Graphic Landscape in cities: decoding the identity and meaning of Chinatowns in London, Manchester, and Liverpool

With the continual growth of globalisation, urban environments are shifting towards the concept of “world cities”. Within this context, multiculturalism, pluralism, and cosmopolitanism flourish to reinvent and expand the ways we communicate with people, place, and society. Communication encompasses multi-dimensional discourses, prioritised differently across various disciplines. For example, in graphic design, visual communication often takes precedence, employing images and/or text as the communication means to convey ideas accessible to a wide audience. In semiotics, communication is understood to encompass a broader spectrum of modalities, including visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile elements. Unlike graphic design, semioticians view communication as a conditional discourse where the accessibility of meaning is subject to the receivers’ knowledge framework and the socio-geographic context of information. The contrasting perspective on communication, combined with pluralistic urban development, has inspired this research framed by the term of “Graphic Landscape” to further interpret this topic.

This research explores the semiotic dimensions of graphic design within the dynamic multicultural context of world cities. It introduces the interdisciplinary concept of Graphic Landscape as a guiding principle for this research investigation. This research aims to uncover how graphic design contributes to meaning-making, identity-making, and place-making within diverse urban communities and how social groups utilise graphic design as a communication strategy to emphasise their identities within world cities. By integrating insights from both fields of semiotics and graphic design, Graphic Landscape offers an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the socio-cultural significance of graphic communication in multicultural cities. As a result, this research affirms the semiotic potential of graphic design elements, while validating the role of graphic design in representing identity, facilitating placemaking, and solidifying social belonging within communities.

This interdisciplinary framework contributes to knowledge for both academic and societal understanding. It emphasises the semiotic potential of graphic design in fostering a meaning-making and societal-impact driven approach to reshape the impacts of graphic communication in urban contexts. It provides an innovative approach to consider how graphic design intervention and design literacy can serve as a new design instrument that can convey social identity, unite social relations, strengthen social belonging, and contribute to cultural diversity and social inclusivity in urban environments. Additionally, Graphic Landscape enriches the current semiotic multimodality framework by incorporating the semiotic potential of graphic design elements that extends the current graphic-associated “semiotic landscape” network beyond typographic considerations. The development of the Graphic Landscape framework draws from the interweaving of interdisciplinary knowledge. Semiotic theories provide a philosophical reflection to view graphic design practices as a form of signs, which is pervasive in the way urban environments function as a meaning-indexical vehicle to convey metaphorical discourses associated with given socio-geographic and socio-cultural contexts. The ‘effectiveness’ of this framework has been tested through empirical case studies conducted in three Chinatowns in London, Manchester, and Liverpool. Each case study unpacks a particular component of graphic practices, evidenced respectively through writing (linguistic and typographic perspectives), colour, and ornament communication. The data collection from the three Chinatowns involves both Chinese migrants’ and mainstream societies’ graphic practices, applied in both “public” and “private” urban settings. The three case studies respond to the research question: What can Graphic Landscape contribute to the processes of meaning-making, identity-making, and place-making within the three Chinatowns in the UK?

Visual ethnographic methods guide the overall methodological principle, leading the empirical case study procedure and subsequent visual data analysis. The developed methodological and research frameworks not only enhance the rigour and literacy of Graphic Landscape, but also endow the quality of transferability that provides a systematic guideline for visual-semiotic design research across the contexts of urban, place, culture, community, and migration studies. Overall, the findings contribute to understand the semiotic potential of graphic design and acknowledge a significant role of graphic design that (re)shapes urban environments and social discourses in multicultural societies.