Abstract:

A city is an object built from two perspectives. An object that represents both the set of architectures and planning projects comprising the urban fabric and the intersubjective reality, the fabric of feeling, built socially and culturally that we term city.
An educational approach to the city object demands competencies be acquired and developed relating to the analysis and interpretation of the way in which such social representations are built, and likewise the textual strategies aimed at favouring a particular meaning above other possible meanings that might question the way in which we think of or imagine the city. The discourses, images, symbols and architectures that “speak” of the city constitute texts applicable to a pedagogical approach aimed at investigating and revealing the procedures which focus the city’s meaning as a space for community living or segregation, as a tense present or an idealised past, as a shared project or a place of opportunity, depending on the circumstances.
This paper looks into the way in which images of the city contribute to the process of normalising and institutionalising the sense of direction in transformation, of the spaces in which historic meaning has been watered down, tension and conflict of the industrial city and are all projected towards a new horizon of expectations under the all-encompassing discourse of the new city under reconstruction. To do so, a study has been undertaken of the images seen in the publication Bilbao Ría 2000, aimed at making the local and international public aware of the urban transformations projected in recent years in the capital of Vizcaya. Said transformations have been related to urban segregation processes, those leading to a stratification and fragmentation of the city into social and economic groups occupying different spaces therein.
This paper starts from a pedagogical analysis of the iconic discourses focussing on the improvement of teaching-learning processes committed to research-action. The proposal adopts a critical theory perspective approach which aims to review educational experiences in the very context in which learning takes place, precisely there where, like a hidden curriculum, the conditions for accessing and building its meaning are decided.
Discourse analysis using a semio-pragmatic approach provides methodological tools that reveal the procedures whereby iconic texts set interpretive frames for the meaning of the city’s events, tensions and conflicts, while at the same time defining the mechanisms for textual co-operation, through which the iconic text addresses and questions its interlocutor, and guides and regulates the reading conditions.
This papers is one of the research activities promoted by the University of the Basque Country, in the framework of the project entitled, "The image of the city under reconstruction".

Keywords:

education, visual studies, image, city transformation, segregation.