Urban semiotics
 a system of signs & practices
•
• M. de Certeau,
•“Walking in the City”, in The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1984
•
•perceiving, sensing, inventing the city

From perception to practice
• “We are not simply observers of the city but are ourselves part of what we see. Our perception is
usually partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns [..] The environmental image is the product
both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience.”
•
•Kevin Lynch, “The Structure of Urban Perception”,
•The Image of the City (1960)
• Perception depends on the positioning of the observer and on his/her movement through the city,
origin, occupation, culture, experience.

Michel de Certeau
The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984
•“Spatial Practices: Walking in the City”
•
• seeing from above and from afar
•
• living and moving below and within

Seeing from above and from afar
• urban island in the sea
•     texturology – immobilizing opaque
•                 mobility in a transparent, readable
•                 text (NB moving cityscape subjected to
•                 the gaze from above in de C’s writing)
•     voyeurism
•     universal, anonymous subject
•                  surveying a ‘whole’, detached
•                  reality: totalizing scopic and gnostic
•                  drive; geometric, panoptic vision
•
•

Living the city – below and within
•Living, using, writing – being possessed by – the city from below and from within
•Experience of reality (fragmented, plural) through the senses and the movements of the body
•Style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation

Living the city from within as a way of resisting the “concept-city” (city from above)
•“concept-city” (city from above) founded on:
•      rational organization
• the city as a synchronic system – a transparent, flattening “no-when”, replacing the opacities of
lived, plural histories and traditions
• the creation of a universal, anonymous subject: “the city”, providing a way of conceiving and
constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, interconnected properties
(94-5)

concept-city
•Rejection of the “waste products” of rational, functionalist administration (abnormality,
deviance, illness, death…) 94
•Mythification of the city in strategic discourses
•Priority given to progress = time; neglect of space 95
•Totalizing, mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies

outside the concept-city: a counter-discourse
•But outside and beyond the reach of the “urbanizing” language of power and its panoptic vision
there are contradictory movements.
•Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city proliferate the ruses and combinations of
alternative, powers or forms of power whose  identity is ‘illegible’. Without points where one can
take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer. 95

Surreptitious creativity
•The microbe-like, singular and plural practices the urbanistic system was supposed to administer
or supress
•Swarming activity of procedures that have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy,
developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined according to
unreadable tactics, constituting surreptitious creativities (96)

indisciplinary spaces
•What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to the apparatuses
that produce a disciplinary space (see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1977) ? […] secretly
structur[ing] the determining conditions of social life.
•Multiform, tricky, stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in
which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space,
of the disquieting familiarity of the city. 96
•

The langue and parole distinction applied to the city
•Langue: spatial order, code, normative urban system
•=
•Parole (speech act, utterance): individual ways of experiencing, using and  expressing, and
therefore ‘actualizing’, ‘differing’ and communicating the city

•official city maps as “procedures for forgetting” that substitute legible, disembodied traces for
the embodied practice(s)
•vs.
•Footsteps – myriad singularities, but not a series, intertwining, weaving spaces together, re- or
counter-mapping the city
•Pedestrian speech acts: walking as a space of enunciation

Creation of a rhetoric of walking
•Actualization of some possibilities implied by the spatial order, transformation and creation of
other possibilities and prohibitions
•Selection and displacement
•Phatic function: ensuring communication by constituting near/far, here/there relations with
others.
•

•Style as manifestation on the symbolic level of individual ways of being
•Use referring to elements of a code: actualization
•“style of use”
•Tropes as deviation from normative order or ‘literal meaning’ defined by the urban system
•Drifting of figurative language opposed to ‘proper meaning’ of geometrical space

•SYNECDOCHE – part for whole… creating enlarged singularities
•ASYNDETON – suppression of links: ellipses fragmenting the space traversed, opening gaps… creating
separate islands 101

•Langue: spatial order, code, normative urban system
•=
•Parole (speech act, utterance): individual ways of experiencing, using and  expressing, and
therefore ‘actualizing’, ‘differing’ and communicating the city
•

•technological system of a coherent and totalizing space that is ‘linked’ and simultaneous
•vs.
•story/ies assembled out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story
whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolizes

Totality and fixity vs. lack and precariousness
•the moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates
•makes the city itself
•an immense social experience of lacking a place
•
•City as pullulation of passers-by, network of temporary residences, universe of rented spaces
haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

•Walking as way of giving new senses – meanings = “signifieds”, feelings and modes of feeling – to
the city “signifiers”
•Or subtracting and deviating - obscuring - the apparently transparent sense and direction of the
“urban text”.103

“proper names” and urban discourse
•“In the spaces brutally lit by an alien reason, proper names carve out pockets of hidden and
familiar meanings” … “make sense” differently, changing places into “passages” 104
•Naming “imposes an injunction prceeding from the other (a story) … altering functionalist
identity”

Symbolic mechanisms organizing discourse on/of the city
–Legend
–Memory
–Dream
• “Proper names make habitable or believable the place they clothe with a word (by emptying
themselves of their classifying power, they acquire that of ‘permitting’ something else); they
recall or suggest phantoms (the dead who are supposed to have disappeared) that still move about,
concealed in gestures and in bodies in motion” 105

City “paroles” vs. city “langue”
•
•Walking, living, using the city as city speech acts, “paroles”, “practices of everyday life” –
“l’invenzione del quotidiano”
•What happens when the city is put into writing, the walking, living, using, inventing re-invented?
•