City in moments of beauty: The “garden” code as the key to creating a communicative situation
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2026-2-104-123
Understanding and perception of the city have changed in the face of increasing environmental complexity and the emergence of hybrid environments. The city is undergoing a deformation, often associated with its adaptation to modern needs: it is no longer perceived as a unit or as a value. New life strategies can overcome a consumerist, destructive attitude toward the city. The challenge lies in developing ways of exploring and comprehending the city that will restore to people a sense of their meaningful presence within it and a sense of responsibility for its future. Object-oriented ontology provides a general methodology for understanding the city as an autonomous, self-valuable entity. The first step toward a harmonious relationship with the city begins with its acceptance, mastering the grand allusive network in which it exists and which it itself produces. Treating the city as a valuable entity in itself entails a search for an adequate method of studying it. Such a method is the drift method, followed by the mapping of spontaneously discovered situations of beauty, invented and tested by G. Debord. At the same time, a “mapping” procedure is being actualized, which would avoid a narrative approach and allow the situation of beauty to be preserved in a relevant form—in structure. The principles of the neopragmatist paradigm in general and social semiotics in particular allow us to outline a research field in which structures for understanding the city will be discovered. One such structure is the traditional Chinese garden, which represents a model of interaction between humans and the universe. A communication experiment for design students, which has been running for five years, allowed us to test this hypothesis. The completed “Find the Garden” task led to significant changes in the perception of the city: the amorphous, monotonous environment was presented in structures-situations, seemingly empty and devoid of content, but filled with the energy of meaning-making. This new vision of the city developed spatial, lateral thinking and the ability to create one’s creative product as a structure or communicative situation, in which the user not only discovers embedded meanings but also generates them.
Keywords: city, semiosis, communicative situation, code, drift, structure, beauty, traditional Chinese garden
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Issue: 2, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 104 — 123
Downloads: 12