Reading cities through the concepts of studium and punctum: The case of Prizren and Pristina

Cities, which represent their existence and first traces in the world since people started to come together as a community, have both become the physical manifestation of social relations, collective memory, and cultural values, and have the power to transform societies through mutual interaction. For this reason, it is valuable to understand the phenomenon of the city, which has a complex and multi-layered structure, and to address its transformation in the historical process, as well as to create an environment for predictions and discussion about the future. In this context, the aim of the study is to try to read the cities and to understand their essence by focusing on the physical and semantic layers of the cities. The main purpose of the study is to borrow the concepts of studium and punctum -which Roland Barthes put forward in his book Camera Lucida- at the point of reading the cities. Prizren and Pristina were chosen as case studies; In addition to literature and archive searches, information about both cities were collected through surveys. Comparing the data obtained and then drawing abstract urban sections documenting the transformation of cities in terms of the contextual infrastructure created, provided a new perspective on the point of reading the cities. The information obtained with the semiotic approach shaped the definitions of the studium layer of the cities, and the punctum layer, which makes the cities unique, was tried to be defined by handling this information with hermeneutic phenomenological approach.