Volume 47, Issue 2 - Themenheft: „Die Stadt als öffentlicher Kommunikationsraum“ besorgt von Doris Tophinke und Evelyn Ziegler

Public space can be understood as a place where strangers encounter each other in certain ways. This has been the common conceptual understanding of the public sphere in sociology and urban studies since Georg Simmel (cf. works by Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Jan Gehl, Richard Sennett, and many more). However, this understanding of public space often centers around unclear notions of how these encounters are interactively structured. So far, research on this topic has mainly addressed what Goffman termed focused interactions , such as talks between strangers in public. His notion of unfocused interactions, for fleeting encounters, has yet to receive adequate academic attention. Thus, the aim of this article is to engage in an in-depth empirical study of fleeting encounters in public places by drawing on three examples of people passing each other along city streets. Based on video recordings, the multimodal interaction analysis shows that when people pass each other they engage in interactional processes expressed through bodily dimensions, which carry specific social implications. Gaze, along with other visually accessible bodily behaviors, is the most important interactive resource people use to make themselves accountable for passing strangers without making contact. The analysis suggests that through passing each other, strangers generate specific kinds of interactive relations that are typical within the public sphere. Fleeting encounters thus prove to be highly structured, interactively achieved processes through which strangers establish their situated relations in a way that allows them to remain as separate interactional units.

This article is concerned with the question why and how urban space becomes a space of protest and contestation. It argues that protest transforms urban space into an alternative space, in which the conventional practices associated with this space, the space’s symbolic functions and the concepts of space themselves are interpreted as means to create power. Protest emerges where the constitutive characteristics of public spaces are restricted, i. e. where accessibility, freedom of conduct and role diversity, and anonymity are limited. After laying the theoretical foundations, the article discusses the typical functions of squares (gatherings and rallies), streets (marches and demonstrations), and parks (festivals, preparation, recreation) for urban protests. It finally discusses the protest practices of the black block, of the occupation of squares, and of Reclaim the Streets in the light of the theories of urban space.

The article deals with Graffiti Writing as a specific urban phenomenon. While present studies usually examine the phenomenon in a general perspective, this article focuses on the semantic, lexico-grammatical, visual and material properties of Graffiti Writing are focused. It is shown, how this properties are related to the urban space. This includes an analysis of the interplay of lexico-grammatical, visual and other semiotic resources in creating meaningful units. The qualitative study focusses on Graffiti Writing in Germany in the late 20 th and early 21 th century. Its empirical basis are photographs of Graffiti Writings in the INGRID-database.

In this article we outline how corpus-based studies can contribute to the methodology of linguistic landscape research. Linguistic-landscape research can be roughly understood as the “study of writing on display in the public sphere” (Coulmas 2009: 14). From a historical perspective, we investigate the emergence and use of the public sphere as a place of attention for official top-down communication in Luxembourg. Based on a large corpus of public announcements of the municipality of the city of Luxembourg, the history of public top-down communication is analysed by taking into account both sociolinguistic and linguistic factors. The analysis reveals that the public announcements are increasingly typographically and linguistically adapted to the conditions of public perception and self-reading in the course of time – whereby initially the multimodal embedding of the older presentation form is maintained.