Signifying Brno – creating urban space, shaping the city

Abstract

Written verbal expressions displayed in urban spaces offer valuable insights into a city's identity from the perspectives of those who live there and have an urgent need to express themselves publicly but anonymously. In accordance with the bottom-up approach of linguistic landscape studies (Ben-Rafael et al. 2006), the paper presents the author's pilot research project investigating the Brno linguistic environment in which vernacular street signage found in the neighborhoods of Židenice and Střed are documented and categorized according to their functional, visual and distributional aspects. In addition to outlining the signage typology, the paper attempts to answer the question of how these messages and their locations reflect the reputations of the two districts and how they participate in the discursive construction of Brno's urban spaces.