ancient cities

918 Urban Semiotics
culture is an unknown variable, because urban
psychology is based so squarely in the United
States. In 1997 the APA established a new division,
International Psychology, which seeks to
promote cross-cultural research by encouraging
more behavioral research outside the United
States. As the cities of East Asia and Africa grow
faster than any others today, such a cross-cultural
urban psychology can test this balance—how
much individual urban behavior is universal across
cultures versus specific within a culture?
Urban psychology research sometimes confirms
popular wisdom about urban behavior—its
faster pace, greater unhelpfulness, and stress. Yet
it may also refute the common wisdom. For
example, since the first surveys by Sutcliffe and
Crabbe in 1963, researchers find friendships in
the city are not fewer or more superficial than
rural friendships but actually prove to be higher
in quality as well as in quantity. Are cities of 10
million in the past 50 years a failed experiment or
the inevitable wave of the future? It is now the
task of urban psychology to test how such cities
impact their individuals and, perhaps, are quietly
creating a new type of human being in the twentyfirst
century.
Harold Takooshian
See also Simmel, Georg; Urban; Urban Life; Urban
Sociology; Urban Theory
Further Readings
American Psychological Association. 2005. Toward an
Urban Psychology: Research, Action, and Policy.
Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Fischer, Claude S. 1984. The Urban Experience. 2nd ed.
San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Krupat, Edward. 1985. People in Cities: The Urban
Environment and Its Effects. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Levine, Robert V. 2003. “The Kindness of Strangers.”
American Scientist 91:226–33.
Milgram, Stanley. 1992. The Individual in a Social
World. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Milgram, Stanley and Thomas Blass, eds. 2009. The Individual
in a Social World. 3rd ed. London: Pinter and Martin.
Srole, Leo and Anita Kassen Fischer, eds. 1978. Mental
Health in the Metropolis. Rev. ed. New York: New
York University Press.
Takooshian, Harold, ed. 2005. “Social Psychology of
City Life.” Special issue of Journal of Social Distress
and the Homeless 14(1–2).
Ur b a n se m i o t i c s
Urban space lends itself well to semiotic analysis.
When we speak, for example, of a city’s
tone, its tenor and ambience, its discernible
character, its distinguishing qualities, its skyline,
its iconic buildings, or its history, we are making
appeals to its semantic power. In other words, it
has come to mean something. That this meaning
is socially, culturally, and materially produced
suggests that it is open to interpretation and
analysis. As the codes and conventions generating
meaning are the foundation of any semiotic
analysis, scholars interested in exploring the city
as a set of signs have put forward a robust set of
analyses of the many signifying practices that
make up urban space.
This configuration of the city-as-sign, as a text
and context to be read, offers a range of different
perspectives on the nature of urban space and
practice. In this capacity, urban semiotics brings
together different approaches to the study of signs
in the city, drawing from film studies, media and
cultural studies, geography, literary theory, urban
planning, environmental psychology, architecture,
art history, sociology, anthropology, and communication
studies. Although urban semiotics does
not exist as a well-defined subfield of semiotics, its
varied expression in other disciplines suggests it
deserves consideration as a useful approach to
meaning making in the city in at least two distinct
ways: (1) As a concept that can better frame the
many aspects of the city-as-sign and signs in the
city, urban semiotics can be used to examine the
built environment as well as the multifarious
nature of social life in the city. (2) As a critical
tool, the study of urban signs can trouble naturalized
readings of city spaces, to reveal ideological
underpinnings of various sites and practices, as
well as highlight the social production of meaning
in and through city spaces. As a medium in which
meaning is communicated in a variety of ways,
from the more mundane wayfinding mechanisms
of street signage to the powerful symbols attached
to its history, the micro and macro scales at which