Mario Panico – författare

Capturing the advances in research techniques within the field, this book will introduce the reader to key contemporary debates within the study of urban spaces. Chapters focus on the important topics of meaning-making and interpretation within cities. State-of-the-art approaches are presented to provide an enlightening outlook into this ever-evolving subject area.

Semiotic Approaches to Urban Space will be a valuable resource for both undergraduates and postgraduates in the fields of semiotics and urban studies, alongside those in disciplines such as visual studies and human geography. Researchers in these fields will find the cutting-edge research within this book to be of great interest.

How is nostalgia expressed through space?

Studies of nostalgia have long illustrated the emotional dynamics which condition our desire to go back to a time and a space that belong to the past. This book addresses this condition from an innovative perspective, by over-exposing the spatial dimension of nostalgia. Doing so unveils alternative and complementary ways of thinking through how this emotion is activated: in particular, how space – unlike time – can be recreated in the present, even in a different location, with the deliberate aim of consoling this bittersweet sensation. The volume defines this re-creation as a “space for nostalgia”.

In this book, this concept is applied within the context of cultural heritage and difficult memories. As a further step, then, the volume questions the modalities through which nostalgia can interact with and permeate a space of memory, therefore influencing collective understandings and the emotional re-writings of our shared pasts. Through case studies relating to challenging nostalgias for troubled pasts in Western Europe, the book examines how the furnishing and use of space, the discourses that surround it, and the objects that become synecdoche of it provide a terrain where even unlikely or troubling forms of nostalgia can grow and blossom.