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The Meaning Making of the Built Environment in the Fascist City: A Semiotic Approach
Abstract and Figures
This article draws on interpretative semiotics to address how spatial designers endow the built environment with meaning. From a semiotic perspective, designing the built environment is an activity that extends beyond its physical reshaping. Designers use complex sociosemiotic strategies to funnel users’ interpretations, drawing upon their manifold resources. Analyzing these strategies is important to not naturalize the dominant meaning that is inscribed in the built environment. As a case study, we analyze spatial design in the city of Forlì, Italy, during the Fascist regime (1922–43). Through the case study, we delineate two complimentary design strategies: typification and environmental propaganda. Typification establishes and uses familiar types of buildings to channel individual interpretations; environmental propaganda spreads cultural artifacts and enacts political rituals about the built environment. Both of these strategies try to steer users’ interpretations of the built environment in everyday life. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of a particular built form in Forlì—the headquarters of the Opera Nazionale Balilla—showing how these strategies were deployed for this particular building.
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School badges, though an integral part of education’s “aesthetic order,” of its signage and apparel, have not been the subjects of much of analysis. In addressing this oversight, the following paper examines the badges of New South Wales government schools and argues that like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, they draw on heraldic models and are constructs of colors, names, motifs, and mottoes that in various ways have local cogency and significance. For example, many badges draw on Australia’s flora and fauna or refer to aspects of its colonial history and thereby induct pupils into the nation’s identity. Some schools, under the pressure to be more business-oriented, have turned their back on the traditional badge in favor of logos and slogans that, arguably, are more commensurate with their times.
Peterson, Norway, was a former cellulose factory that is in the process of being transformed into new usage. A landmark at the premises is the “digester,” a high-rise steel structure used to make cellulose before the factory closed in 2012. The digester is now facing an uncertain material future, but this does not keep it from being represented and remembered in different ways. Peterson is also known for its elephant logo, which has been resemiotised from a signboard into a three-dimensional elephant sculpture in blank steel. As we will demonstrate, this and other uses of semiotic resources may be viewed as part of a transformative process that indicates looking forward into a post-industrial society where communication is more important than cellulose production. However, as we will demonstrate, this interpretation does not necessarily match the intention of the sign producer.
Monuments exist in many different forms, but what is common among them is that they have both commemorative and political functions. While articulating specific historical narratives, monuments convey the worldviews of those in power. As such, they encompass a set of meanings, identities and events, while concealing others. National elites are aware of the power of monuments and use them as tools to spread dominant worldviews, reinforce political power and set off social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. However, individuals interpret monuments in ways that can be different to the intentions of those in power. Monuments are meant to be stable over times in their physical forms, but their meanings are dynamic, reflecting changes in culture, social relations and views on the past. For this reason, monuments representing outdated cultural values or reflecting the ideology of a begone regime often become controversial and their permanence in public space problematic. This article proposes a typology of institutional practices for the cultural reinvention of controversial monuments. Before this, it completes a review of the semiotic and cultural geographical approach to monuments and presents a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of the multiple interpretations of monuments.
El locus de enunciación de este artículo podría parecer descabellado en
un espacio de renombre académico mundial como el XIV Congreso Mundial de
Semiótica de la Asociación Internacional de Semiótica 2019. Por ello, el desafío
fue sumergirse en lo que el comunicólogo argentino Marcelo Manucci considera
“arenas movedizas” onto-epistémicas, teórico-metodológicas y analíticas
que implican la propuesta de construcción de un objeto de estudio desde la
transdisciplina-transcomplejidad, eje de este trabajo en la discusión semiótica.
Esta postura como un neoenfoque paradigmático se focaliza en
innovadores supuestos para la producción de un conocimiento siempre en
movimiento, listo para aceptar elementos de sorpresa y factores disruptivos en
su generación, que más que ser obstáculos, resultan factores enriquecedores del
propio proceso y sus resultados. Así, la transcomplejidad permite entender los
objetos de estudio aludiendo a que los postulados de rigor, tolerancia y apertura
bien pueden ser construidos desde la dinámica consiliente que se enmarcó
en lo que Morin considera como un metasistema unificador de conocimiento
(Morin 2001: 171). En otras palabras, se apuesta por un espacio de discusión
desde, entre y más allá de las disciplinas (estudios en seguridad, semiótica y
prospectiva) en torno a la realidad interpretada en tanto un conjunto dinámico
de significados mutantes en el tiempo y la cultura (Magariños de Morentin 2008:
2). En este caso concreto se apunta a los procesos semióticos como trayectorias
rizomáticas (Deleuze y Guattari 2002: 11) que develan la significación atribuida
a determinados fenómenos por parte de sujetos vivos −se rescata la postura moriniana del sujeto−, quienes han desplegado una construcción específica
de los imaginarios de la frontera norte con Colombia (Mataje-Tumaco) y las
amenazas híbridas. La referencia específica es la derivada de los movimientos
tácticos del Frente Oliver Sinesterra1 (FOS) cuyo líder máximo ya abatido
(2018) fue Walter Patricio Arízala “alias Guacho”. Al igual que otros grupos,
las disidencias encontraron un espacio propicio de resurgimiento luego de la
firma del acuerdo de paz concretado por el gobierno de Juan Manuel Santos,
factor que unido a la porosidad de las fronteras colombo-ecuatorianas han
consolidado sus operaciones criminales en Ecuador.
