No 4 (2023)

The article focuses on the analysis of generating processes of collective representations about the city in the age of digital culture, which are directly related to the urban imaginary structuring. The academic relevance of research on collective representations about the city is supported both by increased scientific interest in phenomena which symbolically and mentally determine the urban reality and by the consequences of digitalization influence on these processes. At the applied level, this problem is revealed in the context of the existing necessity to study the predicting and projecting of the urban environment development processes, the prospects of constructing urban spaces and the urban imagery taking into account the digital transformation of reality. In this research, the main focus is on the visual aspect of generating collective representations about the city and, accordingly, on practices that produce visual urban imagery in the age of digital culture. A digital city representation opens up new ways of structuring collective city views. Imagining a particular city, a person mentally recreates images that allow him to perceive it as a visible location. Nowadays, the process takes place by means of AR or VR digital technologies through the digital media content via electronic gadgets. In the digital culture age, collective city representations are concentrated in a mosaic of reviews, publications, videos, posts in digital communications, where personal information is transformed into collective through digital media. The city is imagined via a digital code as a symbolic system of storage, representation and translation of meanings in digital environment. This situation causes a fundamentally new logic of generating collective urban representsations, where actors of visual content production and city virtualization in digital communications, which create a unique “digital footprint” of each particular city, play a significant role. The city perception onthology is changing, as well as the processes of its comprehension by citizens, guests, tourists: the hyperreal and virtual reality takes up more and more space. Now, collective representations largely depend on the tendencies and trends that the actors of the urban imaginary follow, in particular, on how popular certain images of the city and its objects (nature, gastronomy, architecture, public spaces, etc.) are with opinion leaders in the digital environment.

The article explores the projects of urban development and transformation on the example of Plato’s philosophical utopia and urban planning innovations of Hippodamus, an architect of the 5th century BC. These projects are based on a certain idea of the nature of the City, which is formed not only by general considerations about the needs of people and the urban community as a whole, but also by a completely material form of the city’s structure, which in this case acts as a medium of urban self-representation. In the article, the objective was set to reveal the nature of such a medium and show exactly how this medium performs the work of mediation. The authors argue that one of the most important mediums of urban self-representation is the city wall. It does not form a center unlike a temple or a palace; it is located outside, but its presence permeates the city, gives existence and visibility to the unity of the city, its inseparable whole composed of many elements, and its compelling law similar to the hardness of stone, guaranteeing the safety of the urban space. The wall divides and collides with each other identical and different, one and many, heavenly and earthly, male and female; it protects not only kings and citizens, but also their gods from hostile neighbors; and, finally, it has a kind of power because, acting externally, it turns the outer space into the property of the City, into its system and laws. In Plato’s Republic, the wall marks the boundary of the soul’s reversal from existence in the world of shadows to self-knowledge and movement towards the light. In the famous grid of Hippodamus we find the geometric correctness of the order of streets as a continuation of the social structure and the educational impact of law and order on the citizens of the city. At the same time, the order is given not only by the ratio of parallel and perpendicular streets, but also by the closeness of space guaranteed by the city wall, since only in this case the potential infinity of lines and the emptiness of space obey the correct ratio of the limit and the unlimited, the full and the empty, being and nothing. It is in this neighborhood of the artificial organization of the inner space and the outer limit set by the wall that the contradiction that generates the inner dynamics of the city finds its expression and consists in the fact that the border of the city mobilizes and concentrates forces that cannot be held by this limit and strive for infinite expansion. Walls dictated a new space of life, the stay in which required new skills, habits, a new structure of consciousness. All this also required new educational practices: didascaliae and palaestras could arise only in Greek cities, but not in Greek villages of the “dark ages”.

St. Petersburg is one of the recognized UNESCO World Heritage sites. It arose and was historically organized as a meeting place for world cultures. The maximum approximation of the capital to the borders of the state initially predetermined its ethnic and confessional multiformity, which was the potential for active creative interaction. The subject of consideration in this publication is the dialogue of recognized world architects, whose professional task was the formation of the planning structure of the historical center of the capital. For a modern city dweller involved in the sphere of domestic relations, the historical landscape undergoes semantic reduction. The figurative system of ensembles and monumental monuments comes to be only an impersonal background of everyday life, while the scale of architectural projects and urban planning ideas is leveled and simplified. However, the cultural heritage is turned to the probabilistic logic of reproduction, which can be done with the help of reading, interpretation and verification programs. Based on the comparison and comprehensive assessment of historical sources, statistical data and memoir documents, attribution and disclosure of new semantic oppositions of the urban structure are proposed. The examples selected for the analysis implied the use of hermeneutic approaches in the attribution of historical material with its binding to a system of topological projections. An important place in the knowledge of St. Petersburg belongs to the languages of the non-obvious, the disclosure of the unmanifested aspects of its value structure. The specificity of the translation of visual images into everyday language becomes the primary subject of consideration. The city as a semiotic space is included in the system of text-generating mechanisms that combine the planning principle of building and the conditionality of everyday scenarios by the place of action into a single whole. A certain unity of behavioral models can act as a criterion for characterizing the urban space, which actualizes the position of the urban observer. Thanks to this, “la promenade de l’Empereur” – the route of Emperor Alexander I’s daily walks – is specified, and a commentary is offered on the political scenario for the opening of the monument in his honor. The fact of the installation of the Alexander Column is assessed not only as a memory of the merits of the emperor, but also as an event that determined the legitimacy of the power of his successor, Emperor Nicholas I. The modern city acts as a historically defined visual diversity. The semiotic analysis of urban phenomena is focused on the integration of this unique content. The inevitable changes in the value structure of the city are replaced by the production of new spatial connections. The meaning-generating mission of St. Petersburg is the experience of constant discovery and acquisition, the production of the value presence of man.

