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Vorträge und Posterpräsentationen (ohne Tagungsband-Eintrag):

O. Frey:
"Visual semiotics of creative places in Vienna";
Vortrag: 2006 Conference of the International Visual Sociology Association, Urbino, Italy; 03.07.2006 - 05.07.2006.



Kurzfassung deutsch:
Die Diagnose einer wissensbasierten Stadtentwicklung eröffnet neue urbane Geographien mit einer Verknüpfung zwischen Netzwerken und Orten. Die Verknüpfung unterschiedlicher Wissensformen und Informationen findet über Visualiserungen von Symbolen und Zeichensystemen an konkreten Orten statt.

Kurzfassung englisch:
The diagnosis of knowledge-based urban development opens up new urban geographies which mix, differentiate, and also split up places and networks within the city. The jumble of different kinds of knowledge, of ubiquitously available information, of locally embedded cul-tures, creativities, and innovations provides specific resources for cities, neighbourhoods, places, and individuals: Within the `place- resources´, visualisations may be a crucial potential for the re-urbanization of urban spaces. Visualisations have an increasing importance for the identification of individuals, milieus and urban places. Based on that conviction the paper will contribute to the traditional theories of urban sociology, cultural studies and the research of urban milieus the auditory elements. The innovative aspect is to combine visual phenomena in urban places.
The scientific community of urban research increasingly underpins that globalisation im-proves the fact, that (urban) places like quarters and public places are important for the self-organisation for both the knowledge based service society and the civil society (`glocalisa-tion´). Even if the virtual communication is opening up totally new worlds of information ex-change and communication, the local/regional level based on face-to-face contacts becomes more and more important for anchoring economic, cultural and social processes. In my paper I am interested in how places/quarters in inner city sites are contributing as `vibrant places´ to a renaissance of the European city both due to the gentrification processes as well as for creative industries. As Läpple & Walter (2006) clearly found that in `successful´ creative places there is a tight relation between new `weak ties´ of civil society supporting new forms of social cohesion and a sound base for a variety of creative industries ranging from successful market presence networks to the fluid cultures scenes of events and fun. Moreover, economically successful creative industries need the `amalgamisation´ of these `sticky places´.
The link between creativity and urban places is named in the concepts of different authors: `Creative City` (Landry 2000), ´Cultural Industries` (Wynne 1992), ´Milieux Innovateur` (Ay-dalot 1986), or ´Creative Class` (Florida 2002). Creativity needs places where creative work-ers/milieus are meeting as a precondition for production and consumption of goods of the creative industries. The core research question is concentrated about what is typical for these places and in what way they are different from others. Theoretical basic research will be in collecting elements of a new theory of space construction, explaining in what way visual characteristics are resulting in specific semiotics of places to shed more light on , explaining the locality-bound of creativity. Therefore, theoretical attempts from different theories will be combined: particularly theoretical models from cultural studies, regional economy, economic geography, and sociology of space, all of which explain why urban places develop the ability to attract creative actors and to make them stay for productive and consumptive activities.
The arguments for the reasons for the locality-bound quality of a location and a locality-bound civil structure of social creativity are traced by five lines of argumentation:
1. Spatial cohesion supports direct face-to-face communications, thus within and between creative places a variety of networks, scenes and clusters can be developed.
2. The high probability to meet other creative workers is the prerequisite for ´tacit knowledge´, i.e. the implicit, individual- and place-related knowledge.
3. These contexts of tight communication structures serve as spin-offs for trust productions, visions, experiments, weak ties for scenes and strong ties for new partnerships between different creative branches for a new kind of a local bound production of social and cultural capital (cf. Bourdieu 1982), forming the `habitus of creative places´.
4. Creativity and particularly creative industries are only establishing and successfully working in a `creative space´, i.e. a socially produced relational space, based on overarching cultures, images and ideologies, needing networks of matching places, and actors of different creative milieus, with a particular `placing´ and `space making´ strategies, forming a cities creativity culture.
5. To detect and strengthen these places there is a kind of `symbolic capital´ needed which easily can be shifted as economic, social or cultural capital for those insiders, who are able to read, listen, smell, taste these places, but which is not known yet.
Visualization is one space-producing information channels. As the visual sense is increasingly dominating all our day to day experience (as we are able to select via looking more precisely the urban information over-load) and particularly lifestylisation and unique selling propositioning is communicated predominantly via semiotics, main informations will be exchanged using this channel. The paper is to concentrate on the visual architectures of places. The visual informations of places are space-constituting semiotics. Semiotics as theories of signs and research of semiotic processes deals with the encryption and decryption of communication between addresser and addressee. Signs as codified information are not only sent by people but also by objects in urban places like buildings, road signs, public advertisement, etc. The paper assumes the locality-bound information transmitted through visual signs, which I call visualscapes (see fig. 1). The possibility to decrypt this signs is conditional on the "in-place meaning" (Scollon & Scollon, 2002) of visualspaces, which can be studied by the methods of geosemiotics (see fig. 1).
The paper will present a map of visual spaces of 6-8 selected places in Vienna, describing the specific creativity of these places. The idea is to analyse first the information channels of `seeing´ in the role for different forms of `creativity production´. The paper shows first research results in a phd-project with the method of "photo-elicitaion". There will be presented the interpretation of 6-8 selected visual interviews on creative places in Vienna.

Erstellt aus der Publikationsdatenbank der Technischen Universität Wien.