Explaining New towns In terms of Meaning of Place Using Semiotics

Abstract

Considering the city as the body of social life and the basis of human growth, new towns are samples of unsuccessful places to live. In comparison with old cities, one of the problems of new towns is the matter of meaning of place in their user’s eye. A New Town is mostly the physical body of a city which people can’t find its meaning and even can’t attach new compatible meaning to. This shows that meaning had been ignored in the design process, so new towns must be reviewed basically in the theoretical frame to make a better understanding of people and meaning which must be taken into account in the design process. The main question of this article is that why new towns are different from the old cities in the people’s eyes in the case of meaning of place? Semiotics is as an approach to meaning, which firstly focuses on how meaning has been shaped and how it has been conveyed in language. Elements, which semiotics takes to describe the process of meaning are used in other disciplines as well. This is a theoretical research and is a kind of descriptive and analytical one. Collecting the information based on written materials then the content analysis leads this research to main data which show how semiotics explains the meaning. Generalizing the ideas of semiotics to place and analysis shows the three main phases which place makers should concern in order to provide the basis of meaningfulness of New towns.