ancient cities

The foundation of all semiotics is the concept of
sign. According to Saussure’s well-known definition,
a sign is composed of the signifier and the signified.
In urban semiotics, material objects and forms of
settlement space are studied as vehicles of signification.
In these studies, the symbolic act always
involves a physical object and social discourse on it.
The objects of analysis can be streets and facades or
planning texts and real estate advertising. As a subfield
of urban semiotics, sociosemiotics focuses on
the study of culturally constructed connotations, the
deeper meanings or conception people attach to
spaces (in distinction to denotations that work on
the level of perception), or the ideological conditioning
of the individual experience. Sociosemiotics is
thus explicitly linked to critical theory, avoiding the
individualist bias of much of cultural studies. In The
City and the Sign, Gottdiener defined it as “materialist
inquiry into the role of ideology in everyday
life” (p. 14).
Applied in urban analysis, sociosemiotics questions
the epistemological legitimacy of cognitive
geography and mental mapping as being limited to
perceptions only and stressing psychobiological
adaptation to the environment. As Gottdiener sees
it, urban practitioners create connotative codes as
social products. If this is true, both social affiliations
and spatial practices shape the meanings and
emotions each individual invests in a particular
material object. Indeed, red lights, McDonald’s
logo, or a modern glass façade are interpreted and
experienced differently, depending on the individual’s
income, age, ethnicity, education, and gender.
The actual sociosemiotic method decomposes
spatial signs. Both the expression and content (signifier
and signified) are broken down to form and
substance. Instead of two terms, the analysis deals
with four. Data gathering requires both visual
methods and cultural research. Once researchers
have a good command of the subject, they can
produce rich studies of the relations between conditioning
ideology, immediate perception, objects,
and their wider urban context. In Postmodern
Semiotics (1995) and The Theming of America
(1997) Gottdiener presents sociosemiotic analyses
of environments for consumption, leisure, and
tourism. Sociosemiotics can also be applied to
gang graffiti, visual demarcation of ethnic areas,
and many other elements, which together compose
the contemporary settlement space.
Gottdiener, Mark
Bringing the Threads Together:
Sociospatial Approach
321
The theoretical frame Gottdiener has developed
can best be called the sociospatial approach to
urban analysis. It is a synthetic perspective, which
takes what is best in the new ideas while avoiding
the endemic reductionism characteristic of both
traditional human ecology and recent Marxian
political economy. It does not seek explanation by
emphasizing a single principal cause such as transportation
technology, capital circulation, or production
processes. Rather, it takes an integrated
view of growth as the linked outcome of economic,
political, and cultural factors.
When elaborating on Anthony Giddens’s analysis
of urban process, Gottdiener lists three main
structural changes working behind the emerging
new regional settlement space: (1) the emergence
of the global corporation, (2) the interventionist
state (since the 1930s Depression), and (3) knowledge
and technology as forces of production. In the
other end of the process, the real-estate sector
receives an important agency. Gottdiener views it
as the partly voluntaristic power that can influence
the outcome of societal structures as actual built
environments and urban systems.
These considerations are elements of the sociospatial
approach described in The New Urban
Sociology, which Gottdiener summarizes in the
following six points:
1. The unit of analysis is not the city, but the
multicentered metropolitan region (MMR),
which is seen as the new, qualitatively different
form of settlement space.
2. Settlement spaces are considered not only in
their local and national contexts but also as part
of the global system of capitalism.
3. Settlement spaces are affected by government
policies and by the actions of developers and
other actors of the real-estate industry, creating
definite “pull factors” that partly explain urban
patterns and growth directions.
4. Analysis should not overlook everyday life,
human signification, and meaningful places.
Symbols and objects are likely to have different
meanings to different individuals or groups,
which the sociosemiotic perspective helps to
explain.