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A MYTHOLOGICAL COMPONENT IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE IMAGE OF THE CITY AND URBAN IDENTITY // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 3 (25). P. 168-178

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of constructing urban identity in the rapidly growing Russian metropolis. The author analyzes the social construction of the image of the city and urban identity based on the epistemological concept of the diversity of types of cognition. In the framework of this concept, religion, mythology, art, etc. are considered as various logical systems that use specific methods of presenting and processing information; moreover, each of the types of cognition has its own, not completely replaced by other types, functions in the overall cognitive process. As a result, we see the combining and interweaving of everyday experience and scientific information, mythologies and ideological attitudes, artistic representations and philosophical generalizations in the construction of complex epistemological images such as the image of the city. The regularity of the presence of a mythological component in the construction of the image of the city and urban identity is related to the fact that some cognitive patterns of the myth solve some problems arising in this construction more efficiently than the rational forms of thinking. The most important of these mythological schemes are: (1) the anthropomorphic nature of mythological representation, which allows personifying the image of the object and thereby creating a human attitude to it; (2) the case determinism: the myth explains social facts by unique events that have occurred in the past and have shaped this or that tradition. The case determinism makes it possible to construct explanations when other grounds are unavailable; (3) the special semantic load of the naming procedure in mythological thinking, which includes, among other things, the ability to change the status and fate of an object by changing its name. This scheme is also in demand in conditions of lack or obscurity of other, more pragmatic ways of changing social reality. The functional complementarity of the types of cognition clearly manifests itself in a situation of a shortage of objective grounds for the image of “my city”. In cities with a long history and prevailing cultural traditions or with special distinctive features of the climate, nature, location, the construction of the image of the city is based on objective characteristics, and the scientific (historical, cultural) knowledge, as well as the artistic component, dominates in it. In the absence of features that clearly mark the city, the non-rational, including mythological, component of the image of the city increases. We can trace this trend by example of Novosibirsk—a relatively young technological metropolis. The mythological component in the image of the city is strong both in the mass consciousness of the citizens and in official rhetoric. The main mythological schemes in the construction of the image of Novosibirsk are the personification of the moment of the emergence of the city by strengthening of the figure of the demiurge—a person who creates the city as a new social world by his own free will and independent decision; the purposeful creation of iconic places with the subsequent attribution of history to them (an analogue of a mythological precedent); the formation of the tradition of preserving all historical names when naming streets in order to create the effect of “depth of history”.

Keywords: modern mythology, image of city, urban identity, social construction, types of cognition