Editorial

This article aims to describe correlation between city's architecture as urban culture and cultural studies, specifically in semiotics. This article starts from Chris Barker's statement about city and urban as text in his phenomenal book, Cultural Studies, Theory and Practice. City as a complex subject has been transformed as the representation of urban culture. In the post-modernism view, urban culture as cultural space and cultural studies' sites have significantly pointed to became communications discourse and also part of the identity of Semiology. This article uses semiotics of Saussure for the research methods. Surabaya and Jakarta has been chosen for the objects of this article. The result of this article is describing the significant view of architecture science helps the semiotics in cultural studies. In other way, city's architecture becomes the strong identity of urban culture in Jakarta and Surabaya. Architecture approaches the cultural studies to view urban culture, especially in symbol and identity in the post-modernism era.

This article aims to describe correlation between city's architecture as urban culture and cultural studies, specifically in semiotics. This article starts from Chris Barker's statement about city and urban as text in his phenomenal book, Cultural Studies, Theory and Practice. City as a complex subject has been transformed as the representation of urban culture. In the post-modernism view, urban culture as cultural space and cultural studies' sites have significantly pointed to became communications discourse and also part of the identity of Semiology. This article uses semiotics of Saussure for the research methods. Surabaya and Jakarta has been chosen for the objects of this article. The result of this article is describing the significant view of architecture science helps the semiotics in cultural studies. In other way, city's architecture becomes the strong identity of urban culture in Jakarta and Surabaya. Architecture approaches the cultural studies to view urban culture, especially in symbol and identity in the post-modernism era.

This inaugural editorial launching the first volume of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies details, in two parts, the need for and significance of an urban cultural studies method, broadly conceived. Part 1 (in Issue 1) culls insights from the work of urban philosopher and cultural studies pioneer Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) as a way of exploring the role of philosophy in urban cultural studies research and examining its key terms: cities, the urban, interdisciplinarity and culture. Overall, urban cultural studies (UCS) foments a dialogue between art and society – between textual/representational (humanities) understandings of culture and anthropological, geographical, sociological (social science) approaches. This is ideally accomplished within a reconfigured urban studies paradigm that continues to embrace its characteristic focus on architecture, built environment, city planning, everyday life, identity formation, landscape, space/place, transportation and more, while venturing further into artistic terrain than ever before – films, literature, music, sequential art, painting, digital humanities approaches and more.

Cultural studies has developed into an intrinsically interdisciplinary research practice. The emergence of Urban Cultural Studies, as an extensive field of cultural studies, tries to clarify that the humanities-centered method of urban cultural studies requires a common ground that can unite social scientists and humanities scientists, in an effort to understand urban culture by focusing on its textual dimensions. Identifying urban problems as an interdisciplinary scientific work centered on urban areas, seeks to find ways to return intellectual specialization to the totality of understanding of “cultural texts”. This paper explores the formulation of urban cultural studies to bridge the discussion about the material condition and the cultural imagination of the city in a wider social context. The focus is on the analysis of Henri Lefebvre's thoughts on urban philosophy, urban modernity, and contemporary urban culture. Lefebvre reveals an awareness of the importance of space. Space in Lefebvre's understanding is the field of experience that is perceived, felt, and, most importantly, actually lived. Through Lefebvrian's perspective, this paper offers an understanding that the position of artwork, as one of the manifestations of urban culture, by overcoming disciplinary fragmentation can be seen as a disalienation strategy, becoming "living art" in the perspective of "work" as an effort to overcome product instrumentalization. This is also what the study of urban culture must realize; the totality of understanding of urban phenomena, or urban space as a reality and complexity of knowledge, cannot be understood in a compartmental way, which is only accepted as a collection of objects-economics, sociology, history, demography, psychology, or geology.

The authors set themselves the goal of characterizing the culture and spiritual life of the city within the framework of an interdisciplinary approach. The article substantiates an interdisciplinary approach to the study of urban culture, since the complex ambiguous nature of city culture cannot be fully described and stud-ied from the standpoint of any monodisciplinary approach. However, both cultural, semiotic and environmen-tal factors are important in the study of certain aspects of the material and spiritual urban culture. The authors emphasize that the environmental approach is one of the most sought-after methodological approaches to analysis. Thus, urban architecture as the most important component of the city’s material culture, which dif-fers in fundamental features in various historical eras, represented by various architectural styles (antique, ar-chitectural modernism, minimalism, etc.) and involves joint actions by designers, philosophers, architects, as well as civil engineers, financiers, representatives of local authorities and, most importantly, members of the public. The article provides an analysis of domestic and foreign studies of urban culture, shows the transfor-mation of assessments of the city, urban spiritual life, urban culture. “Urban culture” is characterized as an ar-tificially created environment for people to exist and realize themselves. The study examines the vectors of development of the culture of a modern city.

