Local texts are in the focus of modern urbanism

The article deals with the fact that in modern humanities the phrase “local text” (LT) is used in different contexts, with an emphasis on some of the most common meanings. Two of them, having formed in specific scientific communities, now function in an interdisciplinary area and become paradigmatic. The first meaning is associated with a philological (literary-semiotic) approach. According to this conceptual approach, LT is a text in which there is a certain set of symbols, ideas, images, meanings, united by a certain stylistic or ideological unity; representing the uniqueness of the city (territory). According to the second approach, a local text is a multi-level and multilayered construction. In one case, this is the result of purposeful efforts within the urban anthropological field research. And in another case, the final text that systematizes linguistic and speech stereotypes, motives and plots of certain narratives, city toponyms that arise at different times; thanks to which different urban communities with a common identity build the image of a given place. The local text appears as a sequential development of a theme in a certain group of narratives, images based on a formed core - a certain set of features, thereby becoming a general cultural amplifier of cognition, contributing to the cognitive evolution of urban studies. In the context of our research, we highlight the idea that there are texts that can change the image of the city or create it anew. These are ontological texts. Not all local texts have an ontological function. At the same time, the most famous Texts of the city, such as Petersburg, some local texts: Perm, Tomsk, for example, undoubtedly have it. The article draws attention to key ideas in the discussion of local texts, including the Tomsk text, which are becoming significant for urban studies, for understanding the features of urban anthropology. New reading, reassembly of Topor's approach to the local text, and then the use of his approach in the interpretation of the provincial text. Comprehension of the semiotic constants of local texts in the context of the displacements occurring in national semiosis. A new interpretation of two dimensions of the local text: as a phenomenon of regional literature and as an anthropological mirror of the phenomenon of locality. The emergence of the epistemological historical ideal of such a local text claiming this title gradually leads to the abandonment of the hierarchy of categories in favor of an equidistant system of differences. The embodiment of such an ideal should do away with teleologism, universalism, Eurocentrism, and should lead to the creation of a multiperspective and contextually oriented history of Russian cities, and the development of an alternative approach.

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