Semiology of Public Space
This course explores how public spaces communicate meaning through signs, symbols, design, and everyday practices. Drawing on semiotic theory—from thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes—students will analyze how architecture, monuments, urban layouts, advertisements, and social behaviors shape collective identities and power relations.
Through case studies and field observations, the course examines how public spaces construct narratives about culture, politics, memory, and belonging. Students will develop tools to “read” cities and public environments as complex systems of meaning, and critically reflect on how space influences social interaction and perception.
By the end of the course, participants will be able to decode the visual and spatial language of public environments and articulate how meaning is produced, contested, and transformed in shared spaces.
Public Space Democracy
This volume takes a global view of the emergence of public protest movements over the last decade, asking whether such movements contribute to the globalization of civil society. Through a variety of studies, organised around the themes of public agency, public norms, public memory and public art, it considers the tendency of political contestations to move beyond national boundaries and create transnational connections. Departing from the approaches of social movements perspectives, it focuses on public space as a site of social "mixity" and opens up a new field for the study of politics and cultural controversies. An analysis of the paradigmatic change in the way in which society is made and politics is conducted, this study of the new enactment of citizenship in public space will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography and politics with interests in protest movements and contentious politics, citizenship and the public sphere, and globalization.