Volume 2009, Issue 175

This article takes a first step in linking anthropological analyses of the body in space (embodied space), the global/local power relations embedded in space (transnational/translocal space), the role of language and discourse in the transformation of space into place (meaning), and the material and metaphorical importance of architecture and urban design (the built environment). Embodied space, language and discourse, and transnational/translocal spaces are discussed based on a brief review of the literature and then combined with the co-production (social production and social construction) model of space. A preliminary theory of space and place developed for contemporary settings is explored and illustrated with examples drawn from ethnographic studies of gated communities in the United States and the plaza in Latin America.

The transformative powers of global capitalism presently dispossess and unsettle millions of people as well as comprehensively reshape the built environment on previously unseen scales of creative destruction. When the world is constantly dis(re)membered in ever new ways remembrance as a both individual and trans-generational complex of experience, memory, and knowledge loses significance in everyday life. Confronting rapidly transforming neo-liberal landscapes across the globe, critical scholars no less than dispossessed migrants find themselves in a memory crisis akin to the one observed as part of the context of the French Revolution and the profound transformations of European modernization. In the article, this collective crisis of memory-knowledge-politics is addressed through an engagement with the four concepts “reification,” “amnesia,” “aphasia,” and “apraxia,” the former elaborated through the latter three. Time-space disjunction and dislocation, irrelevance of memory, incapacity to combine, and inability to practice, equates passivity and obedience in relation to the havoc wrought upon masses of people and places. A core concern of the article is to articulate the four concepts in relation to built space and its role not simply as reflection of but rather as effecting and exacerbating the memory-knowledge-politics crisis. The article suggests that the memory crisis has political urgency in the particular sense that a radical politics against reification needs to be articulated in relation to an understanding of built spaces as collective mnemonic assemblages of memory-knowledge-politics, while also suggesting that spaces might be mobilized to topologically articulate past and present intersectional relations of forgetfulness-ignorance-power, and thus possibly be made to contribute to rather than deflect political consciousness and continued struggles for democracy.

The present study deals with aspects of the child's construction of mental representations of the contemporary city. Its aim is a compilation of a body of concepts-criteria for the organization of built environments for child activity, environments that will serve in the direction of child education, not simply act as material framework for his activity. The study is organized around two axes of argumentation. The first axis regards the contemporary city itself, the interpretation of its structure, and of the organization of its public space, the qualities linked to the spatio-temporal activity of the individual and social interaction. Subjects emerging from the literature such as alienation, fragmentary experience of space, changes in the public-private relation, and, broader topics such as changes in the identity of the residence area, as well as of the city, provided the orientation for the questions raised in this research. The second axis concerns epistemological issues of the construction of mental representations of space. On this latter level, we attempt to build our approach on the basis of social interactionism, which promotes the concept of activity to a significant factor in the assignment of meaning to space. From this theoretical discussion emerges the concept of socio-spatial strategic activity, which, along with other social and geographical variables, became the tools in the analysis of the data yielded by our field research (interviews, mental maps), conducted in Thessaloniki, on a sample of seventy-seven eleven- and twelve-year-olds.

Secrecy, paradoxically, is a social fact; as such, it must be performed in order to be realized. This article is a programmatic attempt to explore the semiotics of secrecy as revealed through the interaction of architectonics, spatiality, and social interaction. Gestural secretiveness reproduces socially sanctioned patterns of concealment also embodied in the built environment; these social dimensions also inform local interpretations of legal devices designed to guarantee privacy. On the international stage, moreover, they are transformed into devices for the concealment of potential national embarrassments. As the author demonstrates using materials from Greece, Italy, and Thailand, the practical effects of secrecy — a more flexible construct than the dichotomy of public and private — are revealingly inscribed, at various concentric levels of social identification, on the material landscape of inhabited space, and represent a necessary dimension of adapting urban structures to a human scale.

