Urban Scenography: Emotional and Bodily Experience / Miesto Scenografija: Kūniškas Ir Emocinis Patyrimas (original) (raw)
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The idea, that spatial configurations produce comical and critical situations by encouraging certain “choreography” of its users, is brilliantly developed by Jacques Tati in his films (Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and others). In his turn Michel de Certeau develops the idea, that city space is “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (de Certeau 1984: 117). For a moving body a city emerges as a configuration of obstacles and their absence, which influence the routes and the rhythms of a walker. The idea of interconnection between spatial configurations and scenarios of everyday use of it was developed by the Situationists who developed the concept of unitary urbanism (Chtcheglov 1958; Kotányi, Vaneigem 1961). According to them, spatial structures produce certain type of behaviour as well as emotional experience, and certain constellations of urban elements are able to encourage citizens to participate actively in the reorganization of urban surrounding. As an analytical tool, the concept of urban scenography reveals the interconnections between spatial configurations and everyday scenarios that take place in urban settings. On the practical level, the concept of urban scenography as a dynamic set of city elements (which includes even temporal and accidental items) appears to be a tool applicable for revitalization of underused public spaces.
This paper is less interested in how the agent negotiates from one area to another, instead various parameters that influence cognition of way finding techniques are thought about and in particular the overarching principle of the reputation of linearity. The role of lines in the city is a complex one. This paper discusses how the pedestrian is impacted by lines when way finding and importantly how we begin to think about the space we are about to negotiate prior to embarking on the journey. The focus of study for this work takes as its basis a separation of the way finder as inhabitant rather than occupant as laid out by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who states that inhabitant knowledge is alongly integrated (2007:89), i.e., follows the terrestrial undulations of the environment and gains insight from following paths across and along the urban environment. Agents follow lines (e.g., paths and roads) in order to navigate the city, but lines are also formed by the edges of buildings and physical structures in the city. The architectural theorist Rudolf Arnheim has written about reaction to built form and provides useful insight into the impact of linearity on thought. The more cultural dimension of linearity is also at play when an individual imagines and mentally reconstructs routes through the urban space. The scope of linearity for providing schematics is developed here from the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold, who develops a social history of lines. The agent’s schematic is a mixture of understanding of personal ideas of how the city is organised and socially informed information. The environment is in all cases mediated by the body, and this paper aims to look at how the body may or may not be an adequate receptacle for the encoded messages of linearity within the city. The possible interruption of the agent’s intentionality by the limitations of linearity in the city will be discussed in terms of embodiment. The paper is organised as follows; the paper begins by talking about notions of presence in order to assess how we assert presence in the built environment. A discussion of embodied interaction with built form is followed by analysis of the cultural connections with linearity as an organising principle. Both of these aspects relate the manner of our city experience informed by linearity, which concludes this paper.
Self-organization, appropriation of places and production of urbanity
C. Cellamare (2014), “Self-organization, appropriation of places and production of urbanity”, in C. Cellamare & F. Cognetti (eds, 2014), Practices of Reappropriation, Planum Publisher, Milano, ISBN: 9788899237011, p. 35-40, 2014
In this historical phase, cities are intensely crossed by processes and practices of appropriation and re-appropriation of places and life environments. Motivations are at different levels: necessity, political and personal. The fieldwork shows, however, another reason, namely a need for urbanity and quality of urban life. Space is the medium of all these experiences. Places and everyday life have a strong centrality in them. In fact, these experiences find in the texture and spatiality of places their solidification point, their drive and motivation, often their raison d'être, as well as an activator for their passion. A place is a material and significant space, which precipitates the linear chronographic time and turns it into everyday lifetime. The process of self-organization in / with the territory becomes a principle and a process of individuation. Finally, some experiences directly and explicitly pose questions about the modes of production of politics and institutions, thus entering into a broad debate.
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.
ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics, 2019
The article presents the study of urban space form the existential semiotics point of view. The main notions presented in this paper are the surrounding (i.e. the environment – landscape – city space) and the surrounded (subject – an individual human body). Maintaining the structuralist way of semiotic thinking, the author refers to the concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure (langue and parole), Algirdas-Julien Greimas (englobant / englobé), Michel de Certeau (strategies and tactics) and finally Eero Tarasti (existential semiotics, highlining the figure of the subject). The nature-culture relation discussed here is being presented in the perspective of biosemiotics also. The main part of the article contains the author’s proposal of applying Tarasti’s concept to the city space: firstly, his concept of the landscape semiotics (from 2000) and next the concept of the dynamic “Z-model” (from 2015). As the result, there is presented a complex semiotic study of the city space in the frame of t...