Congreso Internacional Comunicación, ciudad y espacio público

4. SISTEMAS DE CIUDADES, UNA MIRADA TRANSVERSAL

Dividiremos a las ciudades en dos grupos, las ubicadas dentro del macizo andino de la costa del Pacífico y las ciudades de la planicie Atlántica de América del Sur.

Las “ciudades del Pacífico” serán entonces las que se ubican en el área geográfica que contiene la cordillera de los Andes, cordillera del Caribe, precordillera Andina, cordillera de la costa peruano-chilena. Destacamos, en esta primera etapa de análisis, a las ciudades de Santiago de Chile, Lima, Guayaquil, Quito, Medellín, Bogotá y Caracas.

En cambio, las “ciudades del Atlántico”, dentro del área geográfica que involucra al macizo de Brasilia, la llanura amazónica y el macizo de la Patagonia, destacamos en esta primera etapa las ciudades de Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Porto Alegre, Río de Janeiro, San Pablo, Recife y Georgetown.

Figura 4. Descomposición de la estructura topográfica, principales ejes viales y mancha urbana de las ciudades de Buenos Aires, San Pablo, Santiago de Chile y Lima

Fuente: Dibujos de la arquitecta Ayelén Betsabé Zucotti

5. CONCLUSIONES

Las conclusiones pertinentes a esta investigación buscan encontrar patrones comunes en la escala regional, establecer procesos de mitigación y acción válidos, comprobables, ponderando la acción común para mejorar la eficiencia de las ciudades latinoamericanas. A lo largo de la historia de estas ciudades latinoamericanas encontramos procesos urbanos e infraestructurales superpuestos. Hasta aquí consideramos que existe una desvinculación entre el proceso de planificación urbana y el sitio, experimentando deficiencias en la estructura urbana resultante. Fundadas, como vimos, en marcos contextuales iguales, y luego surgiendo de procesos sociales, políticos y económicos conexos, estas ciudades de la región se diferencian, principalmente, en su sustrato natural, por tal motivo concluimos que a partir de aquí es al menos recomendable comenzar procesos de estudio que puedan equilibrar el valor del soporte topográfico al de las otras variables mencionadas, a la hora de planificar y desarrollar los proyectos urbanos. Esta mirada promueve la generación de estructuras de asociación para las ciudades, en relación con su soporte topográfico y, a partir de allí, desarrollar procesos de investigación conjunta.

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ABSTRACT

This paper examines the surfaces of cities as loci for claiming the right to the city, and for expressing inclusive, political urban identities. Based on case studies of surfaces from London, UK, I argue that the surfaces of cities are places of resistance against exclusionary neoliberal urbanism, and propose their examination as places of urban cultural heritage.

Using London’s surfaces and signs as my main territory of enquiry, the paper exposes a number of fundamental issues to the development of Western neoliberal cities: social exclusion and inequality; privatisation and corporatisation; creative homogeneity and a lack of support for vernacular, non- profit-driven urban cultures; and a politics of regulation and control, which leads to securitised, surveilled and hostile urban environments.

KEYWORDS

urban surfaces, surface semiotics, surface

inscriptions, the right to the city, neoliberal

urbanism, London

RESUMEN

En este artículo examinaremos las superficies de las ciudades como lugares para reclamar el derecho a la ciudad y para expresar identidades urbanas políticas e inclusivas. Basándonos en casos de estudio de las superficies londinenses, argumentamos que las superficies de las ciudades son lugares de resistencia contra el urbanismo neoliberal excluyente, y proponemos su análisis como lugares de patrimonio cultural urbano.

Usando las superficies y los signos de Londres como nuestro principal territorio de investigación, exponemos aquí temas fundamentales para el desarrollo de ciudades occidentales neoliberales: desigualdad y exclusión social; privatización; homogeneidad creativa y falta de apoyo para culturas vernáculas y urbanas que no generan ingresos; y una política de regulación y control, que producen entornos urbanos titulizados, vigilados y hostiles.

PALABRAS CLAVE

superficies urbanas, semiótica de la superficie,

inscripciones en la superficie, el derecho a la

ciudad, urbanismo neoliberal, Londres

1. INTRODUCTION

Urban surfaces are social spaces and repositories of political activity. They are the stage on which urban stories unfold, or become hidden, and they mediate between the cultural forces and the physical objects that make up the city. They are fascinating because they are specific physical loci, yet they afford readings and interpretations that expand far beyond their material existence. Urban surfaces have been of interest to scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including sociology (Brighenti, 2009, 2010), anthropology (Noland, 2005), architecture (Unwin, 2000; Lavin, 2011), linguistics (Pennycook, 2009; Harris, 1995; Henkin, 1998), geography (Mould, 2015), literary theory (Nandrea, 1999), urbanism (Tripodi, 2008, 2009), visual culture (Bruno, 2014), photography (O’Neil, 2008) and communication (Irvine, 2012); and there are currently two upcoming publications dedicated to the study of the politics and aesthetics of urban surfaces (Brighenti and Kärrholm, 2018; Brighenti and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2018). This paper draws on knowledge from this body of work, and develops semiotic and legal analytical models as original contributions to the understanding of urban surfaces as repositories of urban cultures.