The article continues the study about the place of cultural anthropology of the city in the national system of the humanities. It proposes a definition of the object of science and describes the foreshortenings of contemporary studies of urban culture. The author thinks that the cultural anthropology of a city should study of the cultural specifics of a particular city in all its diversity. He insists that attempts to develop a more specific definition of the central object of urban anthropology, regardless of one aspect or another, are deliberately helpless. The plurality and heterogeneity of cultural units will always hinder the ultimate completeness of definitions. The ratio of this vision of the object with the aspects developed to date is presented in the form of the opposition “general / particular”. Particular aspects are built up in relation to internal and external cultural anthropology. Internal cultural anthropology is addressed to the study of cultural units and their types, processes, developmental features, and external – to the connection of culture with the external circumstances of its existence (social structure, linguistic expression, architectural embodiment, historical conditioning, etc.). The inner culture anthropology of the city has been developed so far only in two directions – descriptive and semiotic. The descriptive direction involves the study of various (directly perceived and thought-artistic) manifestations of culture. It originated at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries in the works of I.M. Grevs and N.P. Antsiferov, the founders of Petersburg studies. The semiotic direction is associated with the analysis of sign systems that contain cultural information. Its foundations were laid in the works of representatives of the Moscow-Tartu school – first of all, Yu.M. Lotman and V.N. Toporov. The history of the descriptive and semiotic direction of urban anthropology is closely related to literary criticism. The first steps in the study of urban culture were laid on the material of literary creativity and thus built connections between reality and a particular artistic concept – expressing and / or forming a unique image of space. At the present time, when studies on the specificity of the city are clearly divided between two independent areas – the study of literary text and the study of culture, the genetic ties of urban anthropology and literary criticism manifest themselves in the presence of terminological homonymy in the zone of central concepts. The external cultural anthropology of the city demonstrates how anthropological problems are linked with other sciences. To a greater extent, this pairing can be seen with literary criticism, art history, as well as a combination of architectural and construction, architectural and artistic sciences, brand marketing and tourism marketing. To a lesser extent, the cultural anthropology of the city is associated with linguistics, psychology, history, mass communications and philosophy.

The research on Culture Characteristics of Baotou City: Public Art Design and Cultural Space Management in Kundulun District is a study of urban culture and public art that explores the relationship between urban culture and public art and the role of public art in promoting urban culture. It focuses on classifying and exploring local culture, synthesizing artistic symbols and language into new design approaches through public art. The objectives of this research are: 1) to study the historical development and characteristics of Baotou's art and culture; 2) to analyze the identity, value, and meaning of Baotou's art and culture, and and integrate them into the concept of public art design to promote Baotou's image; and 3) to design a set of 3D public art works in the cultural area of Kundulun District, Baotou, using documentary research, field research, and interdisciplinary research. In studying the local culture of Baotou, it changed the direction of urban construction from urban expansion to quality development and promoted cultural and spiritual identity through public art to the integration of local culture and design. The research results showed that Baotou's culture has been positioned as a "steel city with a background of grassland culture". This identity can be used to disseminate the culture of the city by classifying cultural elements into symbols and applying them to the structure of the urban space through public art forms, enhancing the city's cultural identity and increasing its recognizability. The synthesis of the composition was carried out from two perspectives: color and material composition and shape composition. The cooling tower composition is one of the important and prominent structures of the steel mill, and the Mongolian horse is an important vehicle on the grassland as it represents spirit of perseverance and hard work. The “Cooling Tower” element is large, eye-catching and easily recognizable. Therefore, the meaning of "Prairie Horse' is combined and conveyed through the merging of the shape of the Mongolian horse and the shape of the cooling tower. This fusion creates a perfect combination of the elements of grassland culture and the elements that represent iron culture.

From the outset it is necessary to point out that any definition of “urban cultural studies” is likely to be as polemical as those of its two constituent parts—“cultural studies” and “urban studies.” The meanings and significance of these terms themselves have been and continue to be hotly and widely debated within and across a number of increasingly interdisciplinary fields. And yet, taking a moment to sketch out the nature of the debates—even if briefly and in general terms—is necessary if we are to understand the current need for an urban cultural studies method, a method that might bridge both humanities and social science scholarship on the culture(s) of cities. The starting point for Toward an Urban Cultural Studies is, thus, to formulate a provisional definition of urban cultural studies. This requires, first, identifying a generalized, but also representative and relevant, thesis of cultural studies method and, second, subsequently applying this thesis to interdisciplinary research on the city in broad terms.

