Urban Cultural Space in the Context of Evolutionism

Viktoriia Freidlina,Tetiana Uvarova

doi:10.7596/taksad.v9i1.2481

Abstract

Attempts to determine the essence of urban culture were made in the framework of different approaches: civilizational, philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and others. This article is concerned with the analysis of the urban cultural space phenomenon from the evolutionary point of view. Originating as the first ethnographic theory in the works of German historian Friedrich Gustav Klemm, cultural evolutionism was further developed in the evolutionary theory of cultural development, the founder of which is the English ethnologist Edward Burnett Tylor. The problems of the evolutionary theory of culture were widely discussed in scientific circles and found common ground with such ideas as the “axial age” concept by Karl Jaspers and the doctrine of the noosphere. Some common points in understanding the synergistic mechanisms of cultural activities can be found in the holistic philosophy of integrity. An evolutionary analysis of urban cultural space remains relevant today. In this article, we analyze the possibility of studying the processes of cultural transformation in the context of changes in the forms of joint social life, developing from the incoherent homogeneous structure of ancient human settlements to the complex heterogeneous structure of modern highly urbanized urban communities. Also, we attempted to justify the advisability of applying the evolutionary approach to the analysis of the laws of formation, development and improvement of the cultural space of modern cities.

Highlights

When trying to characterize the multifaceted concept of "culture", researchers often use such epithets and characteristics as “kaleidoscopy”, “multicolor”, “inexhaustibility”, and “diversity of forms and shades”
Like the cytoplasm binding all the components of a cell, the urban cultural space is the environment in which all the unique, specific forms of culture that are characteristic of a certain city are formed, developed, and improved
The logical sequence of the flow of urban culture forms from ancient human settlements to highly urbanized megalopolises comes to the fore in cultural studies of the present, as it allows to understand, and to predict many processes taking place in society

Summary

Introduction

When trying to characterize the multifaceted concept of "culture", researchers often use such epithets and characteristics as “kaleidoscopy”, “multicolor”, “inexhaustibility”, and “diversity of forms and shades”. The single universal process of human civilization progress undergoes the following stages: the Promethean era, the era of the great local cultures of antiquity, axial age (the era of the spiritual foundation of human existence) and the era of the development of technology. Proteism can become the progenitor of subsequent incredible changes with their great discoveries In their opinion, the merger of technological progress and spiritual culture is capable of provoking the unimaginable evolutionary breakthrough and the transition to a new civilizational stage of human society. Chardin justified the transition of the biosphere to the “noosphere”, where the evolution of nature and society will not be in conflict, but will merge into a single interconnected process Followers of both unilinear and multilinear evolutionary models come to the conclusion that the evolutionary development of mankind continues and its transition to a new stage of development is imminent. New cultural norms and values confirm their viability, gaining a foothold in the patterns of everyday activity or, on the contrary, lose their significance as less popular

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion