Summary
Highlights
Culture is more broadly interpreted in social sciences than just 'high art'. It consists of ways of life, including values (ideals, aspirations), norms (rules, principles), and material objects (everyday items, infrastructure). These elements are highly interrelated, with material objects providing clues about a society's value system, much like a landscape can be read as a text.
Culture is built on shared understandings, discourses, and narratives, studied through semiology or semiotics where signifiers point to signified cultural meanings. Activities with cultural symbolism are signifying practices, and the study of urban landscape meanings is iconography, often seen in monumental architecture. While societies have dominant values, subgroups form subcultures, displaying diversity and difference, sometimes even confronting the majority's norms (alterity).
Identity is shaped by multiple factors like class, age, gender, and nationality, through various discourses or 'subject positions'. The urban environment significantly influences these subjectivities by bringing diverse people together, leading to comparisons often based on stereotypes and binaries. Power dynamics frequently underpin these comparisons, resulting in feelings of superiority or inferiority.
Postcolonial theory distinguishes between colonialism (direct rule) and imperialism (domineering actions) and neocolonialism (economic/political domination after formal colonial rule). It examines imperialist discourses to undermine ethnocentrism, as Edward Said's 'Orientalism' demonstrates how Western thought constructed views of the 'Orient'. Homi Bhabha introduced 'hybridity', the idea that all cultures are mixtures, formed through 'transculturation' or 'creolization', and that notions of cultural authenticity are disputed.
Both cultural studies and post-colonial theory highlight culture as a social construct. National identities, for example, are 'imagined communities' (Benedict Anderson) formed through imaginative projection, as physical acquaintance with all members is impossible. This applies to other units like neighborhoods, towns, and cities, where shared communities are shaped by media and popular culture.
Space plays a crucial role in forming culture, as it is also a social construct linked to power. Michel Foucault's 'micropowers' concept explains how consent is achieved through discourses that construct everyday actions. Foucault's term 'carceral city' describes urban areas where power is decentralized and people are controlled by these micropowers. Cities demonstrate how space, like the policing of public libraries, reinforces cultural values and can create 'spaces of exclusion' or 'cultural imperialism'.
Space is crucial for identity formation, a process known as 'spatialized subjectivities'. Cities are instrumental in shaping these identities. The history of a space is intertwined with external events, making cities a 'text' that is continuously written, evolving, and disputed through language and social practices.
Postmodernism, a broad movement that departed from modernism, recognizes societal diversity. Jean Baudrillard argued that postmodern culture is based on 'simulacra' – images or copies that become indistinguishable from reality. Consumption gains greater significance in postmodern societies, allowing people to choose identities through goods (aestheticization of consumption). Urban spaces reflect this through increased shopping areas with dramatic architecture and events to attract consumers, making it harder to read the city as a single cultural landscape.
The numerous complex cultural changes in Western cities make it increasingly difficult to understand them as a single cultural landscape. There is no longer one urban geography but multiple, as the city has become discentered spatially, structurally, socially, and conceptually.