Kseniia Hurzhy
Urgency of the research. Interaction with urban space is at the heart of our everyday lives. It is not just its use, but its understanding, appropriation and giving value or super-value that defines us as citizens and citizens. This proves that politicians recognise certain territories (cities) as territories over which a certain idea dominates, related to it, its retransmitters and attempts to influence them. Urban changes, in turn, cause the mobility of cultural meanings according to which people live and are oriented.
Target setting. Urban matter is needed by the modern community to construct the world. The city becomes an image of a rational man-made world. But if the universe for man is mediated by urban space and assimilated through urban structures, the question of their essence arises. A separate gap in this circle of questions about the foundations of such a universe through the organization of urban life is to find an answer to the question of what it is in urban space that indicates, fixes and reflects representations of the world and the self.
Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. In order to fully develop the research objective (analysis of sacred meanings in culture and society), the original theoretical works were studies on semiotics by Roland Barthes and Yuri Lotman, explanations of sacredness in the works of Peter Berger and Mircea Eliade, disclosure of mechanisms of urban space organisation in the works of Amos Rapoport and Spiro Kostof and interpretation of the polycentric phenomenon based on the concept of the city as metacollector by Peter Sloterdijk.
Practical illustrative material on sacralisation in cities is provided by studies of Berlin by Aleida Asman, the cultural monuments of Paris by Henri Lefebvre and American civil religion.
Among the national studies of sacred space in its various correlations with urban reality, a certain research ground is already forming in the studies of F. Tikhomirov, K. Belikov, and A. Sorochuk.
The research objective. The aim of the article is to analyse the problem of identifying cultural meanings in urban sacred space and to illustrate contemporary processes of sacralisation in the city. Analysing the experiences of Berlin, Paris, New York and Indianapolis, we will try to illustrate exactly what kind of transformation contemporary urban spaces are experiencing, how sacralisation of urban objects occurs and what becomes the basis for such sacralisation of urban spaces. It is the translation of the conversation about the sacred in the contemporary city into a theoretical plane and the consideration of the mechanisms of sacralisation as a first approximation that will be the subject of this exploration.
The statement of basic materials. The article examines the phenomena of sacralisation of cultural heritage objects (if such urban objects are "icons" and part of the symbolic identity), the role of civil religion in the sacralisation of urban space objects (using the examples of New York's Ground Zero space, the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin). Emphasis is placed on the peculiar migration of "religious" terminology into everyday urban discourse (use of stable designations: city icon, city-icon, "desecration of an architectural structure"). Emphasis is placed on the hybridity of urban spaces and the emergence of a multiplicity of urban sacral centres.
Conclusions. The sacral framework of the modern city consists of sacralised objects that organise the grid of urban coordinates and help new citizens integrate into the urban field of meaning. Modern sacralisation does not disappear, but fragments; it can be characterised as plural sacralisation, because the city is inhabited by communities united on different grounds, on different grounds, and their sacredness in the city can be fundamentally different from that of another community. The facts of sacralisation of contemporary urban space, point to the continuity of this process as opposed to the studies that tend to speak of a one hundred percent secularisation of urban space. The aforementioned sacralization of urban landscapes, spaces, objects and structures, we see as a promising topic that requires further detailed consideration.
Keywords: sacred urban space, sacralisation in the city, city philosophy, cultural values.
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