Semiotics 3: Dog signs in Lauttasaari

In a previous blog post we performed a somewhat thorough semiotical analysis of dog signs in a Finnish suburb. In the end one of our hypotheses was that the semiotical landscape of the signage reflected the facts that:

• The signs were placed by small-ish housing communities and were thus more personal than anonymous.
• The signs are largely targeted to neighbours rather than neighbours.

Both of these would then contribute to the fact that the dog signs tended to be more akin to "friendly reminders among neighbours" rather than strict commands or warnings. In this shorter post we'll be studying a smaller and less representative sample of dog signs from another Finnish suburb with somewhat differing demographics to see if our hypothesis has any support.

Caveat Lector: We have very little (if any) training in the best practices on how to convey a study in the field of humanistics. In particular, there is a strong chance of confirmation bias happening here, especially as our findings seem to support our suspicions.

The geocultural setting

The suburb in question in this post is that of Lauttasaari. This is an island on the westmost part of the Finnish capital of Helsinki, just on the border with Espoo, with a population of around 25 000 people. The aerial photo¹ below is taken from the west.

We have anecdotal, though slightly outdated, expertise on the sociocultural landscape of Lauttasaari as we lived there all of our childhood. Despite being only a few kilometers from the city centre, Lauttasaari and its residents tends to have a very strong "hometown spirit". Sometimes even verging into a sort of xenofobia². On the other hand, it is very well connected to Helsinki and Espoo and can be easily accessed via public transport, bike, or car. It furthermore has nice nature-filled coastlines that attract people from neighbouring areas.

The housing predominantly consists of apartment complexes. There are some older row houses, especially near some of the shores, but with the very high land prices near downtown Helsinki the supermajority of housing is focused on more dense housing solutions. This means that, unlike with the earlier suburb, the housing corporations are much larger and there are several of them in close proximity. So according to our hypothesis we should expect their communication to be less like neighbourly notices and more "corporate" or "faceless" (anonymoys?) in some sense.

The signs

We did not do as an exhaustive search of the area as we did in the previous article. Instead we took a few long walks in the south part of the western side of the island and recorded any dog-related signs we came across.

We found seven signs, ignoring a few from official city plackards which we feel do not reflect the particular local sociolinguistical environment. We'll go through the seven we have one by one, roughly in the order of appearance during our walk.

The very first sign we came across was striking in that it seemed to depict a doberman instead of the "generic terrier" that is often seen in dog signs. (See again Halonen & Laihonen for a discussion on dog breeds used in Finnish signage.)

Doberman is a big dog bred originally for guarding duties. Meaning that a part of its main function is to be a threat. The silhouette is also quite distinctive, meaning that there is very little chance of confusion in what the sign is indexing against. The sign is also quite large and very prominently displayed, its positioning next to path into the property seeming to indicate that no such dogs should enter the area. Note also that the sign is positioned below other restrictive signs that mark the area as private property and forbid both unauthorized parking and trespassing.

Our reading of this sign would then be that it forbids the entrance of dogs not because of e.g. their excrements but because they are a dangerous animal. We also feel that there is an interesting juxtaposition here as we would expect that a dog sign containing an image of a doberman would more commonly be warning of the dangerous dog, not forbidding its entry. Especially when colocated with "private property, no trespassing" signs.

The second sign we came across was very near the first one, and seems to depict a german shepherd, also a relatively large dog breed. We immediately note that the positioning and the sign vessel are quite different from the doberman sign; indeed, this seems to be a sticker attached to a utility pipe.

Though we assume that german shepherds was originally bred for, well, shepherding, they are also commonly used both in guard duties and warfare. So this sign also uses a silhouette of a not easily mistakeable breed of a potentially dangerous dog. On the other hand, the location of the sign seems to imply that the purpose of the sign is to forbid urination against the utility pipe. This message feels again to be almost at odds with the dog breed used. "No dangerous dogs allowed to urinate here?" Perhaps the sign poster had some extra "no big dogs allowed" signs available and decided to use them for the more generic "no dog urination" purpose, assuming that the locational context would make the meaning clear.

The third sign we found was again using the more common "generic terrier" silhouette.

It seems to signal that no dogs should go to the lawn (to defecate?), but you should pay attention the sign vessel. It is not a mere plastic stick on grass. Someone has driven a metal pipe thicker than our wrist into the ground and attached a very sturdy sign to it. It wouldn't probably stop a car, but it would very much damage one. So even though the sign content is quite standard, the sign vessel is really emphasizing that they really do mean it.

The next signs were essentially a pair of signs on the front lawn of a housing complex. They had a much more self-made feel to them, and they were much more weathered.

They don't depict a generic terrier, but at least for our amateur eye they didn't seem to index any particular big or dangerous dog breed either. Though the silhouette they both use do have the somewhat rare property of depicting the dog's eye as well, implying more awareness and attention?

We then came across the sole example of a sign in Lauttasaari where the dog silhouette is defacating, instead of more generally just "being a dog". Though the sign did also contain the text of "The walking of a dog is forbidden".

Besides the contradiction between the textual part of the sign forbidding dog walking and the visual sign forbidding dog defacation, the placement of the sign next to a tree seemed to suggest to us that it is the dog urination on the tree that is being forbidden. Though we assume that a part of the reason for the positioning of the sign is due to not having it in the way of a lawn mower. The position of the sign also made it quite hard to notice, or read in particular, though the visual parts were not hard to understand even from a distance.

The final (pair) of dog signage we found was near the local high school. They were attached to some utility boxes, depicting quite simplistic and generic dog silhouettes.

The dog sign here also does depict alertness, both with the inclusion of the eyes and the attentive ears towards the left of the sign. We've seen the exact same sign image in various places, and presume that these are a somewhat standard sign one can purchase. This time in sticker format. This is also one of only two signs we saw where a collar is detected, the other one being the "no defecation" sign above.

On the signs as a collection

We walked a few one hour walks (with a stroller) in the area, and found the signage to be quite sparse. The first four signs we found were all within seeing distance of each other, whereas the rest were quite sporadic. There also seemed to be a rather strong variance in the sign types - they varied quite a lot e.g. in the amount of effort put into the sign, especially comparing the few generic stickers and the metal pipe driven into the ground.

Conclusions

Even though there was quite a lot of variance in the signs, they did more often bigger (and thus more dangerous?) dogs. They tended to be quite visible, and their theme seemed to concentrate more in banning dogs per se, not just their excrements. The density of the dog signs also felt quite low to us, even taking into account our less intensive sampling of them. So perhaps there is less impetus in the local communities to put effort into such signage? Or perhaps dog excrements aren't such an issue here? Or perhaps the larger housing communities make people living in them less interested on small mundane things like dog urine on the decorative trees? Might it be that these norms are communicated in some other form than signs, e.g. in local social media groups?³

Regardless on the sparsity of our data and in the uncertainty of our conclusions, we nevertheless see our observations as weakly supporting our original hypothesis in that the signs here can be more harsh than in the more village-spirited neighbourhood. Though with our very small sample size we wouldn't call this evidence, but more akin to anectodal support.