Competitive cities and human scales: The semiotics of urban excess
-
Robbie B. H. Goh
Abstract
Cities are inextricably bound to their human denizens, although this human dimension is complicated by the emphasis on scale, speed, and progress that often dominates the semiotics and discourses of urban competition. In a profoundly ambivalent movement, various aspects of human “livability” are highlighted in the “quality of life” components of cities rankings and planning, while at the same time the “megacity” trend in planning and semiosis constantly threatens to overwhelm precisely that human livability. We can thus detect two broad and fundamentally-opposed semiotic trends, namely, the confidently cosmopolitan trend that emphasizes urban growth and the positive effects these are assumed to have on quality of life; and the dehumanizing trend that emphasizes the human cost of urban growth and its technological components. The profound ambivalence that this indicates, needs to be figured into urban discourses towards a more holistic and balanced account.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Meaning and interpretation: The semiotic similarities and differences between Cognitive Grammar and European structural linguistics
- Can Saussure's orangery manuscripts shed new light on biosemiotics?
- A choice of emblemes and other devices
- Symbolism in handwriting
- A sociosemiotic interpretation of linguistic modality in legal settings
- Tracking the distribution of individual semantic features in gesture across spoken discourse: New perspectives in multi-modal interaction
- Competitive cities and human scales: The semiotics of urban excess
- Justice unmasked: A semiotic analysis of Justitia
- The subversive agent: Anatomy of personal ideological change
- On theatrical semiosphere of postdramatic theatrical event: Rethinking the semiotic epistemology in performance analysis today
- Poinsot and semiotics
Articles in the same Issue
- Meaning and interpretation: The semiotic similarities and differences between Cognitive Grammar and European structural linguistics
- Can Saussure's orangery manuscripts shed new light on biosemiotics?
- A choice of emblemes and other devices
- Symbolism in handwriting
- A sociosemiotic interpretation of linguistic modality in legal settings
- Tracking the distribution of individual semantic features in gesture across spoken discourse: New perspectives in multi-modal interaction
- Competitive cities and human scales: The semiotics of urban excess
- Justice unmasked: A semiotic analysis of Justitia
- The subversive agent: Anatomy of personal ideological change
- On theatrical semiosphere of postdramatic theatrical event: Rethinking the semiotic epistemology in performance analysis today
- Poinsot and semiotics