The paper proposes six theses for understanding surfaces, each of which will be discussed as a separate section.

1. Surfaces are intensive, expressive and deep

2. Neutral surface mode does not exist

3. Surfaces visibilise law, specifically private property and public order

4. Inscriptions turn private property into a precarious commons (precariousness is accessibility)

5. Surface conflict is spatial justice

6. The right to the city is the right to the surface

2. SURFACES ARE INTENSIVE, EXPRESSIVE AND DEEP

Surfaces are spaces of friction, tension and expression. They are the patchy areas between the hard and soft parts of the built environment, between stuff and air, between private solids and public fluids. Surfaces separate and expose, they contain and endure, and they brandish their cracks and colours in public view, often for public access. Classes of surface materials can be read as inventories of building technologies, but they are also objects of expressive interest and textural intensity, exquisite imperfections and variations on the battered body of the city.

Just like derma on living creatures, the skin of the city is deep and multi-layered: it accumulates paint and colour, creating a palimpsest of testimonies and experiences, but it also sheds its fabrics in an unaffected process of self-preservation. Like skin, surfaces develop rifts and intervals, signs of deliberate modelling and trauma, which they continue to flaunt nonchalantly, always prepared for more.

Surfaces and their displays can be interpreted through clusters of visual and textual expression, alongside a series of overlapping ideological and material territories, to produce knowledge about the city.

A methodological focus on the surface comes from geosemiotics (Scollon & Wong-Scollon, 2003) and semiotic landscapes (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), two analytical tools which account for the communicational and locational diversity of urban signage. Geosemiotics and semiotic landscapes are closely related in method and scope, and are anchored in the multifaceted, localised nature of the semiotic sign, emphasising its location and meaning-generating capacity.

Scollon and Wong-Scollon proposed geosemiotics as a method with a specifically urban scope, which is designed to foreground the places of discourse (not just the discourse itself). As its name suggests, geosemiotics reflects on the placement of semiotic markings within the material world, and is built on the principle that every sign is actively and intrinsically connected to its location, generating discourse and information through its bare presence. Simply being there, occupying a surface, is therefore a meaningful act: according to this theory, all signs are functions of material and territorial accessibilities and constraints.

Similarly, the concept of semiotic landscape proposed by Kress and van Leeuven (1996) and further developed by Jaworski and Thurlow (2010) aims to incorporate not just textual utterances in the urban environment, but also visual and non-verbal discourses, cultural values, the law, as well as architecture and the built environment.

The place of visual communication in a given society can only be understood in the context of, on the one hand, the range of forms or modes of public communication available in that society, and, on the other hand, their uses and valuations. We refer to this as the ‘semiotic landscape’. […] so particular modes of communication should be seen in their environment, in the environment of all the other modes of communication that surround them, and of their functions. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 33)

There is a strong sense of emplacement here as well, which is not limited to looking at the places of discourse, but also includes the inherent semiotic function of those places (for example, their assigned and disputed legal and territorial functions). Jaworski and Thurlow go on to define semiotic landscapes as any spaces “with visible inscription made through deliberate human intervention and meaning making” (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010, p. 2) — a definition which prioritises places over inscriptions and suggests that inscriptions can generate as much knowledge about their supportive places, as places can about their supported inscriptions. Inscriptions become tools to understand surfaces, and surfaces become mechanisms of exploring the city.

3. NEUTRAL SURFACE MODE DOES NOT EXIST

Surfaceality is a quality of city surfaces which makes them interesting and active as places of display and public life. The concept was proposed by sociologist Andrea Mubi Brighenti (2009), who started from the premise that walls are not simply boundaries between territories, but also territories in themselves, and they possess inherent communicative potential. Brighenti defined the significance of surfaceality in addition to verticality (see below), encouraging a focus on the semiotic richness of vertical boundaries.

The walls offer a visible surface, which becomes a surface of inscription for stratified, crisscrossing and overlapping traces […] the wall becomes part of the struggle for public attention and a key element in the configuration of an urban regime of visibility. (Brighenti, 2010, p. 323, original emphasis)

Even before they become sites of inscription, surfaces are the deep mirrors of cities, made from paper and glass, concrete and wood, paint and brick. Vulnerable, contested and always open to dispute and change, surface territories are shifting, superimposed functions of materiality and communication, profound in their flatness and generous in their exposure of information. Surfaces express the dynamics of urban life in their acceptance or rejection of signage, and reveal the knowledge of the city through their morphing configuration.

