City of signs - Signs of the city. Special thematic section of Culture Unbound

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This special section of Culture Unbound: “City Signs/Signs of the City” is a collection of essays that deals with the semiotic push and pull of cities, or what Roland Barthes has referred to as the city’s “semantic force” (Barthes 1986: 91). It gathers together articles that deal with the city of signs and signs of the city, in the broadest sense of these terms. Each in their own way works through the city as a repository of signs and resident sign systems, as a signifying vehicle itself. As these essays attest, by virtue of its promiscuous generation of meaning the city has long existed as an object constituted by and constitutive of the modern gaze, a communicative device, social medium, and pole around which a diverse range of practices, meaningful acts and acts of meaning, can coalesce.

This section of Culture Unbound represents a cross-section of the work being done around urban sign systems in a number of cities around the globe. The authors have presented articles that, directly and indirectly, grapple with what Gottdeiner and Lagapoulos have stated is the value of a socio-semiotic approach to the city, exploring “the articulation between semiotic and non-semiotic social processes in the ideological production and conception of space…” (14). From historical monuments to mobile technologies, from literary to filmic representations, from intimate reflections to theoretical engagements, and from immense outdoor screens to the ground beneath our pedestrian feet, these articles constitute a broad range of possibility with regard to reading the city of signs and signs of the city.