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URBAN SPACE AS A CONSTRUCT OF PERCEPTION: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF NOVOKUZNETSK // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 1 (35). P. 146-156

The article addresses the understanding of the problematic of “man in the city”. Semantic intentionality related to urban space is fundamental for the urban person because it amounts to a continuum of coexistence, communications, interactions, relationships, and needs. The study provides a perspective of understanding the city space as a value-semantic construction of reality formed in the process of subjective perception. The issue involves analytical work within the framework of an anthropological approach in understanding of urban life. The interpretation of the variety of contents of citizens’ spatial experiences as situational and semantic is carried out in a communicative and semiotic way. It is consistent with the phenomenological and cognitive interpretation of urban space. Throughout the article, the space of the city, experienced as an anthropological phenomenon, is understood in relation to the specifics of a particular object space and the “urban imaginary”, which is situational and city-fixed consciousness. It was revealed that in the process of urban space perception different dimensions become relevant, such as the material (the material environment created by people: transport infrastructure, parks, buildings.), the social (social interactions and communications of individuals and groups, the way in which they use parts of urban space), the symbolic (how certain signs, symbols, representation systems, specific images construct places). In general, the citizen’s spatial experience is set by a semantic dichotomy in varying degrees of “habitable” and “uninhabited” urban spaces. At one pole, there are frequently visited places inscribed in the everyday order of life. At the other, there are rarely or not visited parts of the city, whose the space texture differs from routine. In conclusion, the findings show that the citizens have the requirement to organize the disparate sensations and experiences of the urban space and to form a holistic image of the city. It becomes the task of semantic and axiological correlation with specific places. The article has been demonstrated it by focusing on the everyday life spaces, the specificity of (social) vision in the city and subjective experiences of the urban life temporality.

Keywords: urban space, image of the city, space perception, urban anthropology, city daily occurrence, topology