Urban history, urban architecture, urban archeology and art history have been among the subjects that were given priority in urban cultural studies focusing on Turkey. Cultural creation and transmission groups and environments that are essential components of urban folklore have not been given the same priority. It is an obvious fact that all components of urban identity and city dwellers need to be taken account in general urban culture studies. As important as tangible urban cultural components, the everyday lives social groups, production and marketing methods, partly ritualistic practices, informal rules, memorial and shared spaces, jargons and secret codes, beliefs and nicknames should be evaluated in a holistic perspective. The urban studies in Western and Northern Europe and in North America have been taking these issues into account in meticulous ways. The urban marketplaces provide venues as cultural scenes in urban landscapes where colorful practices come into being with active participation of various social classes and groups that are the agents of urban culture. This study subjects the cultural memory of market vendors and their folk practices in Trabzon. Trabzon is one of the most important urban centers of Eastern Black Sea region where oral culture is peculiar. The marketplaces and vendors of Trabzon have kept their continuity in harmony with the rapidly changing socio-cultural and socio-economic structure. The folk elements, which were created and practiced by the market vendors in their professional lives were recorded by observation and interviews during field study and evaluated in their relation with and impact upon the urban culture. It was concluded that the marketplaces, which have been among the dynamic venues of the urban culture continue to represent the occupational rules, beliefs, communication techniques, behavior patterns and jargons in a rich content.

The author’s research approach to the topic of urbanism in continental European sociology is based on two fundamental points: 1) no unified sociology of the city has emerged; the historian of science has to deal with national sociologies, such as German and French; 2) the common ideological or, more broadly, intellectual situations give rise to similar attitudes and research topics in professional sociological communities. The choice of Francophone and German-language texts for analysis is determined by the wide exchange and mutual influence of national sociological schools between 1950 and 2000. In both countries, there was a process of reconstruction of sociology, first on the reception of American sociology and then on its critique. In 50 years, there were three paradigm shifts in the study of urban culture. Initially, the ideological concept of urbanism dominated in national sociologies, opposing the German philosophical tradition of the era of O. Spengler and his predecessors. Urbanism was considered as a function of urban space, ensuring freedom and personal development for all citizens (H. P. Bahrdt). The new political economy paradigm (M. Castells) initially began with a critique of urbanism as a form of bourgeois ideology devoid of theoretical content. Subsequently, the new paradigm was constructed in terms of the political economy of “Capital” without any reference to the cultural aspects of urban life. A city is nothing more than infrastructure for the circulation of capital, collective means of consumption necessary for the reproduction of labor, tied to the territory, inelastic, unprofitable. Citizen was considered as agent of economic process, faceless and deprived of individual features, a moment in economic development. In the process of mastering the political economy of the city, sociologists have overlooked the analysis of specific social situations, cultural conflicts, the functioning of imagined communities, and the symbolic connection of the citizen with the city. The political economy of the city was replaced by a new school of social urbanism under the brand of critical sociology (W. Siebel, A. Bourdin). Its adherents made an inventory of languages to describe urban culture and lifestyle, emphasized the idea of accessibility of basic subject and institutional tools of urban life, analyzed the possibilities of urbanism for the social integration of citizens and described the status of urbanism in urban planning, calling it a great social mission (A. Bourdin). In search of an adequate concept of urbanism, sociologists formed their own social identity, proving their necessity and importance in the social and cultural reconstruction of European society.

This chapter presents a case study of urban regeneration and culture in Malta, identifying the key motivations for engaging in urban regeneration and the logic behind intrinsically linking (re)developments to the encouragement of local engagement with Maltese culture. Festivals and historical re-enactments as the foundation of community-based regeneration initiatives are highlighted. It is posited that the engagement of locals is paramount to the success of urban cultural developments, and while cultural tourism is the most immediate driving force behind progressing such investment, the local meaning and ownership of such advancements must be central to the entire process.