The choretic work of history is the way the ecumene, i.e., the relation of humankind with the Earth, develops along time. It amounts to the development of a milieu, i.e., an eco-techno-symbolic chora around the topos of our animal body. This milieu is the second “half” of human existence (the first “half” being the animal body). The dynamic relationship of these two “halves” works in the same way as a predication, in which the subject amounts to nature, and the predicate to the world which this subject is taken as. This process is called choresy. It is already at work in the biosphere, in which it amounts to evolution, but it reaches a new ontological stage when the development of specifically human technical and symbolic systems gives rise to history.

Is a landscape (whether “sacred” or not) gendered? Do artifacts — or for that matter built environments as such — mark, gender or even “queer” a landscape? Are there “male,” “female,” or gender-ambivalent forms or spaces? This article reflects on the evidence for the gradual transformation, over several centuries and culminating in the classical period of art and architecture, of the ancient sanctuary of Delphi from being a site devoted primarily to female powers and divinities to one in which the former were occluded, marginalized, or erased by the cult of the (apparently) male deity Apollo. This process was reflected in temple sanctuaries throughout the Hellenic world prior to the replacement of both by sites and buildings devoted to Christian worship. Ancient Hellenic sanctuary spaces and forms were semiotically hybrid and unstable, their significance parallactic and ambiguously gendered.

The Vitruvian city in De architectura is founded on an eight-part windrose. Vitruvius describes how to trace the direction of the eight winds astronomically and relates the tracing of the street network of the city to the form of the windrose, but his description is extremely laconic. Ever since the Renaissance, the customary interpretation is that the form of the proposed city is radial-concentric, a pattern that exercised a powerful influence on the Renaissance model city. However, a close reading of the text shows that the Vitruvian city has a grid plan, following the general Roman model. But the city also has a symbolic significance for Vitruvius. This has escaped the great majority of scholars, because they isolate Vitruvius's description of the city's form and orientation from its immediate context, that is, his general urban discourse, and further from the entirety of his work. Interpretation has focused on the practical dimension of the city, since Vitruvius pleads for a salubrious city with a specific relation to the direction of the winds. But the winds have strong connotations, since they correspond to one of the four cosmic elements, and these elements are such an essential part of Vitruvian planning theory that they even define the site to be chosen for a city. I argue that the Vitruvian windrose, in addition to being an aesthetic device, is an abridged cosmogram. The windrose is founded on numbers considered perfect, and the city emerges from the perfect geometrical figure of the circle and the marked qualities of the square. Since the geometrical complex of the windrose-cum-city almost coincides with Vitruvius's geometry of the human body, the city also has an anthropomorphic connotation.

The spatial complexity of architecture is postulated to be its main feature by some architects such as L. B. Alberti (1485). We will discuss and compare his definition of architectural space consisting of three registers (necessitas, commoditas, voluptas) with our five registers (urban space, use space, aesthetic space, bioclimatic space, plastic space). In the same way, we will also look into the analysis by F. Choay (La règle et le modèle, Seuil, 1980) of Alberti's treatise. This comparison aims at drawing out differences and commonalities between Alberti's approach of architectural space complexity — primarily how spatial synthesis becomes possible in the project — and ours. This synthesis, or register integration, which is absent in Alberti's work, cannot solely be explained with a simple text presentation, or with a register hierarchy as F. Choay thinks. We propose the concept of synthesis meta-operator to tackle the fusion of registers and pinpoint the role of reference in the project. We will examine how Alberti makes this synthesis in his architectural project as well as the meta-operators he uses. We will conclude by distinguishing generativity and genesis in the theoretical study of conception. One must revisit architectural treatises.

This article reviews and evaluates some aspects of the semiotic heritage from a fundamental treatise on architecture. It shows how the system set in place by Vitruvius at the dawn of our era is being today brought up to date by contemporary architects, yielding a projection know-how that can contribute to the design of virtual worlds. The question is therefore, how can space make sign. According to the Saussurean conception of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified and Hjelmslev's concept of connotation, the semiotic of space answers this question and clarifies the various approaches to description of meaning production developed in the theory of architecture. In this way the semiotic theory can give an explanation of the modernist function-oriented conception of the world, as well as of the post-modernist communication-oriented one. For this purpose it questions the concept of generative grammar that the contemporary architects have developed starting from the works of Chomsky.

