A. Camiz, New perspectives on the meaning of urban form (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Semiotic Approaches to Urban Space
Semiotic Approaches to Urban Space: Signs and Cities, 2024
This book considers a certain strand of contemporary debates on a topic that has inspired post-war semioticians almost as much as language: the space of the city. The early, fundamental insights on topological semiotics by Algirdas J. Greimas, as well as Juri Lotman’s conceptualisation of space as a secondary modelling system, established the city as a concrete language in itself. This language of the urban makes political hierarchies and cultural values legible and comprehensible, so that the formation of material space at first sight becomes inscribed with its more complex and stratified meaning.
Understanding the city through its semiotic spatialities
The city is a complex sociocultural phenomenon where space and time are simultaneously parts of itself and parts of its conceptualisation. In the paper I draw out three general perspectives where the city is characterised by different spatialities and temporalities. The urban space can thus be a space of rhythms and practices, an objectified dimension of the settlement, and a symbolic form in interpretations and creations of cities. The city can be understood as a semiotic whole by considering varying semiotic natures of the urban space.
The Cyclicality of the Anthropic Space in Urban Morphology: an architectural perspective
Proceedings 24th ISUF 2017 - City and Territory in the Globalization Age, 2017
The "Network city" and its crisis Over the last decade we have been witnessing the effect over the territory of the worldwide propellant of the globalization processes. As an immediate consequence, one can remind the progressive weakening of the "Network city" (Marzot, 2006 i). This urban model was intended, since its inception, development and forerunning application, to take over the role of Planning in the management of the territorial transformation and to supersede it with urban and territorial marketing multimodal infrastructure to group existing cities into clusters, considered coherent to down strategy. This overarching process was developed at the expenses of national and local interests, almost completely disregarding the effects produced onto the already established communities. Therefore, if the "Network City" was apparently unfolding an unlimited capacity to multiply opportunities, by increasing movements of people, goods, information and resources, it was pursuing its goals by being very selective and exclusive with respect to the existing framework. As a side effect of this overarching strategy, the dominant urban model Abstract. Over the last decade, we have been witnessing the progressive weakening of the so-called "Network City", indented as the sheer embodiment of the globalization driving forces. This phenomenon mostly occurred because urban model. It progressively delivered an increasing amount of waiting lands and building vacancies over the territory. Emptiness suddenly appeared as the "culture of congestion". Recycling seems to be the immediate reaction to the building standstill and it is nowadays widely accepted as the most promising strategy to face the crisis of the city, especially within Europe. This statement respect it becomes fundamental to reconsider the forerunning contribution of Urban Morphology and Building Typology. In fact this discipline, since the second half of the '50 of the XX century, because of the necessity to reconstruct Europe after the Second World War, was pioneering the necessity to read the Form of the city beyond any ideological prejudice, superseding the Modern approach. As a consequence of this attitude, the city was even more intended as a "manufact" constantly transformed through the different historical promising future for our cities.
The querelle between modern and traditional urban design has alimented in the past decades diverging phenomena such as the new urbanism, the so-called vernacular architecture and the landscape urbanism on one hand, and the extreme radical neo or ultra-modernist approaches on the other side, each establishing clearly a different and diverging position within the international debate. The urban morphology approach, as developed in time by the Italian school of Saverio Muratori and Gianfranco Caniggia and their followers, has developed a methodology for architectural and urban design, which is neither the radical reproposal of the ultra-modernist style, nor the nostalgic reference to vernacular forms. The Italian school of Urban Morphology proposes a methodology for urban and architectural design based on the reconstruction of the formation process of the built organism, the types, the aggregates, and the territorial cycles. Upon the full understanding of these multi scalar processes, it is then possible to develop the project as the last phase of an ongoing process. A last phase, conceived as contemporary on one hand, but not opposing itself to history on the other, deriving its vitality from the understanding of the formation process of building types and urban tissues so to be the continuation of the past into the future. The paper illustrates briefly the formation process of palaces and public squares through some well-known examples, and proposes a project that applied the same methodology in the design.
