Correlation of visual means with methodologies for ‘describing’ urban environment

To say the city is a poly-semantic concept and as such refers to many different realities, is to disengage from an axiomatically defined City as a Whole and its system of derived propositions in order to free fields for the scientific, technical or artistic description of these realities in connection with the various aspects interpreted with reference to concrete cities. Our descriptions of different realities connected with concrete cities such as Athens, Quebec, Vienna, are linked to with ample data prompting to both intuitive and concrete meanings sourced in our experience. A starting common ground is the fact that the rapidly evolving and now largely autonomous electronic audiovisual means expand the empirical knowledge of reality for both the general public and specialists of various disciplines. Moreover, despite the fact that the production and use of such data and objects are very articulated at the mass media and social networking services level, new models of observing and describing the reality with old and modern means are emerging continually that aim to scientific research. The visual sociology as postmodern area is of particular interest for the investigation of contemporary urban environment. The present paper will examine the visual means in correlation with both the methodological description of the urban open spaces (when description involves a system of empirical examples and general notions f the city form or city lifestyle) and the now widespread practice of non-antagonistic use of different means (when antagonistic implies, for example, narrative against optical or against mapping or against mathematical etc).