This special section of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies engages with the idea of activating a ‘sonic turn’ in urban cultural studies scholarship, in part through the evocation of the paradigm of critical and participatory citizenship, as well as through critical approaches to understanding how sound and music are implicated in the texture of a city. This work is therefore informed by theorizations of topdown and of bottom-up approaches to engagements with, and representation of, the city, through sonic and musical means. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, including urban ethnomusicology, urban sociology, cultural geography, acoustic ecology and soundscapes studies, this introductory article examines what is meant by ‘the sonic turn’ as it relates to sound and music studies and how and why this should matter to the study of cities and of the urban experiences of citizens in the broadest sense. This introduction also summarizes aspects of the five papers in this collection, signalling the different approaches taken by each of the authors as evidence of the richness such sonic and musical investigations into the city and the urban experience can bring to urban cultural studies. With a focus on urban ethnography and on applied dimensions of research, particularly in the contemporary city, this article seeks to underscore the importance of listening to and hearing the city, especially for those citizens that do not necessarily have an ‘official’ voice or the technical means to interpret and engage with their sonic environments. Finally, this article suggests how sonic cultural interventions and engagements may assist, if not in social regeneration, at least in promoting a greater understanding of the complex sonic dimensions of city life as mediated and experienced by urban dwellers and as imagined by others.

The studies of urban popular culture in modern China in recent years have attracted wide attention from scholars in China and abroad. The symposium, which is composed by Ma Min’s “Injecting vitality into the studies of urban cultural history,” Jiang Jin’s “Issues in the studies of urban popular culture in modern China,” Wang Di’s “The microcosm of Chinese cities: The perspective and methodology of studying urban popular culture from the case of teahouses in Chengdu,” Joseph W. Esherick’s “Remaking the Chinese city: Urban space and urban culture” and Lu Hanchao’s “From elites to common people: The downward trend in the studies of Chinese urban history in the United States,” provide valuable insights on the perspective, trend, and methodology of the studies.

Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. It presents original research and integrates historical methodologies with those of anthropology, geography, literature, art, and architecture. Moving between precolonial, colonial, and contemporary urban spaces, it covers the major regions, religions, and cultural influences of sub-Saharan Africa. The themes include Islam and Christianity, architecture, migration, globalization, social and physical decay, identity, race relations, politics, and development. This book elaborates on not only what makes the study of African urban spaces unique within urban historiography, it also offers an-encompassing and up-to-date study of the subject and inserts Africa into the growing debate on urban history and culture throughout the world.The opportunities provided by the urban milieu are endless and each study opens new potential avenues of research. This book explores some of those avenues and lays the groundwork on which new studies can build. The contributors include: Maurice Nyamanga Amutabi, Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, Mark Dike DeLancey, Thomas Ngomba Ekali, Omar A. Eno, Doug T. Feremenga, Laurent Fourchard, James Genova, Fatima Muller - Friedman, Godwin R. Murunga, Kefa M. Otiso, Michael Ralph, Jeremy Rich, Eric Ross, Corinee Sandwith, and Wessel Visser. Toyin Falola is the Nalle Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin; Steven J. Salm is Assistant Professor of History, Xavier University of Louisiana.

HISTORIANS HAVE DEMONSTRATED a penchant for tracking the forces of change stemming from the political and socioeconomic upheavals that have punctuated the history of the Middle East in the past two hundred years. The effects of the Ottoman reformation (or Tanzimat), the European industrial revolution, World War I, and the collapse of four centuries of Ottoman rule followed by the imposition of European control over much of the Arab Middle East have steered historians in this direction. As a consequence, they have shown considerably less interest in looking for elements of continuity and stability among the many transformations experienced by the region. This benign neglect holds true for historians of the Middle East regardless of the methodologies and frameworks of analysis they apply to their subjects. Indeed, the social and economic historian is no different from today's less-fashionable political historian and the liberal historian no different from the conservative. The study of urban political culture in Syria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a case in point. I will argue that political culture in Syria did not change abruptly with the break-up of the Ottoman empire and the imposition of European rule at the end of World War I. Rather, the exercise of political power followed what can be called the Ottoman model for nearly four decades after the demise of the empire. In order to support this contention, three periods of modern Syrian history need to be examined. In the first period, from the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth, a political culture in the towns of Syria arose that was intimately tied to the emergence of a single political elite. During this time, the urban elites developed a distinct social character and political role. The second period begins with the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the introduction of French rule and ends with World War II and France's abandonment of Syria. A remarkable degree of continuity in Syrian urban political culture and in the character of the Syrian elite's political role distinguished this era, despite the major upheavals that foreshadowed and characterized the interwar years. The third period corresponds to the early years of Syrian independence. Only then did Syrian political culture begin to assume radically new forms and dimensions, but even this process took nearly two decades to unfold.