New Rules for the Spaces of Urbanity

New Rules for the Spaces of Urbanity

Goran Sonesson

Published online: 5 March 2013

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract The best way to conceive semiotical spaces that are not identical to

single buildings, such as a cityscape, is to define the place in terms of the activities

occurring there. This conception originated in the proxemics of E. T. Hall and was

later generalized in the spatial semiotics of Manar Hammad. It can be given a more

secure grounding in terms of time geography, which is involved with trajectories in

space and time. We add to this a qualitative dimension which is properly semiotic,

and which derives from the notion of border, itself a result of the primary semiotic

operation of segmentation. Borders, in this sense, are more or less permeable to

different kinds of activities, such as gaze, touch, and movement, where the latter are

often not physically defined, but characterized in terms of norms. Norms must be

understood along the lines of the Prague school, which delineates as scale going

from laws in the legal sense to simple rules of thumb. Such considerations have

permitted us to define a number of semio-spatial objects as, most notably, the

boulevard, considered as an intermediate level of public space, located between the

village square and the coffee house presiding over what Habermas called the public

sphere. Urbanity originates as a scene on which the gaze, well before the word,

mediates between the sexes, the classes, the cultures, and other avatars of otherness.

However, this scenario is seriously upset but the emergence of the cell phone and

other technical devices, as well as by the movement of populations.

Keywords Normativity � Normalcy � Urbanism � Space � Time geography �Globalization

G. Sonesson (&)

Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

e-mail: [email protected]

URL: http://project.sol.lu.se/ccs

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Int J Semiot Law (2014) 27:7–26

DOI 10.1007/s11196-013-9312-2

1 Visual Embodiments of Law

To the layman, the most straight-forward way of conceiving the visual embodiment of

law would be to imagine the facade of the Supreme Court, preferably built in the

eighteenth or nineteenth century with the explicit intention of giving expression to

jurisprudence. Whatever one may think of de Fusco’s semiotics [1], according to which

the facade of a building is the expression plane of a sign the content plane of which is its

interior, it seems to fit this kind of building. To arrive at a more comprehensive theory of

visual meaning and its rules, nevertheless, two moves are necessary: to replace the law

within a spectrum going from normalcy to normativity; and to conceive visual meaning

in terms of the kind of activities that can or should take place in specific spaces.

1.1 From Normalcy to Normativity

Semiotics is very much concerned with rules and regularities. Rules are connected to

normativity, and regularities to normalcy. The ‘‘semiotics of the natural world’’

according to Greimas [2], as well as Husserl’s [3] science of the Lifeworld, and

‘‘ecological physics’’ as invented by the perceptual psychologist Gibson [4], are all

sciences of normalcy, of that which is taken for granted to the point of not ordinarily

being considered to be worthy of study. According to Husserl, every particular thing

encountered in the Lifeworld is referred to a general type. Closely related to these

typifications are the regularities that obtain in the Lifeworld, or, as Husserl’s says, ‘‘the

typical ways in which things tend to behave’’. These are the kind of principles

tentatively set up which are also at the foundation of Peircean abductions. Husserl,

however, went further and described the general principles of the Lifeworld, which

would for instance state that the sun goes up every morning, whatever the science of

physics may have to say about it [3], and Gibson defined the ‘‘laws of ecological

physics’’, involving, for instance, the claim that some objects, like the bud and the

pupa, transform, but that no object is converted into an object that we would call

entirely different, such as a frog becoming a prince, in spite of what the fairy tales tell

us [4]. And in spite of modern physics, we may safely add that, in the world of

ecological physics, no atom is transformed in a quark [5].

Another sciences of normalcy is time geography, a very abstract discipline,

invented by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hagerstrand, which aspires to

determine the limits imposed on the trajectory of an individual going from the

cradle to the grave [6, 7]. Time geography is concerned with general, rather than

special, facts, that is, with invariants, which tend to be trivial, rather than

exceptional in kind. The invariants are conceived as limits of, or restrictions on, the

liberty of action open to individuals or groups, stating what is possible and

impossible in given situations. These restrictions are defined in terms of space and

time, but do not take their origin in natural or economical laws; rather, they result

from the fact that phenomena tend to crowd, or affect each other, without having

any other kind of relation explicable from general rules.

The third kind of Peirce’s types of relationship between the parts of a sign,

symbolicity, is defined by regularities as well as rules. Regularities, however, depend

on normalcy, whereas rules derive from normativity. It is true, no doubt, as Hammad

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[8] has observed, that regularities tend to be transformed into rules. If the directors of

Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, together with the organizers of the current symposium,

always sit down at the table closest to the kitchen, then this regularity tend to be

perceived as a rule, and any attempt to overstep it becomes a transgression.

Mukarovsky [9], the main figure of the Prague school of semiotics in the 1930 s,

started out from a phenomenological model in order to describe communication, in

particular as instantiated in a work of art. An artefact is produced by somebody, and it

has to be transformed by another person into a work of art in a process of

concretisation. In my other writings, I retained the idea that communication (in the

sense of conveying signs) is not necessarily about transportation or encoding, but it

does involve the presentation of an artefact by somebody to somebody else, giving rise

to the task of making sense of this artefact (Fig. 1) [10]. To Mukarovsky, the important

point seems to have been that the process of creating the artefact, as well as that of

perceiving it, are determined by norms, which may be aesthetic (and in works of art

they would be predominantly so), but they can also be social, psychological, and so on.

The work of art is that which transgresses these rules. Mukarovsky [11] points out,

however, that these norms may be of any kind, going from simple regularities to

written laws. It makes sense to conceive of the space from normalcy to normativity as a

continuum. Still there would seem to be a qualitative rupture at least between normalcy

and normativity—and another one when normativity is specified into written law.

