No 2 (2025)

The article shows that urban identity and city identity are fundamentally different concepts: the former describes a person’s position of conscious belonging to a certain urban community, the latter describes the historical equality of the city to itself, its unity in time and space. At the same time, both concepts are open-ended: urban identity is, in principle, conditional and dynamic, and city identity is always greater than its self-identity. The identity of the city to itself turns it into a static museum of self-sufficient artifacts. The identity of the city confirms its status as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, changeable in its constancy and constant (the same) in its variability. The visual space of the city serves as a basis for self-identification only when it is perceived as a sign system – a text that can be read not only at the level of content and meaning, but also at the level of sense. To identify oneself with a specific city means to accept and master the values, ideals, socio-cultural attitudes and moral guidelines of a specific urban community, that is, its senses. Urban identity is based on such penetration into the cultural sense of the city. In turn, city identity largely depends on the urban image that is formed by the city dwellers – the bearers of the urban identity. The genesis of a specific city’s identity is the result of acts of understanding its essence: its history, which takes on the features of a biography; its architectural environment, which takes on the character of a semiotic system; and its spatial structure, which acquires the properties of a text. In this perspective, the city’s visual environment is always “larger” than its material or aesthetic dimensions and acts as a form of representation of meanings that equally underlie both urban identity and city identity.

The article explores the concept “code of space” proposed by Henri Lefebvre, still little known and rarely encountered in contemporary urban studies, and reveals the role of this code in the process of space production. The author analyzes the concepts “spatial practice”, “representations of space” and “representational spaces”, which are key in Lefebvre’s theory. She shows that spatial practice is associated with the perception of territory, representations of space with comprehension, and representational spaces with experience. At the same time, the production of space, understood as social practice, is also conditioned by three aspects: (1) the action of material forces and technologies, (2) the results of accumulated knowledge, the achievements of science and intellectual thought, and (3) the free process of signification and creation of meanings. The code of space allows us to understand what the produced space communicates, that is, to reach the level of its content and meaning, which means that such a code belongs primarily to the field of representations of space. However, the code of space makes it possible not only to conceptualize a particular space, but also to live in it and to produce it. In other words, the code of space correlates with both experience (representational spaces) and perception (spatial practice). The author argues that the cultural code of the city can be interpreted as one of the variants of the code of space and also demonstrates the existence in modern urban studies of three approaches to the interpretation of the concept “cultural code of the city”: culturological, semiotic and anthropological. The author reviews the main statements of the mentioned approaches and explicates some separate theses, which are poorly coordinated with each other. The article recognizes the need to create an integral method that can take into account the advantages of each of the presented approaches and overcome the existing differences.

The main theoretical field in which philosophy and architecture meet is the problem of the habitat, which is dominated by the concepts of place identity, space production, and the image of cohesion with the landscape. “Architectural philosophy” is a relatively new interdisciplinary approach that does not consider architecture as part of the philosophy of art, or even the philosophy of technology, but considers architecture itself as a method of cognition of reality. The “formal logic” (rules, positions, consequences and conventions) of the functioning of the metalanguage of architectural forms, aesthetic, figurative and visual approaches are analyzed in this study, taking into account certain temporal characteristics, by the method of topological reflection. The emergence of new conceptual approaches in architecture and urban planning over the past thirty years is explained by special social changes in post-industrial society: a shift in emphasis from visual/iconic to ethical and “sustainable” concepts, including due to new theories of posthumanism and intergenerational responsibility. In this sense, the Italian experience of topological reflection is unique. Originated largely on the phenomenological grounds popular in the Italian architectural discourse of the 1950s and 1960s, this approach persists in current projects of space creation, demonstrating conceptual continuity. The actualization of this approach goes simultaneously with attempts to comprehend the possibilities of multisensory technologies. Sociological concepts of “sensory fields” are also being introduced into practice. In general, we can talk about the emergence of several new trends, yet based on old traditions, which assign architecture, renovation and urbanism a significant, if not the main, role in creating conditions for a territory’s resilience.

The article discusses one of the problems of teaching bioethics to Russian-speaking students, since in Russian the word “bioethics” does not have a plural from, which creates the illusion of some single correct one. Therefore, the multiple essence of bioethics remains a metaphor. The introductory part of the article emphasizes other aspects of plurality associated with the essence of bioethics (interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary field of study, social institution, revision of the history of its origin). In addition, the article associates the plurality of bioethics with expanding its subject area. In one of these expansions – in pedagogical bioethics – one of the tasks is formulated: semiotic protection of the life goals of individuality (I. Melik-Gaikazyan). This type of protection ensures, firstly, the appropriateness of considering bioethics in this journal; secondly, it dictates the need to take into account the changing sociocultural context of perception of the meanings of “protection”, “life goals”, “individuality”; thirdly, it substantiates the relevance of semiotics (and visual semiotics) for the methodology of combining different research approaches in the humanities: historical, holistic and activity-based. The authors of the article, based on their many years of experience teaching the discipline Bioethics to medical university students, note the differences in the perception of the listed meanings. These differences are associated not only with the change in the sociocultural context but also with the course in the curriculum where bioethics is taught and the differences in the future specialties of students (future doctors or future health care organizers). All this makes it difficult to choose and select material for a lecture on the topic “Bioethics: Its Status and Principles”. The article proposes a survey of students preceding the lecture so that the lecturer can know precisely where to start the introductory lecture, which options for the received answers need to be supported and developed, and which options for answers require counterarguments. The authors argue that two questions are enough for the survey: What is bioethics? Who does a voluntary informed consent primarily protect? The article presents the results of surveys of first-year students and postgraduates. It is concluded that the substantiation of the interrelation of these two issues is included in the content of the introductory lecture. This conclusion defines the “starting conditions” for the entire course since it allows for selecting educational material to illustrate the entire spectrum of interpretations, the range of interpretations, and the amplitude of applications. A fragment of the lecture is given, the content of which includes a comparison of views (F. Yahr and V.R. Potter) on the genesis of bioethics, designation of differences in interpretations of bioethics (V.R. Potter and A. Hellegers), schematization of the reasons for the emergence of bioethics (the need to conduct experiments and their ethical consequences, progress in medical sciences and new biomedical technologies, changes in the doctor–patient relationship). A discussion of modern metaphors included in the discourse of bioethics that can be effectively used in the lecture is given. An analysis of the “myths” about the genesis of bioethics is given. The article presents the grounds for distinguishing between bioethics and those areas of applied ethics with which bioethics is often identified. Examples of its extensions demonstrate the multiplicity of bioethics (urban bioethics, pedagogical bioethics, political bioethics, space bioethics, business bioethics, and ethnic bioethics). The authors’ research on identifying the types of bioethics and defining their bases and functions became the basis for developing the structure of the lecture. This overcomes the difficulty of choosing definitions for such a multifaceted phenomenon, existing in the plural, as bioethics. A semiotic analysis of the means of expressing bioethics (metaphors and definitions) allowed the authors to choose two definitions of bioethics and select the most striking metaphors.