Putintsev Pavel A.
PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE CITY AND ITS IMAGE
Architecton: Proceedings of Higher Education №1 (33) March, 2011
The author poses the questions, what the phenomenon of the city actually is and what its image is composed of. In searching for the answers, he considers, first of all, the anatomical aspects of the city environment. In the context of these aspects, the following city materialities are identified: carcass, fabric, plasma, facture, megatexture and mediatexture. The author notes that, for considering the phenomenon of the image of a city it is essential to include into the city structure the individual as the bearer of the environment’s image. The inclusion of the individual as an active subject in an environmental situation evokes the classical theory of perception of the city developed by K.Lynch. The article describes the experiences of K.Lynch’s followers in isovist and fractal analysis. The result of the new practical experience is a new understanding of the environment as a calculated visual space visible to the individual from a certain point in the city.
The author maintains that the environmental approaches to city image description are too narrow and points to the need to include psychoemotional factors into the structure of the image of the city. This circumstance calls for taking a renewed look at the phenomenon of the city. Based on a review of the structures of fictional and dead cities, the author arrives at the conclusion that the city is an archetype structure that has absorbed the key features of traditional cities but it is not necessarily associated with human habitat. The author goes on to state that connotations generated by human mentality have a direct impact on the image of the city. Moreover, virtual substances may get built into human ideas of a place. Mythogeography, in turn, may impart commercial potential to actual places. The virtual aspect raises work with the image of the city to the level of non-design, psychology and art.
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