1.2 Unseen Spaces and Their Transgression

You can read about the laws in the statute book. The only time you can literally

perceive them, however, is when they are violated. This applies to the whole scale

of phenomena from normalcy to normativity. To Mukarovsky [11] the whole point

of the norms is of course that new works or art can—and, according to Modernism,

Fig. 1 General model of communication, adapted from [10], and inspired in the models of the Pragueand Tartu school. The sender/source offers an artefact to the interpretation/concretisation of the receiver/target. The dashed lines indicate optional processes

New Rules for the Spaces of Urbanity 9

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should—offend against them. But this idea can be taken much further. At the level

of normalcy—a normalcy that will vary with each culture -, it was first formulated

in the proxemics initiated by Hall [12]. Hall was not concerned with space in

general, but only with the small portion surrounding the human body; and he did not

care about space outside of time, but only about the moment in which a meeting

takes place between subjects from different cultures. Proxemic spaces are defined by

which potentialities for action they open up to us—and these are really only

perceived when they are infringed. This approach was later on extended to other

kinds of space by Hammad [8].

We can make use of mathematical topology to define the succession of spaces

characterised by Hall [13]. From a proxemic point of view, the subject can be seen

as a topological construction: a series of concentric circles demarcating the public,

social, personal and intimate, spaces (in relation to another subject), within which is

found the bodily envelope, all of which are defined by the fact that they may be

penetrated and, as a result, produce an effect of meaning. This is to say that these

‘‘protective shells’’, as Hall calls them, are more or less permeable. In topological

terms, they possess the property of being open or closed. More exactly, in

merotopological terms, some parts of them have the property of being open and

others that of being closed. They produce a meaning when the borders are

overstepped. The case of the bodily envelope is most easily illustrated: it possesses

are series of openings (mouth, nostrils, etc.), but it may also be penetrated

elsewhere, with more serious consequences. To some extent this can be generalised

to the proxemic spheres: the intimate sphere, for instance, may be more open in the

forward direction. Between the bodily envelope and the proxemic distances other

layers can be introduced, those of clothing, which themselves are structured on

several levels, from hairdo and tattoo, at one extreme, to outdoor clothing, at the

other [13].

All cultures define their public, social, personal and intimate, spheres, but the

distances that characterise each one of these spaces are different in different

cultures. According to one of Hall’s classical examples (which I have myself had

numerous occasions to corroborate), a person from an Arab culture, who posits

himself within what is from his point of view the personal sphere, the distance from

which it is comfortable to have a chat, inadvertently enters the intimate sphere of a

Westerner, the sphere in which it is proper to ‘‘fight or make love’’.

Although Hall may have been the first to characterise space in terms of their

potential infringement, he was, in some respects, anticipated by the German nineteenth

century sociologist George Simmel [14]. Simmel makes a comparison between the

bridge, the door and the window, which he takes to be paradigmatic spatial objects.

One can cross the bridge indifferently in both directions, he says; but, in the case of the

door, entering is very different from leaving. The window is used to connect internal

and external spaces, exactly as the door is; but, whereas the door opens in two

directions, the window has, according to Simmel’s expression, a ‘‘teleological effect’’

(we might say a vector nowadays), which goes from the interior to the exterior, but not

the reverse. All that has been said so far remains describable by topology, that is, a

purely static theory. However, Simmel distinguishes three additional aspects that do

not concern the mutual relationship of spaces, but the provisions that these spaces

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permit us to carry out: movement in only one direction, in the case of the window;

movement in two directions, but with different significations, in the case of the door;

and movement of an identical type in the two directions, in the case of the bridge (Cf.

Fig. 2). The privileged direction of the trajectory as well as the qualification of space as

being interior and exterior is thus added.

The two station-points between which the bridge extends are undifferentiated.1 In

the case of the door and the window, it is obvious that the stations qualify the

trajectory. Between qualitatively different spaces, the direction cannot ever be

indifferent. But it may fail to be manifested, or be manifested in only one direction.

The reverse of the ordinary window must be the shop window: the latter has a

privileged access from the outside inwards. It is of course possible to look out of a

shop-window, just as one may look in through an ordinary window, if one is a

peeping Tom, or if it is one of those immense windows found in Dutch bungalows.

This is the whole difference between normalcy and normativity.

Permeability is relative to the different senses, as well as to movement. There is

some confusion when Simmel opposes the window, which may be penetrated from

the inside out, to the door and the bridge, which may be penetrated in both

directions. The problem is not so much that there are windows, such as shop

windows, which are more customarily permeable from the outside in, or even that

apartment windows may be permeable from the outside. The basic issue is rather

that, while windows are permeable to sight, doors and bridges are permeable to

movement. There is a difference in the practice of the users: one leaves by the door

and one looks through the window. Permeability in this sense, however, can only be

understood in relation to the border.

In order to demonstrate the semiotic nature of borders, Hammad [8] picks the

wall as an example. It is possible to jump over a wall, he observes, but this may be

perceived as an aggression. A wall may appear to be insurmountable, but it is only

so to someone having no resources at his disposal, such as a ladder for climbing

over it or a crowbar to crack an opening in it. The wall is merely as ‘‘dissuasive

Fig. 2 Illustrations of the three cases described by Simmel [14]: (a) permeability in only one direction,as instantiated by the window; (b) permeability in two directions, but with different significations, asmanifested by the door; (c) permeability in two directions but with the same meaning, as in the case of thebridge

1 This is of course not true in many particular cases, when the bridge extends between enemy territories.

But it is not the bridge as such which determines this qualitative difference.


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device,’’ that is, an invitation not to pass it over. In addition, it can be seen as an

invitation to search for a door, that is, a place where the wall may be traversed.

Indeed, the door, just as the wall, is a device that serves to filter certain things out,

while letting others through. This is illustrated by the exterior wall panels of the

cells in La Tourette. They are divided into four sub-panels: a door, which lets

through people, light, air, mosquitoes, warmth and cold; a metal lattice serving as a

mosquito net, which lets through air and cold, but neither people nor mosquitoes; a

window pane which allows light to pass through but neither air nor other objects;

and the concrete basement which lets through neither heat, nor light, nor air, nor

people. Hammad [8] concludes that all barriers are selective in that they allow

entrance to certain categories of agents and not others. They are thus defined, not by

intrinsic properties, but by the part they play in some particular social practice

(a ‘‘program’’ in Greimasian terminology). Yet, the material properties of these

spatial objects are not indifferent: a piece of winter clothing must be woven tightly

in order to prevent cold winds to pass through the fabric, and a door must be

sufficiently wide to permit the passage of a man carrying burdens.

