VISUAL CULTURE AND THE CENTRALITY OF URBAN SPACE: URBAN STUDIES ON THE PRACTICES OF ESTABLISHING A CULTURAL HIERARCHY

Abstract

The current stage of transformation in urban spatial structures demonstrates the city’s significance as “a humanity’s laboratory» and an “economic motor of the cognitive-cultural economy.» The war in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of the city as a center of military resistance The complex picture of urban visualization is dynamically changing and requires clarification of the forms of historical implementation of the hierarchy of cultural practices. The purpose of the study is to reveal the logic of visualizing the centrality of urban space in the context of the origins of the emergence of the hierarchy of cultural practices. The research methodology is based on the perspective of the Chicago School of Urban Studies, which identified three levels of approaches to understanding the city: short-run (priority on defining empirical parameters), long-run (defining the city as the basic form of civilization), and middle-run (defining the specifics of a particular civilization, its role in the formation, spread, rise, and decline of the latter). In this context, the basic oppositions of the »great and little traditions» (R. Redfield, M. Singler) and »the center and periphery» (N. Luhmann) were examined. The results of the study define basic parameters for defining city as a criteria for civilization in the context of the transformation of symbolic architecture into subservient one, and clarified the historical form of script that embodied the city’s semantic centrality through the differentiation of cultural practices and the increasing complexity of their hierarchy.  
The long-run perspective of urban studies showed that the city represented a break in the monotony of segmentary differentiation and the starting point for the formation of cultural hierarchy in general. The complexity of these practices was apparent in the fact that the stone structures of city walls, which bring together the surrounding landscape and the fate of people into a unity, became the bearers of the semantic centrality of the inscribed text. In the middle-run, the historical type of city embodied the basic institutions that represented a dynamic modification of the hierarchy of cultural practices. Using the example of modern reconstructions of the ancient Greek polis (Arendt, Sennett) as a “school of balanced life,» the complex structuring of urban spaces and their role in visualizing the ancient canon are demonstrated. This study demonstrated that the visualization of the centrality of urban space manifested the hierarchy of cultural practices.