Not only is any surface more than a blank canvas, but it also bears upon it layers and layers of material and visual codes, and it stands as part of a larger physical and inscriptive system. This surface palimpsest was captured by geographer Oli Mould in the following passage:

The surfaces of the city are multi-layered – one could argue that it is a palimpsest of past and present stories, cultures and economies etched onto each other over time. This layering of the city by a long history of planners, architects, activists, commentators and ordinary inhabitants creates a multiplicitous canvas which has been concocted by an anachronistic recipe of play, creativity, activism and art. (Mould, 2015, p. 92)

Surface landscapes are integrative and invented environments, and not simple canvases, contexts or containers for expression (Pennycook in Shohamy and Garter, 2009). They drift, they expose, and are constantly subject to dispute, claiming and reclaiming. They are untotalisable, unmasterable, re-markable and renegotiable (Noland, 2005), reflecting on the fluid nature of urban life and the urban environment.

In addition to surfaceality, surface territories also possess verticality, the property of vertical urban structures to form interfaces of exposure and display. Simon Unwin described surfaces as “interfaces between space that can be occupied and solid that cannot” (2000, p. 36), but surfaces are also sites of occupation themselves. They are hard ‘things’ of legal persuasion and material determination, bordering, screening, supporting or protecting ‘content’, either beyond them (as is the case with walls or hoardings) or before them (billboards, posters, notice boards). Surfaces are frontiers and liminal spaces, in-between spaces, margins, edges and walls; but they are also partitions that can be shared, and are primary forms of habitation of the material world: “inscriptions open surfaces into depths of meaning and multiple physical dimensions” (Bruno, 2014, p. 3).

Banal, mundane and sometimes hostile walls, are principal sights of exploration for the myriad inscriptions that occupy their surfaces. Other vertical structures such as billboards or street signs, hoardings or bus shelters, electricity boxes or doorways, are all significant components of the urban visual landscape. Their surfaces open the built structures of the city as potential sites of transmission and networking. Any one of these vertical elements can potentially also be used to show presence, to surprise, to defy. In Nandrea’s words,

These walls are not simple horizontal borderlines dividing up space; they are vertical planes that, through inscription, can be transformed into unexplored and multidimensional spaces, becoming frontiers in the dictionary sense of undeveloped areas or fields for discovery or research. (1999, p. 111)

Urbanist Lorenzo Tripodi calls these vertical surfaces spaces of exposure (2008, 2009) and he defines them as “functional, structured spaces where city users are exposed to the spectacle of goods, entertained, impressed by flows of images” (2008, p. 308). These images accumulate and overlap, forming intricate visual palimpsests with layers upon layers of colours, messages and materials, of temporary communicative presences. The spaces of exposure draw our attention to the vertical creation of meaning, and they are useful for understanding not just the impressive neoliberal spectacle of corporate imagery and sponsored muralism, but also less sensational visual iterations and inscriptive claims.

There is no such thing as an impartial surface, free from invisible tensions and palpable material constraints. All surfaces are part of the lawscape (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015); some form artscapes and communicative networks (Stewart, 1988); and most contribute to economies of exposure and visibility (Tripodi, 2009).

Surfaces generate capital by hosting consumerist messages or promoting citywide agendas of regeneration and placemaking; they become objects of adoration and unattainability when embellishing contemporary architectural icons; they evolve into bi-dimensional monuments of aesthetic and heritage interest; and they are tools of exclusion and control in the fight for the image of the city. In fact, I would suggest that surfaces are the image of the city, hence the high stakes in protecting their desired aspect and predicting any potential threats to their integrity.

The spaces of exclusion of the neoliberal city often appear in the form of private ownership of public spaces, which also reflects in the treatment of surfaces. Hostile surfaces, just like hostile architecture, are designed to preclude any unwanted inscriptions and to offer customised, built-in rejection of nonconformist signage. Anti-graffiti coatings densify surfaces even more, and they slyly politicise the materiality of the surface by sometimes not declaring their presence. The resulting under-cover surfaces will less readily accept dispute and inscription, but they will nevertheless maintain their exposure and vulnerability, albeit in a less accessible way. Ultimately, it all goes down on the surfacescape: reinforcements, breaches, commodification, struggle, acceptance, segregation, conviviality, occupation — and there is no better way to examine these than by looking at inscriptions.

Surfaces host a conflict between the institutionally-enabled dominance of monophonic discourses, and the fluid, editable, re-inscribable proposals of a communally produced, polyphonic language. The single discourse can appear as a policy of cleansing and eradication, support for fiscally-conformist commercial messages, or strategically backed muralisation and artification of specific urban areas. Political agendas and administrative strategies determine the visual forms of surfaces, from localised, plural, materially-embedded inscriptions to prolific, replicable, globally-palatable icons.