ancient cities

marketing. The postindustrial city has thus become
characterized by a dense cluster of signs meant to
signal its unique features, as a register of its cultural
and symbolic capital. The commodity sign of
the city is used to draw in tourists, artists, wellheeled
immigrants, and investors: the city as sign
for sale. As part of a strategy drawing upon history
in the form of heritage myths, as well as making
use of contemporary signifiers of innovation and
creativity, the symbol making associated with the
city-as-brand has come to serve as an important
vehicle in a competitive global market that trades
in urban distinction and differentiation.
Rhythm and Sound in the City
Recent work on signifying practices in the city
has suggested that the analysis of time can be
another approach to reading urban spaces. It is
possible, using a semiotic framework, to chart the
different temporal arrangements operating in
urban space, bound up as they are in the meanings
attached to places, people, things, and images
in the city. The multilayered nature of time in the
city, from personal biographies to the larger
sweep of history, creates overlapping patterns
and competing and complementary rhythms.
Henri Lefebvre, in his writing on cities, introduced
the notion of rhythmanalysis as a way of
reading these different kinds of temporalities.
Other scholars have made use of this concept to
read the rhythms of urban mediascapes. Notable
among these is research done on advertising in
the city, which examines the ways in which the
signs of advertising are organized according to
the different temporal frameworks, what in advertising
parlance is often called dwell-time, in the
city. Ads found on commuting routes, for example,
are structured differently than those found in
advertising in public squares. The representational
codes of advertising are attuned to the different
temporal contours of the city and are to be
read accordingly.
The rhythm of city life as understood by advertisers
points to another way in which signs shape
the experience of urban space: sound. As a counterpoint
to the dominance of the visual in city
design and living, the sonic aspects of urban life
provide a significant array of meanings. Architects,
urban planners, artists, and environmental
Urban Semiotics
921
psychologists have explored the nature of the
acoustic environment and framed it as an important
aspect of how the city is understood and experienced.
Soundscape studies illustrate how the city
can be read, or rather heard, as bearing another
kind of semiotic shape. This sound-based sign system
is made up of a range of sonic signifiers, from
unwanted sound in the shape of noise (traffic, construction),
to ambient sounds (wind rustling in the
trees), to the role of music as an instrument shaping
encounters in the city (its use as a tool to
attract or repel people).
Scholars working with sound in the city speak
of listening to the city as a way of orienting one’s
self to space and to others. Sound, in all its forms,
is used as a means for mapping out individual, as
well as social, relationships in time and space.
Numerous soundscape studies have also demonstrated
the complexity of sound as a device put to
different uses in the city, both affectively and ideologically.
In this respect, the many sonic profiles of
a given city provide multifaceted signs that need to
be understood personally, socially, historically,
and politically.
Sounds and images lend semiotic contours to
city life. Their signifying power is important to the
manner by which people make sense of cities in
both intimate and profound ways. Urban semiotics,
as these multiple approaches demonstrate, is
not simply about reading the surface of the city to
get at its depth. Rather, a semiotic approach to
urban contexts offers varied considerations of the
city as a communicative phenomenon. As these different
perspectives also make clear, the manner in
which meaning circulates, the spaces through
which it flows and to which it becomes affixed,
provide ample opportunities for rich semiotic
analyses.
Geoff Stahl
See also Benjamin, Walter; Capitalist City; Cultural
Heritage; Flâneur; Gottdiener, Mark; Lynch, Kevin;
Other Global Cities; Society of the Spectacle; Social
Production of Space; Urban Theory
Further Readings
Baudelaire, Charles. 1995. The Painter of Modern Life.
Translated by J. Mayne. New York: Phaidon.