Ph.D
Mrs Mohammadi Maryam will present his Ph.D thesis on " Defining the Coding Principles of Cultural Sustainable
Urbanscape Using Semiotics Approach
Abstract
Reviewing the literature on
urban design's theories indicates that management of Urbanscape is one of the
most important goals in urban design. Urbanscape, due to its essence, character
and dimensions, is considered as a territory for emergence of place identity
and meaning. Therefore this concept presented the social and cultural values
and characteristics of a city and indicates the socio-political, economic and
cultural characteristics of the society. Urbanscape, as one of the most
important urban dimensions is a tangible level of a city which users are connected
with it and through this connection they can read and understand the city.
Despite its importance in creating place identity, studies of existing trends show
that meaning and identity of Urbanscape is fading away at different scales,
leaving it without a distinctive characteristic. The aim of this research is to
define the principles and methods involved in coding a sustainable cultural
urbanscape which leads to legibility and finally create a place identity containing
social and cultural values. For this purpose, first, theoretical framework and
selected approaches are defined for achieving the identity in urbanscape.
Investigations show that a cultural sustainability approach with the aim of
cultural and social identity could be applicable. In other words this
theoretical framework could prevent creating a spatial or non-spatial
Urbanscape.
Semiotics is adopted as the
theoretical approach to define an appropriate method for coding the Urbanscape.
This approach could be used here considering the dualistic relationship between
subjectivism and objectivism which is revealed through the concepts of signs
and codes. For the purpose of this research which is defining an appropriate
method (adaptive or collaborative coding) and principles of coding, the first
step is to determine the various codes and signifiers for urbanscape. Here the
semantic, aesthetical and functional dimensions of urbanscape are explored. The
case for study is the everyday's urbanscape at the neighborhood scale.
Therefore at first, the cases are chosen through their contrast in
Scio-cultural characteristics of Cheshmeh Neighborhood is selected as an example
of "Ego" ("self") which contains cultural character and
Golestan Neighborhood as an example of "Other" lacking cultural
character. For testing the hypothesis through ideas of experts and neighbors,
the data was gathered Using Delphi Technique and Questionnaire Forms. For
analyzing the qualitative and quantitative data, the SPSS software is used.
Through analyzing the expert's data, the signs, codes, meaning in each text is
defined and through analyzing the neighbor's viewpoint, ranking the signs,
comparing the cultural characteristics of urbanscape, the cultural signs are
defined. The results show various signifiers and meanings revealed through
various texts in everyday's Urbanscape at neighborhood scale. Also the results show
the extent of the appropriateness and cultural evaluation of texts from the
viewpoint of the residents. Also it shows which one of the signifiers have
influence on the evaluation of a text as a cultural one and what are the
principles for such an evaluation. And finally the effect of individual
characteristics on cultural perceptions of the texts is explored as well.
Therefore this dissertation presents not only the coding method (collaborative
coding), but also defines the principles of coding of urbanscape at
neighborhood scale which leads to legibility.