City as a visual text: Towards the concept of cultural code
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2026-2-9-42
The city is a complex socio-historical phenomenon, one of the key aspects of which is its status as a cultural text. The city is one of the forms of recording and transmitting messages that are significant for local cultural identity. The sphere of the urban signifier is formed by a system of artifacts that designate and structure the environment of a specific city. In order to perceive not only these forms, but also the contents, meanings and senses expressed through these forms, it is necessary to have the appropriate codes. Activation of the cultural code ensures the actualization of the sense encrypted in the connotative layer of the urban text. At the same time, on the one hand, the sign of sense can be (or not be) anything and, on the other hand, any cultural phenomenon can act as a code in the context of encryption / decryption of the message. ’Code’ (like ’sign’) is a modal concept. Code is not something that exists in itself: something is a code only in the situation of fixation / transmission of information (message), that is, in a communication event. Communication is the modus conditionalis of a code: something acts as a code when the communicative context of an event translates this something into a semiotic-pragmatic register. In turn, communicative contexts are set (but not prescribed) by the collective experience of city dwellers who consciously maintain their cultural identity. The perception of an urban artifact (ensemble) in a semiotic perspective transfers the perception / recognition mode to the reading mode, and the inclusion of the corresponding cultural codes in this mode (along with linguistic, aesthetic, professional, etc.) provides the recipient with access to the fundamental level of the sign / text – its sense, always encrypted in the subtext.
Keywords: urban semiotics, visual text, hermeneutics of urban text, sign, meaning, sense, subtext, code, cultural code, local identity
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Issue: 2, 2026
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