Urban chronotope - urban semiotics. Florence and Saint Petersburg

In this paper author presents an interdisciplinary interaction betweeen semiotics and chronotopy. The paper refers to the great cities of Renaissance and the Russian cities like Saint Petersburg. As M. M. Bakhtin formulated, "genre is cultural memory". According to the author, the structural and spatiotemporal memory lies in the core not only of artistic works, but of urban structurestoo.As an instruments of structural and semiotic analysis of city, the terms of chronotope and chronotopy were coined. The followers of M. M. Bakhtin, the structuralists and the semeiologists of the Yu. M. Lotman Semiotic School now agree on this point. In 1990s, one of the founders of Russian semiotics, Yu. M. Lotman came to the conclusion that new spatiotemporal modes can crystallize and spiritually develop citizens. This concept formed the basis of the first part of the paper. The second part considers practical opportunities of semiotics and urban chronotopy in dialogue with students during classes on such humanities subjects as philosophy, global art culture, aestetics e.t.c. According to the author, urban chronotope and urban semiotics are different and complementary instruments of scientific comprehension and development of cities.