Permeability, it turns out, is relative, not only to the different senses and to

movement, but also to different kinds of agents. Interestingly, however, Hammad

does not attend to the possible unidirectionality of borders, which we observed in

our analyses of Simmel’s window and door. Indeed, the window certainly has the

capacity to let light and gazes through in both direction, but there is a sense, noted

by Simmel, in which it is permeable to gaze from the outside in, and not the reverse.

The first kind of ‘‘being able’’ is somehow physically incorporated into the object;

the other one is just a part of the social practice of which the window forms a part.

By using dark glasses or one-way mirrors, it is possible to incorporate the second

prescription into the object, but that is not usually done. This only serves to show

that, basically, a border is always a semiotic device, although in some cases the

prohibitions and permissions that it involves may assume a material shape. The

implication is not that the border is arbitrary, created by mere fiat, but rather that

there is always some social practice on which it is grounded [13].

1.3 The Affordances of Space

It has been suggested that the Lifeworld, understood as above (in 1.1), is simply

the niche, in the sense of (non- Gibsonean) ecology, in which the animal known as

the human being stakes out its life [15]. The niche, then, in this sense, is the

environment as defined by and for the specific animal inhabiting it. In Husserlean

language, the niche is subjective-relative—relative to the particular species. The

precursor of the niche, understood in this way, is the notion of Umwelt introduced

by von Uexkull [16], which is today the defining concept of the speciality known as

biosemiotics. As opposed to an objectively described ambient world, the Umwelt is

characterized for a given subject, in terms of the features which it perceives

(Merkwelt) and the features that it impresses on it (Wirkwelt), which together form a

functional circle (Funktionskreis). According to a by now classical example, the tick

hangs motionless on the branch of a bush until it perceives the smell of butyric acid

emitted by the skin glands of a mammal (Merkzeichen), which sends a message to

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its legs to let go (Wirkzeichen), so that it drops onto the mammal’s body. This starts

a new cycle, because the tactile cue of hitting the mammal’s hair incites the tick to

move around in order to find the skin of its host. Finally, a third circle is initiated

when the heat of the mammal’s skin triggers the boring response allowing the tick to

drink the blood of its host. Together, these different circles consisting of perceptual

and operational cue bearers make up the interdependent wholes of the subject,

corresponding to the organism, and the Umwelt, which is the world as it is defined

for the subject in question.

There is a difference between the cues triggering the circles of behaviour of the

tick and a human being in front of some of the ingredients of his or her niche:

windows, doors, chairs, bridges, and so in. In the normal case, we do not have to go

out or in as soon as we see a door. It is only a potentiality of action offered to us.

The reaction of the tick can hardly be distinguished from its percepts. In one

passage, nevertheless, Uexkull [16] talks about the same room as it presents itself to

a fly, a dog, and a human being. All furniture in the room, as well its floor, walls,

and ceiling may simply be landing places for the fly, but even the fly has the choice

of making use of them or not. Although the floor and the sofa may not originally

offer anything different in the world of the dog, mentioned by von Uexkull in the

same passage, the dog can learn to react to them in different ways. The differences

afforded by the sofa, the table, the chair, and the wall, not to mention the stove and

the kitchen sink may however be beyond the world of the dog.

Quite independently of von Uexkull, James Gibson coined a term for this kind of

meaning. An affordance, according to Gibson [4], is ‘‘a specific combination of the

properties of its substance and its surfaces taken with reference to an animal’’

(italics deleted). More informative are some of the examples given: the affordance

may be the graspability, or the edibility, of a thing. Graspability can be understood

as the aptness to be grasped. Edibility must be interpreted as the susceptibility of

being eaten. These are inferences which might be said, using a phenomenological

term, to be ‘‘sedimented’’ onto an object of the Lifeworld: accordingly, an apple,

once it is seen to be an apple, is also perceived as something which may be grasped

and then eaten, because these are events being known to have taken place (and

‘‘properly’’ so) with other apples at other times. Therefore, the apple is apt to be

grasped and eaten, both in the sense of normalcy and normativity: this is what

happens most of the time, and it also what we consider the proper thing to do with

an apple [17]. The apple does not stand for its own graspability or edibility. Unlike

the case of the sign, there is not some object here that is directly given without being

in focus which points to something more indirect that is also more emphasised.

Rather, graspability and edibility are properties, in the sense discussed above, of the

apple. However, they are not just properties of the apple, but just as much of the

subject grasping and eating it. We thus end up with a kind of relational properties of

the Lifeworld. Gibson’s notion of affordance goes a long way towards realising the

idea of active perception: it is a kind of meaning distinct from reference, and thus

from the kind of meaning conveyed by signs, but it is more related to the art of

doing things with things than to the world as the realm of ‘‘substances’’. Gibson

points out that affordances are both mental and physical and depend both on the

animal involved and its environment. They are part of what makes Gibson’s


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psychology ‘‘ecological’’: that is, a theory taking into account the interaction with

the environment. Nevertheless, the notion of affordances should not simply be

identified with the cycle going from perception to action in von Uexkull’s Umwelt.

Affordances would seem to be superimposed on the realm of substances, that is,

unlike the properties of the world perceived by the tick, they are not there instead of

substances.

