Prilog semiologiji urbanizma), Naklada Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb 2007, 8-10p

13.- Architecture theory since 1968, edited by K. Michael Hays, Columbia Book of Architecture, the MIT Press 2000, 306/7p

14.- Charles Jenks, Post-Modern Architecture, in Architecture Theory Since 1968, MIT press, Columbia Book of Architecture, the MIT Press 2000, 309p

15.- Ibid, 309p

16.- Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, http://www.pps.org/articles/jjacobs-2/

17.- Srecko Horvat, Znakovi postmodernog grada  (prilog semiologiji urbanizma), Naklada Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb 2007, 8-14p

18.- Ibid, 202p

19.- Ibid, 202p

20.- Henri Lefebvre, The  Production of Space, Blackwell Publisher, Oxford 1991,38p

21.- Howard Besser, Intellectual Property : The Attack on Public Space in Cyberspace http://raforum.info/spip.php?article1793&lang=fr

22.- http://www.planning.org/greatplaces/spaces/characteristics.htm

23.- Manfredo.Tafuri, Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology, in Architectural Theory Since 1968, ed. Michel Hays, Columbia Book of Architecture, the MIT Press 2000, 17p

24.- Lars Gemzoe, Javni prostor –javni grad, Kopenhagen humanizovani proctor, in Urbani spektakl, Clio, Beograd 2000, 43-48p

25.- Stephan Carr, Public Space, Cambridge University Press 1992, 3p

http://books.google.com/books?id=pjo4AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

26.- Malcom Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Features, Zukin 1996, 69p

27.- Stevan Vukovic, Javna umetnost u javnom prostoru, http://www.matica.hr/Kolo/kolo2007_4.nsf/AllWebDocs/Javna_umetnost_u_javnom_prostoru

28.- Ibid.

29.- Ibid.

30.- Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture, Semiology and the Urban, Routledge 1996, 168p

Literature

Josep Ramoneda, A philosophical idea of the city, Conference lectured at Yale University 2003, http://www.publicspace.org/en/text-library/eng/7-una-idea-filosofica-de-ciutat

Urbani spektakl, grupa autora, Clio, Beograd 2000,

Ljubinko Pusic, Citanje grada, izmedju duha i materije, Prometej, Novi Sad 1996,

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publisher, Oxford 1991,

Srecko Horvat, Znakovi Postmodernog Grada (Prilog semiologiji urbanizma), Naklada Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb 2007,

Architecture Theory Since 1968, edited by K. Michael Hays, Columbia Book of Architecture, the MIT Press 2000, 

Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of great American cities, http://www.pps.org/articles/jjacobs-2/ 

Howard Besser, Intellectual Property : The Attack on Public Space in Cyberspace http://raforum.info/spip.php?article1793&lang=fr 

http://www.planning.org/greatplaces/spaces/characteristics.htm

Stephan Carr, Public Space, Cambridge University Press 1992, http://books.google.com/books?id=pjo4AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Malcom Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures, Routledge, 1997,

Stevan Vukovic, Javna umetnost u javnom prostoru, http://www.matica.hr/Kolo/kolo2007_4.nsf/AllWebDocs/Javna_umetnost_u_javnom_prostoru

Rethinking Architecture, a reader in cultural theory, edited by Neil Leach, Routledge 1996

© Disturbis. Todos los derechos reservados. 2011