Abstract
The city image presents an important part of urban research, because representations about the city basically underlie urban identities and are connected with its symbolic capital and attractiveness for the residents. Our earlier research of urban identity in Chisinau included images of the city it was based on and showed their inconsistency. Considering that images represent cognitive and emotional matrixes of the historic period of their formation, congruent with the existing social construct, it is important to trace dynamics of formation and contents of the Chisinau images, which are being formed as the public/brand ones in the touristic albums and guides of the Soviet period, as well as in the years of independence of the Republic of Moldova. For this purpose, we selected several sources from the both periods and carried out their comparison according to the identified categories. The results of the analysis proved the existing correlation between the city image from the albums and the main notional trends of the time of their creation. We can trace evolution of creation of the “new” city concept in the Soviet period and flourishing of this idea in 1980s. During the independence period the city image reflects some obvious ideas of identity search, revision of history, a European city, revival of traditional culture as one of the key components of national identity, which will define the appearance of the city as well. It is challenging to continue the research on additional sources from the last 5–10 years.
Highlights
Local urban research during the past decades was mostly focused on the history of the city, generating numerous books and papers with reconstruction of its architectural and cultural past, there were some papers about Chisinau image in fiction and touristic offers (Axenti 2018)
City guides are combined with maps, and albums represent monographic research or separated aspects of the city image, for example “Chisinau: boulevards, streets, squares, parks: encyclopedic guide” (2017), “Cultural Chisinau” (2017), “Chisinau 1918
Despite a limited number of sources, there could be traced a main tendency in the evolution of the Chisinau image – changes in paradigm during a relative short period of time
Summary
The interviewed research participants, speaking about their views and emotions about the city, generated their own images of Chisinau as a part of their personal experience of local space and place. Local urban research during the past decades was mostly focused on the history of the city, generating numerous books and papers with reconstruction of its architectural and cultural past (for example, Eșanu 1998, Ciocanu 2017), there were some papers about Chisinau image in fiction (for example, Grati 2017) and touristic offers (Axenti 2018).
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