While it is possible for graspability to be a property of things in some respect

independent of culture, this could hardly be the case with edibility. Anthropological

studies are full of examples of things being eaten in some places and considered

entirely inedible in other places. And it is easy to think of other meanings that are

clearly of the same kind as those mentioned and which are yet culturally specific. We

just have to think about the dice as opposed to the cube. Suppose there is some human

culture where die have not been invented: it might yet seem as if the throwability of the

dice may be perceived directly by those coming from the relevant culture, even though

this particular kind of throwability can only be known to those coming from cultures

like our own in which they are important ingredients of many games [17]. Similarly,

for most people in contemporary Western culture, a computer keyboard has an

immediate property of writability (not necessary less immediately present than the

depressability of the keys). Thus, some affordances may be defined by our common

Umwelt, as Gibson would seem to presuppose, while other, ‘‘cultural’’, affordances

(to coin a term which would be anathema to Gibson), must derive from specific socio-

cultural lifeworlds. There is a problem with Gibson’s description of ecological

psychology that is parallel to the one found in Husserl’s description of the Lifeworld

[18]: suppose that what I am looking at is not just a cube but more particularly a die.

Then the argument adduced by Husserl and Gibson continues to be valid: the object

will be seen as directly to be a die as a cube.

Writing in 1989, I thought I had made a discovery [18]. However, more or less at

the same time, Sinha [19], in a similar fashion talked about ‘‘the socio-cultural

‘affordances’ of cars as complex artefacts’’, and, more recently, Costall [20]

proposed to ‘‘socialize affordances’’. In Design theory [21, 22], however, it seems

that this socialization has happened as a matter of course, without the contributors

even noticing that they were in contradiction to Gibson. The attentive reader will

realise that many of the examples in Gibson’s work (the post box, etc.) are socio-

cultural in nature, but Gibson never comments on this fact. The post box has a

‘‘natural’’ direction inwards (as opposed to a fire-hydrant which has a direction

outwards), and so has a litterbin, but we normally see the difference. The same goes

for doors, windows (some of which open up onto the street, others to the house),

bridges, and so on. If you throw a used tissue into the post box instead of the

litterbin, you are offending against normalcy rather than normativity. I would be

surprised to learn that there is a country (except for Singapore, perhaps) that has a

law against it.

1.4 Summary

In this section, I have suggested that there is a continuum from normality to

normativity, which includes law, but that we should still expect there to be

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qualitative differences, even though these may be difficult to determine. I have also

invoked a long range of authorities to convince you that perception intrinsically

contains potentialities for action, or, in Gibsonean terms, that they afford different

kinds of action. The cues that immediately make the tick execute certain actions do

not deserve to be described as affordances, because they are immediately triggered

when the cue is present. One may wonder whether the resting-place should be

considered an affordance for the fly, since everything appears to have this property;

however, there are certainly things that to the fly afford other actions, such as eating.

The human world, at any rate, is full of affordances. Some may be mere

possibilities, but others are determined by normalcy or normativity. To separate a

world of purely natural affordances hardly seems possible, but culture certainly adds

more to the multiplicity of affordances, as well at to its norms and normalcy.

2 A Stroll Down the Boulevard

There has been much talk about the boulevard as a spatial manifestation of

modernity. From a theoretical point of view, Walter Benjamin must no doubt be

considered the pioneer of this view [23]. A number of literary writers, from Poe and

Baudelaire, to Gogol and Dostoevsky have written about the boulevard experience,

and more recently, it has been the central scene of several French films, from

Rohmer to Bresson. To understand this, it is important to conceive the boulevard as

a frame containing a bundle of trajectories, in the sense of time geography. Like the

door and the window, the bridge and the post box, the boulevard is a spatial object,

defined by a number of potentialities, which range from normalcy to normativity. Of

course, it is a more complex spatial objects, with more parts, and thus with more

potentialities. In the following, I shall consider the boulevard as the precursor to the

pedestrian street, which is now common in most parts of the world, and ignore what

might have been specific to the first boulevards constructed by Haussmann, as well

as to the imitations in Saint Petersburg.

2.1 Encounters on the Pavement

My first discussion of the boulevard as a semiotic device came right out of my own

experience of living in Paris in the 1970s [13]. I am not the only one to have been

fascinated by the boulevard as an epitome of urbanity and, hence, of modernity. Before

Baudelaire, Poe wrote about the view from the cafe table. Gogol pondered the infinite

possibilities of Nevskij Prospect, and Dostoevsky surveyed life in Saint Petersburg

during the white nights. Maupassant also placed his hero on the boulevard. Nor did the

boulevard experience cease to fascinate numerous writers and artists who came after

Baudelaire. Several films by Eric Rohmer, from ‘‘L’amour l’apres-midi’’ to ‘‘Les nuits

de la pleine lune’’ (first shown in 1972 and 1984, respectively) are basically about life

on the boulevards. This is also largely the case of Robert Bresson’s ‘‘Quatre nuits d’un

reveur’’ (appearing in 1971 and based on ‘‘White nights’’ by Dostoevsky, but moving

the scene to Paris). Thus, literature and film confirm my intuitions about the

importance of the boulevard to urbanity.


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The boulevard is a public place, as is, of course, the town square. Spatially,

however, the boulevard is a place of passage, while the square is a meeting place.

This should be taken quite literally, as we shall see: on the boulevard, itineraries run

in parallel (at least partly), but on the square they tend to cross. Another implication

of the same observation, however, is that the square is basically static, whereas the

boulevard stands for dynamism: the continuous thrust forward.

In order to discuss the boulevard as a semiotic device, we have to start by

establishing spatial semiotics firmly on the ground. This can be done by having

recourse to ‘‘time geography’’, as characterized above (1.1). First of all, the

boulevard is a place on which individuals whose lifelines start out and finish at very

different places let them run in parallel for a shorter or longer duration. This is really

the central topic of Gogol’s short story ‘‘Nevskij Prospect’’: the soldier and the

painter, who come from different social classes, and who live in different parts of

the city, walk together for a moment along the boulevard. So much for the different

points of departure. However, they part again, when each one discovers a woman on

the boulevard whom he decides to follow, which brings them both away from the

boulevard and to new parts of the city where they have never been before. In Poe’s

short story, ‘‘The Man in the Crowd,’’ such a lifeline starts out abruptly from the

cafe window, and ends in the void 24 h later.

