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THE WALL AND THE CITY: EDUCATIONAL SEMIOTICS OF AN IMAGINARY POLIS // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 4 (38). P. 79-98

The article explores the projects of urban development and transformation on the example of Plato’s philosophical utopia and urban planning innovations of Hippodamus, an architect of the 5th century BC. These projects are based on a certain idea of the nature of the City, which is formed not only by general considerations about the needs of people and the urban community as a whole, but also by a completely material form of the city’s structure, which in this case acts as a medium of urban self-representation. In the article, the objective was set to reveal the nature of such a medium and show exactly how this medium performs the work of mediation. The authors argue that one of the most important mediums of urban self-representation is the city wall. It does not form a center unlike a temple or a palace; it is located outside, but its presence permeates the city, gives existence and visibility to the unity of the city, its inseparable whole composed of many elements, and its compelling law similar to the hardness of stone, guaranteeing the safety of the urban space. The wall divides and collides with each other identical and different, one and many, heavenly and earthly, male and female; it protects not only kings and citizens, but also their gods from hostile neighbors; and, finally, it has a kind of power because, acting externally, it turns the outer space into the property of the City, into its system and laws. In Plato’s Republic, the wall marks the boundary of the soul’s reversal from existence in the world of shadows to self-knowledge and movement towards the light. In the famous grid of Hippodamus we find the geometric correctness of the order of streets as a continuation of the social structure and the educational impact of law and order on the citizens of the city. At the same time, the order is given not only by the ratio of parallel and perpendicular streets, but also by the closeness of space guaranteed by the city wall, since only in this case the potential infinity of lines and the emptiness of space obey the correct ratio of the limit and the unlimited, the full and the empty, being and nothing. It is in this neighborhood of the artificial organization of the inner space and the outer limit set by the wall that the contradiction that generates the inner dynamics of the city finds its expression and consists in the fact that the border of the city mobilizes and concentrates forces that cannot be held by this limit and strive for infinite expansion. Walls dictated a new space of life, the stay in which required new skills, habits, a new structure of consciousness. All this also required new educational practices: didascaliae and palaestras could arise only in Greek cities, but not in Greek villages of the “dark ages”.

Keywords: city, power, wall, medium, Plato, Hippodamus, Hippodamus’s grid