Faces and the City

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Facial Presence in Urban Space
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-73500-9
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 162 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 417 g

Reihe: Routledge/FACETS Advances in Face Studies

Faces and the City advances the understanding of the role of faces and face representations, their meanings and interpretations, in physical and digital urban space.

This comprehensive study builds a typology of biological, represented and digital faces within urban space and presents an interdisciplinary approach to the facial presence in urban space, which it is used to analyse in depth urban faces and facial representation in public art, monuments, memorials as well as memorial practices, including digital ones.

This innovative volume will interest PhD students and scholars in semiotics, visual communication, digital humanities, cultural geography and urban studies, as well as those working in urban planning and design, architecture, memory studies and art history.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bellentani, Federico

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Städtebau, Stadtplanung (Architektur)
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction

Part 1

2. Faces and facial presence in urban space: A literature review

3. A semiotic and cultural-geographical framework for the study of facial presence in the urban space

4. A typology of facial presence of the city

Part 2

5. Faces on the facades of Bologna, Italy: A semiotic inquiry into urban inscriptions

6. Sculpted faces: Face inscription in monuments and memorials

7. Facial practices: Faces in institutional and vernacular memorial practices

8. Digital Faces: The evolution of faces in digital memorial practices

9. Conclusions: Urban semiotics face to face

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Federico Bellentani is a project manager and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin, working on the ERC-PoC project EUFACETS (EU Face Advanced Communication for Elders Treasuring in Society). He was also a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project FACETS (Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies) from 2021 to 2023. He holds a PhD from Cardiff University (2017), an MA in Semiotics from the University of Bologna (2013) and was a visiting researcher at the University of Tartu.

He is Director of Marketing and Communication at Dinova, an AI-driven company integrating semiotics and storytelling. He was named among Forbes Italia’s Top 100 Marketing Managers (2025) and received the Google Cloud Star for Marketing and Communication in 2022 and 2024.