2011
This urban thesis represents a body of work which spans eight years. Presented within its pages is a ‘PhD-Thesis-Atlas’ related to the questions of how to read the urban structure for the contemporary urban landscape. It embodies first and foremost the academic explorations of what specific questions, problems and issues present themselves within the debate of urban morphology and, specifically, typomorphology which centres its activity around the study of the physical [building] and spatial [open] forms of the cities. The Thesis-Atlas simultaneously traces the effects of the typomorphological debate through the visual and empirical explorations of urban form and structure. Documented here, is a theoretical underpinning for the debate, as well as a proposal on how to empirically reflect on urban form and place formations. The document is divided into 4 parts. Parts 1 to 3 contain the core text and theoretical elaborations within the debate, and explore the possible methods of how to examine the city empirically. A total of 10 chapters, each with a specific focus and questions, complete part 1 to 3. Each chapter has visual markers to indicate which images relate to specific issues mentioned in the text. Part 4 represents the visual narrative of the thesis. It contains all graphic material, either sourced or original, in photographic, mapped and diagrammatic formats. It is hoped that the 500 images shown in this thesis will help guide the reader through the periods and types of development which has not only been instrumental in the historical development of the debate surrounding city structure, but also to act as a stimulus for future work.
The urban form as ‘variation of identity’ in a city
Bari ISUFitaly 2018 - Proceedings , 2018
The city is an "organism in the making", an entity in constant transformation, not a complex of immutable elements. The city represents the entire human experiential field of the world, considered as expression of a "fundamental movement of existence" in its completeness and historicity, expressed by the formative structure of tissues and building types, by the urban hierarchies, by the relations with the territory, by the social relations, and by the values and criticalities. The conference's aim is to propose a dialectical comparison between scholars of Architecture, Urban Planning, Urban History, Restoration, Geography, on the theme of urban morphology with an interpretative perspective based on the concept of "operating history". Search for a multidisciplinary syncretism that eludes single analyzing techniques and aims to the complete reconstruction of the urban phenomenology in its totality and concrete essence, through the study of the changing and inflexible condition of 'fluidity' hinged on the world's events. An integrated thought based on the critical concept of 'making' that constitutes, phase by phase, the signifying element of each present, explained through the relationship between the before and the after: that is the research perspective of 'being' that announces the notion of transformational process. Therefore, the projection in the future of the urban form is the central theme of the conference that proposes to stimulate the reflection on the issues as: recovery (not only of the historical city), re-use of existing urban spaces, regeneration, ex novo design in peripheral and peri-urban areas and natural spaces. All that, without neglecting the issue of sustainability, not considered with the strabismus of those who surrender to the "technique" pre-domain.
Practising the Science of Urban Form
Narvaez, L. (2017) Practising the Science of Urban Form (Viewpoints). Urban Morphology, 21(1), 81-83., 2017
In relation to urban morphology and its application in relevant professions, three interrelated needs are especially evident: first, to respond to the challenge of bringing together research and practice to achieve their mutual development; secondly, to advance understanding of what urban morphology means as an interdisciplinary practice; and thirdly, to address the need for theoretical-practical coherence.
The best way to conceive semiotical spaces that are not identical to single buildings, such as a cityscape, is to define the place in terms of the activities occurring there. This conception originated in the proxemics of E. T. Hall and was later generalized in the spatial semiotics of Manar Hammad. It can be given a more secure grounding in terms of time geography, which is involved with trajectories in space and time. We add to this a qualitative dimension which is properly semiotic, and which derives from the notion of border, itself a result of the primary semiotic operation of segmentation. Borders, in this sense, are more or less permeable to different kinds of activities, such as gaze, touch, and movement, where the latter are often not physically defined, but characterized in terms of norms. Norms must be understood along the lines of the Prague school, which delineates as scale going from laws in the legal sense to simple rules of thumb. Such considerations have permitted us to define a number of semio-spatial objects as, most notably, the boulevard, considered as an intermediate level of public space, located between the village square and the coffee house presiding over what Habermas called the public sphere. Urbanity originates as a scene on which the gaze, well before the word, mediates between the sexes, the classes, the cultures, and other avatars of otherness. However, this scenario is seriously upset but the emergence of the cell phone and other technical devices, as well as by the movement of populations.