Top-down and bottom-up semiotic landscapes in Eastern Suburb Memory: A scalar-chronotopic approach

Abstract

There is a trend for old industrial areas to be redeveloped into commercialised areas to promote consumption and city branding. In such redevelopment, differentiated semiotic landscapes (SLs) are utilized to project identities and to promote consumption. This article examines the top-down and bottom-up SLs in the Eastern Suburb Memory (ESM) in Chengdu, China that was converted from an industrial heritage site. Drawing on Bakhtin's notion of ‘chronotope’, we focus on the differences between the chronotopes invoked by the government and those by entrepreneurs for the purposes of national identification and commercialisation through translingual and multimodal practices. We find that the top-down choreographies tend to invoke the chronotope of the Chinese industrialisation period in the past to evoke national solidarity and pride for publicity and tourism. In contrast, the grassroots' SLs utilise more ancient and broader chronotopes (e.g. the Republic of China and contemporary Europe) across multiple scale-levels to evoke nostalgia and exoticism. Furthermore, this article explores the emerging tendency of the two types of SLs to transcend binary oppositions and achieve mutual absorption through the lens of assemblage.