ABSTRACT
In 1989, David Harvey, Marxist geographer and promoter of a critical geography, published a book about cultural changes and urban transformation processes. This chapter focuses on just one among its several features emerging since the 1970s: the new interest in signs and signification processes. This interest is one of the characteristic traits of the postmodern syndrome and comprises the general and particular attention to languages, signals, narrations, meanings and manifold ways of making sense in general. The chapter offers an instructive view on properties of the new window upon planning first opened some time. It is a short account of a small number of selected theories and projects from the time when the layer of signs and significations had entered architecture and urban planning. In architecture and urban design eclectic sign production and storytelling continue as the usual ways of producing differences wherever new investments in housing projects, new urban areas and touristy places are advertised and presented.
