Street Corner Semiology

Abstract

Thought only as a point where one street meets another, the intersection is composed of two entities: the street and the street corner, both having ephemeral qualities, the former purely transient and the latter both fleeting and permanent. The street is defined by a “street wall,” the sidewalk, the curb, people, and sometimes motor vehicles. With respect to this investigation, the area defined as the street corner is the entire lot adjacent to the point at which two streets intersect. While the street caters solely to the needs of the motorist, the street corner serves a dual purpose: a convenient location for essential non-places like gas stations, bus stops, and stores. Additionally, it can act as a central gathering place for people to interact. It is also because of its convenience that the street corner may be susceptible to high pedestrian activity thereby lending itself to perceived or realized vice. The street is a necessary element for a city to thrive – basis for growth, a thread that holds the urban fabric together, but because of the frequency and ephemeral nature of the street and its corners, their potential to become more than utilitarian spaces is largely disregarded. For example, the street is not seen as a way to engage architecture and people or to project architecture into infrastructure. The street, a non-place, is inundated with signs and advertisements that force the human mind into conversation with text. In most cases, there is no personal connection between the street and the driver or pedestrian who uses it. Therefore, the street has no identity. People, through actions, can give the street identity, and in the process claim ownership of the street. In that action, the people themselves become a text, and consequently gain a portion of the city where a sub-culture is formed that forces the street and the street corner into the margin of society. Even its color, the gray-black tones, allows the street to fall into the periphery. The street corner, a by-product of industrialization, a quasi-isolated phenomenon carved from the necessity of transportation and promoted by supermodernity. Within the street corner lies a sequence of texts to be read and decoded; a point at which communication occurs between objects both inert and individual through space and tangible boundaries. Therein lies the dichotomy between the physical and psychological nature of the street corner. Both a gateway and a destination, it is a non-place that either promotes or negates vice through its composition of negative space, proximity of structure to the street, and materiality. But what is, if at all, the relationship between the street corner and the community it belongs to (or the community that belongs to it)? It is a question posed that requires an understanding of the depth of the intersection, its relationship to the urban fabric, and the human psyche. This relationship will be uncovered through analyses of the intersection in the city, particularly the city of Detroit and those cities within it, to determine whether the condition of the street corner affects the adjacent neighborhood, or the opposite. Once a bustling city on the map, Detroit presents an interesting case to be studied and analyzed. Its streets reflect pockets of urban decay and a declining population density. Here, the street corner can be used as a signifying node to uncover the condition of a community’s social environment with respect to its physical environment. The intersection is a nucleus of bustling life. It can be proven that it holds within it the ability to be a text for symbols within the community.