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Perception
of Space: Urban Images and Identificational Strategies.
PhD.-project Sergej Stoetzer
Review:
Prof. Dr. Martina Löw
Images of cities play a key role in the formation
of urban identity, producing specific spaces and
sometimes leaving traces of that process behind,
inscribed in material artefacts specific to places.
Picturing urban identities is a new method of mapping
the linkages between specific places, the production
of space, and visualising the basis of the construction
of urban identity as highly specific to place, media
image, and acting. Examples from the empirical base
can be examined by clicking on “data”.
Overview
The images of cities created by professionals, as
well as by individual actors, play a key role in
the formation of urban identity. Professional images
are oriented towards media distribution in campaigns
used to convey a precise picture of what should
be regarded as specific to the city in the eyes
of the beholder. Early approaches were postcards
that showed an example of the city’s tourist
attractions or combined different ones in a collage.
These days the competition between cities in attracting
tourists, highly skilled migrants and investors
uses iconographies for distinction – but mostly
immaterial ones aimed at media distribution.
Besides these intended images, subjective ones arise
from the perception of urban space, experiences,
memories, and ideas, building tension between the
individual constitution of urban space and the adoption
of a pre-arranged mixture of symbols, historical
issues, visual artefacts, and narratives produced
intentionally. The individual actor’s urban
identity, his/her mental image of the city, is formed
from this tension.
The subjective image of the city is reconstructed
using visual and narrative empirical data from students
at Darmstadt, where these processes of negotiating
identities are studied. The city’s official
imagineering is analysed utilizing its Web presence,
focusing especially on Darmstadt as a “city
of science.”
The theoretical aim behind this is to integrate
concepts of place-based identification with a sociological
perspective on the constitution of space as a social
process that involves action and structure, materiality
and atmospheres, ascribing both subjective and perceived
preconfigured characteristics to places —
to the urban realm.
The work concentrates therefore on three main aspects
(click for more details):
- place-marketing,
with a tendency towards homogenisation;
- concepts
of identification with places and
the
- newly
elaborated methodical
framework for analysing processes
of attributing meaning to specific places while
constituting space.
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