Integrative model for studing the city and city environment: a review of Svetlana Kasatkina's monograf Urbosphere: understanding city space

This review is the outcome of the work made by an official reviewer of Svetlana Kasatkina’s monograph « Urbosphere: Reflection of Urban Space». The review provides the concept of ‘urbosphere’ outlined in the monograph. The author demonstrates that the suggested models of urban space study (conceptual semiotic, structural semiotic and substrate semiotic) shed light on a city as a self-organizing system involving such interrelated components as the city concept, the city structure and the city substrate, forming the basis for the notion ‘urbosphere’. The review refers to the considerable theoretical and practical significance of the concept of ‘urbosphere’. Since the concept of ‘urbosphere’ encompasses other models of studying of urban space and enables to explore different levels of city space as well as the relationships between them, the reviewer describes this concept as an integrative model.