Implicit in this description is a second property of the boulevard: its capacity for

giving access to the whole of the city, for being the stage in relation to which all the

rest forms the behind-stage (in a Goffmanesque sense [24]). The soldier and the

painter both leave the boulevard to go to other parts of the city, but the itineraries

that they choose are only two out of many potential ones. In this sense, the

boulevard is the starting point for numerous virtual trajectories. This explains the

sentiment, always expressed in fiction, of infinite possibilities being available along

the boulevard.

Another particularity of the boulevard is that it puts emphasis on one of the

fundamental laws of time geography: that two persons cannot occupy the same

space at the same time. When you find yourself on the sidewalk, in particular on one

as crowded as that along the modern boulevard, it is essential to steer free of other

people. As Goffman [24] observes, it takes a lot of largely unconscious

manoeuvring to avoid bumping into other persons. Each encounter on the sidewalk

involves a negotiation about who is to step out of the way or, more ordinarily, the

degree to which each of the participants is to modify his/her trajectory. However

unconscious, such a transaction supposes a basic act of categorisation; we may

negotiate with somebody whom we have recognised as a fellow human being, but

not with a lamppost, a statue, or even a dog. So, in Gibsonean terms, this must no

doubt be a case of affordances presented by the body of the other. Normality

requires us to avoid bumping into the other. Normativity may appear at a later stage.

Indeed, when this process of interpretation becomes conscious, and the other is

not simply seen as a stranger, but as an individual person, or even as a person of a

particular class or social group, that is, in Husserlean terms, of a particular type,

negotiations may break down. This is exactly what happens to Dostoevsky’s

underground man at the start of the story: neither the hero, nor his opponent wants to

give way. At this point, the affordances become conscious, and may be treated as

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signs. And what was mere normalcy becomes normativity when it is violated. When

you decide not to budge, or to walk directly against the other, you are not only doing

something that is not normal, but also something which is against the norms. But

there probably is no law against any of these behaviours.

Modernity starts much earlier, in the chronology of Bakhtin [25], and it is

specifically manifested in the market place of the Middle Ages. Bakhtin is not very

clear about what exactly happens there, but the idea, as can be gathered from his

other works, is that the market presents a polyphony of voices. The boulevard,

nevertheless, as it may still be experienced today in Paris and in many other

(particularly Latin) big cities, is not a polyphony of voices, but a tangle of gazes.

Indeed, the primary function of interpretation, telling us that another person is

approaching for whom we must give way (as noted by Goffman), is overdetermined

by a secondary function of interpretation, normally at a higher level of awareness,

which is aesthetic, as least in the traditional sense of involving ‘‘pure contempla-

tion.’’ As such, it does not only pick up information, but also gives it out by

conveying messages such as ‘‘I observe you’’ and ‘‘I find it worthwhile to observe

you.’’ The hero of Eric Rohmer’s film ‘‘L’amour l’apres-midi,’’ who spends his life

on the boulevard, expresses this double function of the gaze very clearly when he

says life on the boulevard is basically a question of ‘‘trying oneself out on another.’’

The gaze, in this case, as in those of Baudelaire and Gogol, is exchanged between

men and women. Frenchmen still unabashedly conceive this as a mutual interchange

between the sexes. Some feminists, on the other hand, are known to have claimed

that this is something men do to women and, consequently, they talk about ‘‘visual

rape.’’ The metaphor is adequate, at least in the sense that it describes the crossing

of the visual barrier—that is, a border of normality, if not normativity, is infringed.

In fact, the trajectories of the boulevard are peculiar in that they do not only allow

for movement, but create virtual access to looking, and no doubt also to smelling,

touching and, more rarely, talking. At least this is what Rohmer’s hero hopes for.

Once we construe communication as a task offered for interpretation, as I

suggested above (1.1.) the sender may him/herself be (part of) the message [10].

The artefact created is, in this sense, his/her own body (Fig. 3), or parts thereof,

which are singled out for attention. This applies to all gesture, to all kinds of

spectacles, to everyday meetings and indeed to the classical situation of

communication. In the latter case, the sender may be saying something or showing

a picture, but his/her own body is also part of the message.2 And it certainly applies

to the boulevard.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the spectacular function can be described as an

operation resulting in a division applied to a group of people, and separating those

which are subjects and objects, respectively, of the process of contemplation; but, in

fact, the subjects and objects of contemplation are often the same, at least

temporarily [26]. In the market, on the square, or along the boulevard, observation is

(potentially) mutual, as well as intermittent. Yet, this is not true of the official

parade or the dismemberment of Damien, or of the sporting event or the theatre. In

2 It should be noted that awareness and/or purpose have not been included in the characterization of

communication given above. Messages of the sender’s body are of course often not intended.


123

ritual, there is a difference between those who only observe and those who, in

addition to observing, are also observed. In contrast, along the boulevard, but also

already on the town square, the spectacular function is symmetric and continuously

changing. However, contrary to what happens in other parts of everyday life, it is

certainly dominant, in the sense of the Prague school [9]; it not only retains the

upper hand, but it also makes use of everything else for its purpose.

2.2 Crossing the Street

The boulevard may be an exotic experience, but pedestrian streets are nowadays

present everywhere. Some of the properties that allowed the boulevard to become the

centre of modernity are also available in the pedestrian street. It is the broad pavement

that affords strolling, as well as the protective crowns of the trees. Old prints, however,

give the impression that the original boulevards in Paris did not possess any separate

pavement, but the traffic also seems to be fairly limited. In this sense, before cars

invaded the city, the boulevard must have been rather like a pedestrian street—just as

all other streets at the time. But it was broader than other streets, so it afforded the

coming together of many persons in one place. Pedestrian streets, however, are often

only broad because traffic has been banned, which means that they may not correspond

as well as the boulevard to the scene of which the rest of the city is the behind-stage.

In any modern city, the two big flows of pedestrians and vehicles have to be

regulated. On modern boulevards, as well as when you leave the pedestrian streets

behind, the trajectories of pedestrians sometimes have to traverse that of the cars.

