Interpreting Urban Heritage in the Digital Age
Semiotic Approaches to Representation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23312296 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Silvia La Placa (0000-0001-9792-9323, University of Pavia), Justyna Borucka (0000-0003-1591-0149, Gdańsk University of Technology, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 291 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-22 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Heritage (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2571-9408 • E-ISSN: 2571-9408 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/heritage9070291 |
| OpenAlex | W7170073788 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 23 |
Starting from a semiotic understanding of the city as a stratified and continuously rewritten palimpsest, this paper investigates the relationship between urban heritage, graphic representation, and cultural translation within the current digital scenario. The study introduces and develops a theoretical framework, the “translation triangle” (TT), articulated around three mutually co-determining domains: the cognitive, concerned with the critical identification of relevant signs within the urban text; the technical–digital, concerned with their formalisation through survey instruments, three-dimensional modelling, and visualisation pipelines; and the socio-anthropological, concerned with the mediation of translated content towards its recipient. The framework is tested through two urban contexts: Pavia, Italy, and Gdańsk, Poland, different in scale and research advancement. Both demonstrate that the quality of urban heritage representation depends not solely on geometric accuracy or visual effectiveness, but on the capacity to make explicit the interpretative choices embedded in each translational act and to produce forms of knowledge that are comprehensible, interrogable, and culturally shareable. The paper concludes that every digital representation of urban heritage constitutes a semiotic act, not a neutral technical operation, and that the future of the discipline lies in constructing translations that are conscious, verifiable, and culturally grounded, capable of preserving the historical meaning of heritage without reducing it to spectacle or data infrastructure.
Cultural heritage · Identification (biology) · Meaning (existential) · Mediation · Representation (politics) · Semiotics · Urban planning · Visualization · 3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
Present Pasts
The Historic Urban Landscape
Heritage Recording and 3D Modeling with Photogrammetry and 3D Scanning
A Companion to Schopenhauer
UAVs Photogrammetry for Inner Areas Documentation
Palimpsests of power
Heritage 4.0
Visiting Heritage Sites in AR and VR
Evaluating visitor experience of digital interpretation and presentation technologies at cultural heritage sites
Visualising the past for the future
| Highly cited | No |
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