In any post-disaster contexts, the affected societies will inevitably be involved in tensions between remembering and forgetting the past disaster experiences. They need to forget the disaster in order to return to their daily lives; at the same time, they also need to remember the disaster, which will usually involve canonization programs of the cultural memory of disaster. This study explores, how these programs, manifested in post-disaster monuments and commemorations, entail meaning contestations, through which the cultural interpretations of the disaster are formed and disputed. This paper uses the example of the Aceh Tsunami Museum in Indonesia as a part of a canonization program of the cultural memory of a tsunami. This museum was erected as a memorial to the success of the post tsunami reconstruction programs lead by the Indonesian government. While the monuments’ managers have proposed certain narratives by which to remember the disaster, the visitors construct their interpretation of these through their daily practices. Hence, the shaping of the cultural memory of a disaster involves the social functions of the disaster monuments. For the locals, this museum has diverse functions: recreational, memorial, educational, and economic ones; however, the memory of the success of the post-tsunami reconstruction programs has been forgotten by the locals.
In this unique book Scott A. Bollens combines personal narrative with academic analysis in telling the story of inflammatory nationalistic and ethnic conflict in nine cities – Jerusalem, Beirut, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Bilbao, and Barcelona. Reporting on seventeen years of research and over 240 interviews with political leaders, planners, architects, community representatives, and academics, he blends personal reflections, reportage from a wealth of original interviews, and the presentation of hard data in a multidimensional and interdisciplinary exploration of these urban environments of damage, trauma, healing, and repair.
The efforts of fascism to form a 'culture of consent,' or shape depoliticized activities, in Italy between the world wars, make a unique portrait of fascist political tactics. Professor de Grazia focuses on the dopolavoro or fascist leisure-time organization, the largest of the regime's mass institutions. She traces its gradual rise in importance for the consolidation of fascist rule; its spread in the form of thousands of local clubs into every domain of urban and rural life; and its overwhelming impact on the distribution, consumption, and character of all kinds of recreational pursuits - from sports and adult education to movies, traveling theaters, radio, and tourism. The author shows how fascism was able, between 1926 and 1939, to build a new definition of the public sphere. Recasting the public sphere entailed dispensing with traditional class and politically defined modes of organizing those social roles and desires existing outside the workplace.
Long confined to mathematical and logical investigation of metalanguage-object language relations, metasemiosis (the process by which signs come to represent other signs) has become, in recent decades, the focus of a growing body of empirical research. The key development has been the recognition by Michael Silverstein of a distinction between metasemantics and metapragmatics. Whereas metasemantics deals with the reflective use of metasigns (in particular, metalanguage) to represent language understood in the Saussurean sense, metapragmatics deals with the reflective use of signs to represent the uses of language and other object signs. Metapragmatic semiosis turns out empirically to be a widespread and important feature of language use around the globe. Metasemiotic research has also brought into clearer focus the nature of reflective processes themselves. Explicit awareness or consciousness of signs (such as words) appears to be a metasemiotic phenomenon created by the deployment of semantic metasigns. Pragmatic metasigns, however, where the metasign-object sign relationship is based upon icons and indices, are relatively less accessible to explicit consciousness, although research suggests that humans are able to acquire implicit understandings, attitudes, and skills through such pragmatically reflective processes. The study of metasemiosis promises new insights into the nature of knowledge and consciousness, as well as a more adequate conceptualization of reflection and its agentive role in human conduct.
Who makes our cities, and what part do everyday users have in the design of cities? This book powerfully shows that city-making is a social process and examines the close relationship between the social and physical shaping of urban environments.
With cities taking a growing share of the global population, urban forms and urban experience are crucial for understanding social injustice, economic inequality and environmental challenges. Current processes of urbanization too often contribute to intensifying these problems; cities, likewise, will be central to the solutions to such problems. Focusing on a range of cities in developed and developing contexts, Cities by Design highlights major aspects of contemporary urbanization: urban growth, density and sustainability; inequality, segregation and diversity; informality, environment and infrastructure.
Offering keen insights into how the shaping of our cities is shaping our lives, Cities by Design provides a critical exploration of key issues and debates that will be invaluable to students and scholars in sociology and geography, environmental and urban studies, architecture, urban design and planning