The article analyzes the theoretical and methodological foundations of a visual-anthropological research on Soviet residential architecture in the constructivism style in Odessa. In the Soviet context, architecture played the role of a source of renewal. Constructivists consciously participated in the creation of the “new”, that is, modern man, ready to live in an era of global change and build a society of the future. This thesis is concretized by conducting a cultural-anthropological research in Odessa. Considerable attention is paid to the development and substantiation of a comprehensive methodological approach based on an anthropological perspective in the study of the city, a philosophical and anthropological understanding of culture as proportionate to a person, taking into account the diversity of forms of visual experience in modern culture, and based on the latest research in visual communication. The thesis is defended that with the help of the proposed methodology it is possible to discover new rather than predetermined meanings. One of the key conclusions is that the realized visual-anthropological research confirms the importance of the semiological approach to architecture. It allows exploring how architecture shapes human behavior, how the design of a new type of housing, to which both the authorities and architects paid special attention, participates in the creation of a new set of life connections. The constructivist house is studied as a specially organized space that conveys certain meanings. The results obtained make it possible to comprehend and reconstruct the “mechanisms” of cultural communication, ways of translating cultural meanings. The results of the study contribute to the reconstruction of the image of Odessa in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as to a deeper understanding of the anthropology of the socialist city.

The article presents a study of the role of visual works of the 14th–18th centuries created in the time of the spread of the plague or in anticipation of an epidemic for its witnesses. The existential and social contribution of religious rituals specializing on the disaster and aimed at surviving are determined in the article. Historically and socially stable traditional ritual responses to the spread of the plague were the most important tools for those living during it. In ritual practices, the witnesses of the epidemic received significant experience of recreating the ordered being-in-the-world and the destroyed social ties. Thus, rituals specializing on the disaster rebuilt order in the world that was constantly disintegrating and asserted its stability. The problem of the uniqueness of the purpose of the abundant frescoes, altarpieces, icons, paintings created during the plague is comprehended. Based on the material of the evolution of the figurative expressions of the cult of St. Sebastian, who became one of the defenders of the plague, the article shows how the uniqueness of their expressive surfaces contributed to the revival of feelings and the birth of forms of sensory presence in the world freed from the plague’s pressure. Evoking powerful streams of sensations in the viewer, the power of the image acts as the resource of reviving feelings that are not exclusively related to the circumstances of the epidemic. The visual rhetoric of the works thereby counteracts the extinction of consciousness fixed by witnesses in the historical reports of the plague. The study of the iconography of the images of St. Sebastian reveals how visual works also allowed flexible variations of the meaning of salvation, including the affirmation of the openness of the future. For instance, unique works developed the technique for protecting witnesses of the epidemic. The forms of presence motivated by the works at their meaning and sensory levels could put an end to life’s complete subordination to the epidemic. Starting from the 16th century, this trend of reorientation of sensory presence as a response to a large-scale epidemic disaster was also developed with architectural structures.

The aim of this research is to study the territorial geocultural environment on the material of еру toponymic vocabulary containing color elements. The article considers the toponymic system of the language as a semiotic space that reflects not only the features of a geographical object, but also its socio-cultural characteristics. Toponyms are visual signs of the cultural landscape of a certain territory. They are the result of a meaningful (but rather complex and contradictory) nomination process, as well as a product of human cognitive activity and a kind of a “business card” of a geographical object. In the naming process, the nominator chooses one of many features of the referent that seems to him the most important. This feature is fixed in the internal form of the name of a geographical reality with the help of nominative means available in the language. One of the obvious features of any geographical object is its visual characteristics (shape, size, length, height, color, etc.). The color characteristic acts as one of the main motivating features in toponymic naming. And since color is one of the main parameters of visual perception of the surrounding reality, a color marker in the composition of a toponym is quite common. Color itself has a lot of cultural and symbolic meanings, which are preserved when the color designation is included in the name of a geographical object. The language material of the article is toponyms whose elements are the names of the classical seven-color optical spectrum, i.e., the seven colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). The research material (more than 27 thousand American toponyms with a “rainbow” element) was obtained by a continuous sampling method from the Geographic Names Information System, in which more than two million toponyms are recorded. Each of the considered color markers is investigated from several perspectives in the article: the symbolism of the “rainbow” color is studied and systematized; a quantitative analysis of toponyms with a given color designation is carried out (depending on the type of named objects); the productivity of the use of color identification depending on the type of a toponym is revealed; a correlation between the color marker and the toponym distribution area is established; the main motivating factors of “color” naming, such as the visual characteristics of a geographical object and additional cultural and symbolic meanings are identified. The article proves that a color marker, as an element of a toponym, not only describes, defines, and characterizes the physical and geographical features of a topographic object, but also reflects the national and cultural features of the phenomena of reality in speakers’ minds. The anthropocentric direction in the study of the toponymic vocabulary, focusing on the analysis of units of the toponymic system in close connection with people’s mental and spiritual-practical activities allows regarding this system as a product of human cognitive activity (L. Weisberg, E. M. Vereshchagin, V. N. Telia, V. G. Kostomarov, et al.), and the elements of this system as a reflection of the worldview specific to a particular society, its views and ideas. The results of the study indicate the importance of the color element in toponymic nomination, which is the basis of the perceptual layer of the toponymic concept, i.e., it reflects the sensory image of a geographical object based on a person’s visual perception of the surrounding reality. The author confirms that, since color is an important source and transmitter of cultural and historical information about the object of the name, it is perceived as a kind of a symbol and a fundamental factor in the conceptualization of mental processes in toponymic naming.