URBAN EMPATHIES AND GEOSEMIOTICS: THE GEOGRAPHIC SYSTEM OF URBAN SIGNS

This book is divided into three chapters: the first, with three sections, establishes the conceptual foundations from which the relationship with urban space as a communication phenomenon arises, such that it becomes the container and transmitter of all types of information. The second chapter, composed of five sections, presents the confrontation between the aesthetic and social urban imaginary, with the aim of exalting the symbolic in the processes of strengthening the sense of the urban. Through this confrontation, a review is made of the history of reflections on this topic, from aesthetic empathy to symbolic geography, to define the semiotic dimension of the urban, through concepts such as urban language, syntax, and urban text. The third part unfolds in three sections that situate the field research in Chapinero Central, Bogotá, where the topo-semiotic, aesthetic-semiotic, and socio-semiotic geographies are consolidated, with which the geographical quality of the semiotic behavior of urban space is established. The research concludes with the definition of geosemiotics, or the geographic system of urban signs. In this way, the aesthetic is transcended by the semiotic, a perspective that recognizes the social dimension of the common person in the urban landscape, who constructs, through their spatial empathy, the meaning of the urban.