Urbanities,
Vol. 4
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No 2
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November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
74
read, and interpreted as a significant material, like a text written with montage (by people) in
the time and contiguous space of a series of signs (buildings, signs, streets, doors)’
(Canevacci 1996: 34). According to Canevacci, the city, like a novel, can be observed through
the dual space-time dimension. Canevacci wrote, ‘In a metropolitan context, the space-time
indicators are merged into a new, tangible whole. On the one hand, time becomes visible, it
becomes animate, it becomes flesh or wall, street, building; on the other hand, space becomes
layered in history, it incorporates time, and collects the many plots of urban stories’
(Canevacci 1996: 34). Observing the city as an urban chronotope, Canevacci discovered how
each place of the city, even those that seemed the most anonymous, can be considered full of
meaning if placed in relationship to human experience.
The cultural geographer Mireya Folch Serra (1990) noted how Bakhtin’s concept of the
chronotope can be useful in social research to help understand a point of view from the
bottom up, that of regular people that she contrasts to that of urban planners. She noted that
the concept of landscape, as intended by Bakhtin, takes on a different meaning than the usual
one, and she clarified this distinction by explaining the differences between two different
conceptions of landscape. The first suggests the ‘manifestation of the built environment, the
aesthetic of form and other spatial elements’ (Folch Serra 1990: 256) and is meant as the
‘product of social decisions legitimated by political authority’ (Folch Serra 1990: 256). She
noted how this first meaning was embraced by various schools of social science driven by an
orientation to rationalisation and mathematisation in their tireless search for spatial order in
human affairs in which spatial reality was considered separate from temporal reality. In the
second sense of landscape, close to the meaning given it by Bakhtin, it is ‘a repository of
meanings that allow people to establish affective and imaginative responses to their
surroundings and the social collective’ (Folch Serra 1990: 258). Here landscape emerges
from an encounter with the temporality of the individual who projects his or her personal,
idiosyncratic temporality on spaces and attributes meaning to it. Folch Serra noted that this is
how ‘(the landscape) becomes not only graphically visible in space but also narratively visible
in time, in a field of discourse all attempting to account to human experience’ (Folch Serra
1990: 258). It can be understood as a narrative platform that connects the dimension of space
to that of time.
In her article ‘Narrating the Road’ (2012), Tatiana Argounova shows the influence of
Bakhtin’s ideas in her exploration of the road as an anthropological concept. Based on
research that she conducted in Siberia, she drew a number of comparisons between the road
and narrative, identifying their chronotopic dimension and their shared ability to connect both
physical elements and cognitive emotional ones in a fluid, sequential way. If the narrative can
be considered ‘a story about things that take place over some period of time’ (Argounova
2012: 194), and ‘which has a sequence of events’ (Argounova 2012: 194), likewise the road
‘is the concept where spatial and temporal dimensions merge; at any one spatial location point
on the road, there is only one temporal dimension, and walking along the road always relates
to time – a step back is related to the past that took place a second ago and a step forward
related to the immediate future’ (Argounova 2012: 201). In this way ‘the point in time’ and
‘the time’ together create ‘a spatial and temporal location’ (Argounova 2012: 201).
