Tra decoro e degrado. Appunti per una semiotica dei segni urbani

The aim of the paper is to investigate the way in which the practices of erasing writing on walls are able not to block semiosis but to produce further signification. To this end, the research corpus focuses on two particular contexts, the San Lorenzo district in Rome and the university area in Bologna, to which other examples of particularly significant modes of semiotic erasure are added. In the areas under investigation, the conflict between the subjects who write on the walls and those who erase these signs reaches a certain acme, making them emblematic for a preliminary socio-semiotic investigation concerning the claim of taking the floor involving urban actors (institutions, inhabitants, young people, political collectives, artists, police forces) and the application of rhetorical devices. it is particularly relevant to frame the way in which these rhetorics are articulated because they are able to produce policies and ideas of 'degradation' and 'decency' from a unilateral perspective capable of delineating the power dynamics that develop in urban spaces.