A classical Greek allegory can serve to illustrate the idea of architecture as a cyclical process of negentropy: the story of the ship Argo, of which we know that she could not call at any harbor, and so was condemned to be repaired, piece by piece, on her own. This story defines a kind of self-reproduction, a figure between phagocytosis and metamorphosis of her own shape. Again, we find this figure of self-reproduction, according to the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, between the notion of Nature and the notion of Culture, from which we can establish a frame of couplings that generate symbolic forms of society.

Cognitive representations are being shaped and determined by interaction with the environment. The social environment constitutes an important part of this environment. Yet in formal models of cognition, there is little attention for processes resulting from social interaction. On the other hand, in formal models of social interaction, little attention has been spent on the cognitive origins of social interaction. Recently, a few studies have been published combining cognitive representations with social interaction. In this article, we discuss how social cognitive representations (SCRs) provide a concept for a further linkage of cognitive models and social interaction. The paper concludes with requirements for the use of SCRs for different levels of research questions, and identifies a number of promising venues for further research.

A semiotic actor creates, uses and transfers or communicates meaning with the help of signs in order to interact with other actors and society. For a complete understanding of the cognitive and social phenomena related to this process, we state that social science and cognitive science cannot stay in their own arenas. The use of social constructivism or construction sheds light on the relationship and interaction between the individual (cognition) and society. The semiotic actor is not merely a stimulus response actor that exchanges signs; it has a cognitive system that creates new signs, modifies (the meaning of) signs, and forgets signs (cognitive limited semiosis). Secondly, the semiotic actor has the capability to incorporate and influence the environment (semiotic Umwelt or “outer” world) as part of its cognitive “inner” world. And thirdly, linguistic capabilities allow it to socially construct and share meaning with others, thereby empowering itself and others to create social structures and express social behavior (e.g., reciprocity, empathy). The contribution of our work is to emphasize that social construction needs to be grounded in cognitive science, i.e., the semiotic actor or homo semioticus enables us to reason that signs in social science are represented as signs in cognition and the other way around (semiotic resonance).

Information systems actability is a theoretical and methodological approach to technology-based information systems in organizations. Its emphasis is on communication and its basic view is that information systems are instruments for technology-mediated work communication. It received its original theoretical inspiration from speech act theory and the language action perspective. Information systems actability has been further developed and it has obtained theoretical inspiration from many other traditions and theories. This article presents a coherent analysis and view of information systems actability and traces its different theoretical roots. Besides the language action perspective and speech act theory, information systems actability gets its current theoretical backing from theories and knowledge traditions like pragmatic philosophy, classical semiotics, social action theories, affordance theory, semiotic HCI engineering, conversation analysis, discourse theory, and activity theory. The article contributes with a synthesizing analysis of different information systems actability publications and reconstructs the theory and presents it in a condensed form in fourteen propositions.

User interfaces have the primary role of enabling access to information meeting individual users' needs. However, the user-systems interaction is still rigid, especially in support of complex environments where various types of users are involved. Among the approaches for improving user interface agility, we present a normative approach to the design interfaces of web applications, which allow delivering users personalized services according to parameters extracted from the simulation of norms in the social context. A case study in an e-Government context is used to illustrate the implications of the approach.

This article presents a simulation model of the production and the use of university diplomas as signs of excellence for academic labor markets. The model pays special attention to the decoding of such diplomas by the employers, who use them for selectively hiring jobseekers, whose diplomas differ with regard to performance, costs, and reputation. The model further assumes that for new, unknown diplomas, reputation is more important for recruitment purposes than real performance. Thus, the reputation of new diplomas influences their chances on the labor market as well as their attractiveness for future students. This has obviously consequences for their long-term market shares, which are simulated on the computer for the case of a competition between an established and a new diploma. It turns out that the cost-performance-space of diplomas contains niches of partial evolutionary stability, where established diplomas are able to defend their monopolistic dominance against the competition by certain types of new diplomas. The number and the places of such niches of stability seem to depend on institutional learning processes of the labor market and the reputation based strategies of the employers for the decoding of new diplomas.