Traffic signs will often help to regulate the meeting of these flows. In general, traffic

signs are clear embodiments, not of law in general, as is the case of the facade of the

Supreme Court, but of specific laws. They are often visual statements, and more

specifically orders and prohibitions. The traffic sign that tells us where the

Fig. 3 General model of communication in the specific case in which the sender/source is him/herself(part of) the artefact offered for interpretation to the receiver/target

18 G. Sonesson

123

pedestrian crossing is found, nevertheless, only indicates a potentiality for actions. It

would be wrong to call this an affordance, of course, because it is a real sign, and it

is even largely conventional. The rectangles painted on the street surface are

certainly also conventional signs, but they still have an aspect of borders and

directionality, not dissimilar to the bridge. The pedestrian may feel both contained

and urged on when using a zebra crossing. This is a normal place to cross. It is also a

normative place to do it, because while you do not have to cross the road when you

encounter a zebra crossing, it is where you should cross, if you want to do some

crossing. Whether it is more specifically a law, however, may be different in

different countries. Indeed, so-called jaywalking is illegal in the U.S., but in other

countries, such as the U.K. and Sweden, there is merely a norm dissuading it.

Whether the cars have to stop when the zebra crossing is being used is also

something that seems to vary from one country to another. It may be normative in

the general sense, but it does not seem to be very normal. In some countries, such as

Sweden, there is actually a law, which says that cars have to stop at zebra crossings

if somebody is waiting on the pavement clearly showing his or her intentions to

cross, in case the crossing is not regulated by traffic lights.3 This means that it is the

perception of the person crossing, or showing his/her readiness to cross, which

constitutes an affordance to the driver of the car telling him to stop—and an

affordance of the highest degree of normativity. In other countries, where this law

does not exist, on the other hand, it is the car that constitutes an affordance for the

pedestrian bidding him not to cross.4 This law was established fairly recently,

probably something like 10 years ago. So it could be said that in Sweden the painted

marks on the street are embodiments of the law and can be perceived as such. Or, at

least, that is what they should be.

In fact, it seems that pedestrians perceive them in this way. They feel contained

and protected by the borders of the zebra crossing and thrust forward by its

vectoriality. Most drivers, however, do not seem to share this interpretation.

Pedestrian crossings without traffic lights have in recent years become the place

where most pedestrians are run over by cars.5 There is talk already of abolishing the

law, and meanwhile city councils take away more and more zebra crossings.

Pedestrians are once again reduced to crossing wherever they find fit. At least they

now are aware of being free game.

2.3 Summary

This section has been concerned with the boulevard and the pedestrian street as

allowing the coming together of many people in one place for short times and

affording an experience of the other which comprises all sensory channels

3 Again, intentions are only relevant here to the extent that they are embodied in the perceived readiness

of the pedestrian to cross.4 The pedestrian who, after been run over, is asked whether he did not really see the car approaching,

knows all about this.5 This could be because driver’s licenses from other countries, which may not have this law, are simply

exchanged for Swedish driver’s licenses, without any further requirement. Or it may be because Swedes

has become more disobedient.


123

including, in however rare occasions, gesture and language, but more often only

gazes. We also considered the flow of pedestrians at the place where it meets the

flow of vehicles, the pedestrian crossing, and we discussed the different ways in

which the pedestrian crossing may embody normalcy and normativity and also more

specifically a law.

3 Public Vices and Private Virtues

The specificity of the boulevard resides it its being a public place. It deserves to be

seen as a landmark of public life at its beginning, for the same reason as the coffee

house has been so presented [27, 28]. Sennett’s characterisation of the coffee house

as a place where persons coming from different social groups and classes, as well as

from all parts of the country, can meet on an equal footing without their individual

history or personality having any importance could serve to describe the public

sphere in general, including the boulevard. The difference is that, while the coffee

house is a place where a lot of talking goes on, the boulevard is basically a visual

affaire. It is mainly an encounter of glances. In this section, I will discuss the nature

of the public and the private, and I will then consider two recent developments,

which may perhaps constitute the end of the visual public sphere, as we know it, or

they may turn out to be mere accidents in its history.

3.1 The Public and the Private

In French, the term privatization is ambiguous: it means to render something

private, but also to deprive somebody of something. Although English makes use of

two words, the root is clearly the same. In Hammad’s [8] work, that which is

rendered private is at the same time robbed from the public. When the visitor at La

Tourette installs himself in the cell, he immediately begins to transform this public

space into a space of his own. More formally, privatisation involves, according to

Hammad’s definition, a person being able to conjoin himself with a place, while

others are unable to do so, as well as a superior instance authorising such admittance

to the place. As Hammad [8] puts it, ‘‘privatisation has something to do with the

very general problem involving the control of processes and the mastery of space.’’

One is reminded of Rousseau’s [29] phylogeny of private property, according to

which space was once common to all until the first person set up a border and

declared that what was within the border was his property (in which case the same

person takes on the part of conjoined subject and authoriser). A more plausible

beginning of privatization may have been the setting up of a fence, which, just as

Hammad’s wall, is more fundamentally a dissuasive device than a real obstacle. Or

it may be that the subject in question simply situated himself at the centre of a set of

proxemic spaces and fought off any intruder.

Still, public space can hardly receive an exclusively negative definition. Public

space, as conceived by Habermas and best described by Sennett, is much more than

an ‘‘amorphous mass’’ from which private space is spared out [27, 28]. I already

suggested that Sennett’s characterisation of the coffee house might be used to define

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the public sphere in general. Even as a description of the coffee house, a more

formal definition would have to go beyond the simple conjoining of a person, or

several persons, with a space, and take into the account the earlier trajectories of

these persons starting out at different points in a qualitatively differentiated space

and ending likewise. It would also have to take into account the permeability

resulting between the different trajectories at the central space of encounter, where

this permeability pertains to the different senses, and to the production of incentives

for the senses of the others, including gesture and speech.

If we admit that there is a process of privatisation creating the private domain,

then perhaps we should also postulate a process of ‘‘publication,’’ which is not

simply the reversal of the former one. Something does not become public merely by

returning to the innocence of undivided space before the fall occasioned by privacy.

