Культурный код города

Abstract

The article explores one of the modern trends in the semiotic analysis of the city and urban environment — the study of the cultural code of the city. In the contemporary aca­de­mic discourse, the importance of studying the cultural code of the city is growing not so much as a phenomenon but as a system of decoding and cognizing each specific city in its own con­text. This aspect is closely related to the analysis of the problem of enhancing urban identity and local patriotism, as well as identifying the unique cultural meanings of the city as part of exp­loring its image in the external environment. As the basis for the study of the cultural code of the city, it is proposed to consider the following factors encoding of urban environ­ment: a) nature and climate, b) texts, where the city is conceptualized and presented in litera­ry context, c) historical events associated with the city, d) spatial characteristics, e) symbolic relationship with famous individuals (“geniuses of place”). The process of coding is inf­luenced by other features of the city, which form economic, culinary, tourist, digital and other codes of the city, and their decoding can be carried out both on the everyday level and on the expert (academic) level. The author identifies the main ways of expressing, capturing and communicating the city’s cultural code in signs of different origin.