Urban semiotics
Encyclopedia
Urban semiotics is the study of meaning in urban form as generated by signs, symbols, and their social connotations.

Most urban semiotic theory is based on social semiotics
Social semiotics
Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice. Semiotics, as originally defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the science of the life...

, which considers social connotations, including meanings related to ideology and power structures, in addition to denotative meanings of signs. As such, urban semiotics focuses on material objects of the built environment, such as streets, squares, parks, and buildings, but also unbuilt cultural products such as building codes, planning documents, unbuilt designs, real estate advertising, and popular discourse about the city , such as architectural criticism and real estate blogs.

Theorists who take a social semiotic approach to urban semiotics define their discipline in opposition to the methods of behavioral geography
Behavioral geography
Behavioral geography is an approach to human geography that examines human behavior using a disaggregate approach. Behavioral geographers focus on the cognitive processes underlying spatial reasoning, decision making, and behavior...

, beginning with the work of Kevin Lynch
Kevin A. Lynch
Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner and author.Lynch studied at Yale University, Taliesin under Frank Lloyd Wright, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and received a Bachelor's degree in city planning from MIT in 1947...

 in The Image of the City, which they criticize for being limited by its exclusive focus on the denotative level of communication (recognition of spatial elements, such as paths, as conceptual objects), ignoring the connotative meanings associated with urban forms; instead, urban semioticians argue that urban structures often become recognizable because they have symbolic meaning beyond their functional meanings. The social semiotic approach to urban semiotics also grew out of a critique of architectural semiotics, which was perceived to be overly attached to linguistic models of semiosis and thus unable to adequately consider the social connotations of signs.

Some theorists have used semiotic models in empirical studies of the construction of meaning in urban environments. Raymond Ledrut has used questionnaires and interviews about viewers' responses to sets of photographs in order to examine the role of class in shaping mental models of the city. Martin Krampen
Martin Krampen
Martin Krampen is a leading German semiotician, semiotics Professor in Göttingen. He has worked in the field of visual semiotics and environmental perception, also as a professional artist, but he became well-known as the one who established the field of phytosemiotics , later becoming an...

 conducted studies of photograph recognition in order to discover the level of facade detail required to identify building types, and to examine the role of socioeconomic status in shaping preference for building styles.

Associated authors

Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...



Francoise Choay

Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...



M. Gottdiener

Algirdas Julien Greimas
Algirdas Julien Greimas
Algirdas Julien Greimas , known among other things for the Greimas Square, is considered, along with Roland Barthes, the most prominent of the French semioticians. With his training in linguistics, he added to the theory of signification and laid the foundations for the Paris School of Semiotics...



Martin Krampen
Martin Krampen
Martin Krampen is a leading German semiotician, semiotics Professor in Göttingen. He has worked in the field of visual semiotics and environmental perception, also as a professional artist, but he became well-known as the one who established the field of phytosemiotics , later becoming an...



Alexandros Lagopoulos

Raymond Ledrut

Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for his work on dialectics, Marxism, everyday life, cities, and space.-Biography:...


Further reading

  • Gottdiener, M. and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, eds. The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
  • Krampen, Martin. Meaning in the Urban Environment. London: Pion, 1979.
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