The transgression of the borders erected by privatisation is also a positive fact.

Indeed, there may be a dialectic spiral taking us from privatization to publication

and back again and, if we conceive privatization to be a process, as Hammad clearly

does, there is no reason to think that there cannot be a converse process of

publication. In fact, it is not even necessary to suppose that publication must follow

privatization. Rather, there may have been intermittent processes of privatization

and publication at different moments of human history.

Consider Dunbar’s explanation for the origin of language [30]: when human

groups grow too large (to around 150 individuals, which is the basic human group

according to Dunbar) mutual grooming as practiced by other primates turned out to

be too time-consuming. Language evolved as a substitute for grooming, reducing

the need for physical and social intimacy. This is a curious idea. First of all, if

grooming is something like caressing, than language certainly does no produce the

same effect, already at the physical level, that is, no obligatory oxytocin. Second, if

you want to talk with 150 persons at the same time, you need a big auditorium, and

whatever the effect, it will be nothing like grooming. Perhaps mutual gaze, whatever

its shortcomings, may be a better substitute for grooming. If so, the boulevard would

be able to offer a social cohesion going well beyond Dunbar’s number. Add talk to

this (wherever it came from) and you will have the coffee house. But Dunbar is

undoubtedly right in thinking that the kind of talk going on at this stage—which

would include the coffee house, in my opinion—was more of the kind of gossip than

philosophical, legal, or political disquisitions.

3.2 The Affordances of Veils

If we take modernity in a wider sense (but not as wide as in ‘‘modern Home

sapiens’’), the town square and the market place may well be stations on its way.

Catalhoyuk, which is often billed as the first city being inhabited from around

9,000 years ago, apparently did not have any city square; in fact, it did not even

have any streets. People do not appear to have had any public life, and yet they

huddled together. The town square is a clear advance when seen in this perspective.

This is where you meet your 150 friends (if we accept Dunbar’s number). In Europe,

from the seventeenth century, the coffee house allowed you to meet all the others,

and from the nineteenth century, you could exchange glances with even bigger


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multitudes on the boulevard. This European public sphere has since then more or

less expanded to include the whole world. In some places, it may have arrived first

in the curtailed form of the Internet. Recently, however, the village world has been

coming to the public sphere. One of the consequences of so-called globalization is

that populations are transferred from one part of the globe to another in proportions

that have rarely been known before. Some of them go directly from the village

square to the boulevard.

From Gogol’s perspective, the intermingling of different worlds, which took

place along the boulevard, had its entries and exits in different neighbourhoods of

the city, which were different mainly as to class. Although Paris has long been an

international city, the case may not have been very different in Baudelaire’s time.

My own experience of the Parisian boulevards in the seventies of the last century,

however, involved people coming from many different nations being present, first

on the boulevards, but also to an increasing extent in more direct face-to-face

interactions, which in many cases took place at the university. Twenty years later, in

my own town in Sweden, this commingling of nationalities was already a part of

everyday life.

At some point, however, there was a fundamental change. For a long time,

everybody seemed to be playing by Western rules, not of rationality, certainly, but

as far as the public character of public space was concerned. If the boulevard,

rechristened the pedestrian street, is a space where we are all offered up to the gaze

of the others, Muslim women wearing one kind of veil or another, from hijab to

burqa, constitute a challenge to all of modern urbanity. In any form, the veil is an

obstacle to seeing and, in particular, being seen. It is a negative affordance: it takes

away the potentiality of seeing—in the case of the burqa, at least, also for the

woman herself. The problem, I believe, is fundamentally semiotic. The argument of

the Dutch government that a (male) terrorist may hide arms under a niqab or a

burqa is essentially a confabulation. The real reason we tend to feel so strongly

about this, however, is that this kind of clothing destroys the symmetrical

permeability to gazes that is the foundation of urbanism and, thus, of modernity.

Hammad [8], who himself comes from an Arabic country, suggests that the veil is

an instrument by means of which a man controls his wife, daughter or sister. To

extend the analogy that Hammad is himself pursuing, we may say more specifically

that the man controls the body of the woman concerned as a particular kind of space.

Although men in the West have also, until recently, had a fairly tight control of

women (or have thought they had), it has never extended to the entire body, or to the

face. Only in church, facing God, Western women had to cover themselves—and

even this only happened when our great great grandmothers were young.

Wearing the veil is normal in many Muslim countries. It is often also normative.

In some countries, such as Iran, it is even enshrined into law. With the new sharia-

based constitution, Egypt will probably also transform some precept like this into

law. In Egypt, however, as in many other Muslim countries, the wearing of veils has

long been normal and even normative to a large part of the population. The case of

Iran is different, because for a large part of the twentieth century, it was not normal

to wear the veil, at least in the urban centres, and for many Iranian women it still

isn’t. It was not—and is not—part of the world taken for granted.

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However, this is precisely what it is for many Muslim women now living in the

West. In our part of the world, it is not only normal, but also normative (although

not a law—except in a few countries) not the wear a veil. And this is not a simple

custom that can be exchanged for another. It is an essential part of the whole modern

project. More than religion, and more than the repression of women, this may be the

origin of the clash of civilizations—occurring right in the middle of the pedestrian

street.

It is easy to think of the veil as a piece of clothing like any other. If we look at

this phenomenon, however, from the point of view of a semiotics of space informed

by time geography, the fundamental character of this contrast between Western and

Muslim views becomes apparent. To cover your face, or parts thereof, is to deprive

public space of your presence. If we take into account that public space is really a

bundle of trajectories, which offers opportunities for the exchange of gaze, hearing,

smelling, touching, and talk, we realise that the veil completely changes the ways in

which communication is channelled in our society. Semiotics may thus help explain

why the burqa phenomenon has stirred up so much controversy in the Occident.

