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The Image of the Hyper City

Landi, Davide

Authors

Davide Landi



Abstract

© 2018, The Author(s). Since the nineteenth and twentieth century, information has been pivotal both in the cultural tradition and then in the economic tradition. While the Fordism economic model and its specialisation requirements originated a simplistic zoning and single-use development approach to the design of a city. It, however, determined a fragmented growth of cities. Inevitably, the zoning as an urban strategy affected the architectural scale. Nevertheless, the idea of information, commercial goods and thereby people freely able to flow through the city allowed architects and urban designer to conceive new types of urban infrastructures. For example, trains, which were designed on the model of urban “arteries and veins.” Over time, the persistence of urban and architectural segmentation has strengthened social and economic inequalities among urban society. In addition, information has played a more vital role in this strengthening process. The technological achievements of the twenty-first century such as information technologies have significantly affected cities. The new informational patterns have provided new ways of designing, and in turn how societies experience cities. These “quantified cities” consist of digital data that dynamically interacts with “quantified human beings.” Consequently, a renewed urban semiotics is established, which is built around an alternate sociological comprehension. Is this new urban semiotics able to heal an ill and divided urban body? The paper will investigate a new concept of “quantified city” based on the notion of “Hyper-Reality,” and its inhabitants who are entering in a “post-human” condition while living in a dynamic urban environment. In particular, the critical analysis will be used as a “tool” for redefining the perception of the city (i.e., the image of the Hyper City) through inhabitants’ (post-humans’) relational patterns which are technologically mediated (i.e., Google Maps, Uber, Instagram, etc.). The more traditional notion of urbanisation is questioned with a focus on how the an urban society is embedded within the digital condition and the notion of a city.

Citation

Landi, D. (2019). The Image of the Hyper City. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 32(3), 533-548. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9583-8

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 15, 2018
Online Publication Date Sep 29, 2018
Publication Date Sep 15, 2019
Deposit Date Mar 7, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
Print ISSN 0952-8059
Electronic ISSN 1572-8722
Publisher Springer Verlag
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 32
Issue 3
Pages 533-548
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9583-8
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/5628064
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9583-8

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Copyright Statement
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the
source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.




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