City imaginary boundaries

The problem of city perception through imagined boundaries is analyzed. The city is considered as а space, that a person imagines and experiences thorough a continuum of meanings, formed by a set of ideas about urban space and time. This study focuses on urban imaginary boundaries that are formed based on urban imaginary functioning patterns. The author draws on the scientific statements of B. Anderson, who identified the collective imaginary concept, E. Soja, who demonstrated that a city is represented as both real and imagine by a person, and A. Lefebvre, who suggested that a person experience the city on the base of the imaginary. Urban imaginary boundaries are the semantic facets that symbolically encode what the city and the non-city is based on citizens’ ideas. In the article two vectors of urban imaginary boundaries’ structuring are revealed: 1) through identifications codes, setting the distinction “one’s own” and “others”, including through belonging to the urban space, and providing an imaginary belonging for people, who are unfamiliar with each other, to citizens and to the city; 2) through the urban imaginary’s temporal aspect, revealed in the culture city memory categories that define the structure of collective ideas about a city through images of the city’s past. To the non-city, which is outside the imaginary boundaries, the author refers to all those urban space objects and practices that are not symbolically and mentally related to citizens’ urban ideas.