3.3 The Proxemics of Talk

Globalization besets the boulevard experience from another angle as well. Thanks to

the cell phone, we are connected to the whole world, potentially all the time. In that

perspective, the boulevard experience may seem trivial. Many new and unforeseen

events can occur on the boulevard, as we have learned from literature and from the

cinema, and perhaps also from personal experience; but in the brave new world of

digital communication, many more, and more unexpected, events are sure to take

place. Nonetheless, the boulevard experience has two advantages: it addresses all

the senses, and it puts us into contact with people we do not know. The second

function may be more perfectly accomplished by chats or commentary fields on

the internet; but the effect of this achievement is much diminished because of the

inability to fulfil the first function. Moreover, on our cell phones, we are most of the

time restricted to the small Dunbarean group of 150 friends. Thus, whatever it’s

utility, the cell phone is not a public space comparable to the boulevard.

In time geographical terms, cell phone communication, like the Internet, with

which is has more or less merged since the advent of the smart phone, ranges over

the whole of space, although the space involved does not have any concrete

geographical determinations; but it remains constrained by time to the specious

present. When it is observed in time geography that phenomena tend to crowd, this

crowding is fundamentally thought to take place in space. No two phenomena can

occupy the same space at the same time. We saw a practical application of this

axiom in the meeting of two persons on the pavement, as well as in that of the

respective flows of cars and pedestrians. The question now becomes whether several

items can occupy the same time slot. In other terms, we have to investigate whether

the trajectory going from the cradle to the grave may incorporate several levels. The

axiom of crowding, it seems, it not applicable in exactly the same way to time.

According to Gurwitsch [31, 32], every perceptual situation is structured into a

theme, a thematic field, and a margin. The theme is that which is most directly


123

within the focus of attention. Both the thematic field and the margin are in

contiguity with the theme, but the thematic field is, in addition, connected to the

theme at a semantic level. When attending to the theme, we are easily led to change

the focus to something within the same thematic field. Changing what was earlier in

the margin into a theme, on the other hand, may require some kind of outside

incitement. In the margin is normally found some items of consciousness that

always accompany us, such as our own stream of consciousness, our own body, and

the extension of the Lifeworld beyond what is presently perceivable. But the margin

also contains all items that are not currently our theme, nor connected to this theme,

but which are still relevant to us in the present. Thus, while several things cannot be

thematic at the same time, unless they are unified into one item, they can still be

present in the thematic field, or they may appear somewhere in the margin. As

Arvidson [33] has observed, Gurwitsch offers the experiential background on which

the study of attention finally makes sense.

If we now return to the boulevard experience, we realise that the boulevard, as a

trajectory populated by other people, is all the time present at the margin of the

pedestrian’s consciousness, some items of it becoming now and then promoted to

thematic rank and then sinking back into the margin. To every true flaneur, as we

have met him in literature and in the cinema, the boulevard is the centre of the

thematic field, although the thematic focus will be continuously shifting. The

boulevard must be somewhere at the margin of consciousness of the cell phone

speaker, too, for, if not, he or she would not be able to walk on it, but in this margin

is has to throng with several other items, such as the place where the interlocutor is,

and the space of the connection itself.

For those of us who still follow the trajectory of the boulevard unhindered by cell

phones connected to the net, the boulevard experience has changed. A few decades

ago, the only persons who were talking in the street without having any visible

partner were people with schizophrenia or similar maladies. Nowadays, of course,

most of those talking on the street are absorbed into an interchange taking place

along some digital highway or other. They have a vector directed inwards, from the

point of view of the physical space in which they are situated, however much it may

be directed outwards in relation to digital space. Talking while you are walking in

the street was a few decades ago far from normal: indeed, it was normative not to

talk to strangers, except for particular circumstances, and practically everybody on

the boulevard were strangers. With the cell phone, our 150 friends have become

portable stuff.

No doubt these people still observe the Goffmanean manoeuvre permitting them

not to chock with other people in the street; at least, it does not seem to be very

common for them to walk into other people on the pavement. However, while they

are living in digital space, they are closed off to the multisensory experience of the

boulevard. Indeed, they are carrying a digital veil. Unlike the burqa, it is only

impermeable in one direction, from the subject out. In this sense, the cell phone is

the inversion of the hijab and other varieties of the veil, which would appear to be

impermeable from the boulevard in.

In most countries, there are law prohibiting the use of cell phones while you are

driving. It does not seem probable that these laws will be extended to people

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walking in the street. And yet the use of cell phones in the city centre may well be

the beginning of the end of public life, as we know it. This does not mean that public

life will not re-emerge in some other form—on the Internet, perhaps. But it will then

be deprived of some of the properties with which is has been associated for the last

few centuries. It will not be predominantly visual. It will not be a polyphony of

glances.

3.4 Summary

The aim of this section has been to show that the boulevard and the pedestrian street

are pillars of public life, as we have known it for the last few centuries, beginning

around the European Enlightenment. Public life, in this sense, has changed at lot

recently, both because of technical devices, such as the cell phone, and because of

the reshuffling of historical layers occasioned by the movements of populations.

Both the cell phone and the veil may be said to modify the principles of

permeability characteristic of the boulevard experience. Public life, with its norms

and its normalcy, will no doubt suffer important changes, but may re-emerge in a

new form.

4 General Summary

In the present essay, I have tried to show that meanings are available to us already in

perception, and that these meanings may include potentialities of actions. Such

meanings may be inserted into a continuum from normalcy to normativity, which

may or may not take the form of explicit laws. I have discussed norms and normalcy

in the case of the public sphere, as manifested first in the boulevard and more

recently in the pedestrian street. The function of the public sphere is to bring people

of different origins together, not necessarily to have a talk, but to experience each

other. The public sphere is a polyphony of gazes. Normalcy and normativity are

embodied in many phenomena of the public sphere. Profound changes to the public

sphere may happen in our time, both because of new technical inventions such as

the cell phone, and because of the arrival of new cultural habits, such as the wearing

of veils.

Acknowledgments This article was written while I was head of the Centre for cognitive semiotics at

Lund University, financed by the Tercentenary Foundation of the Swedish National Bank.

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http://jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conventions_and_design_part_2.html

http://jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conventions_and_design_part_2.html

New Rules for the Spaces of Urbanity

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