A semiotic approach to the landscape accounting and assessment. An application to the urban-coastal areas

One of the most relevant issues of planning in the most landscape valuable locations, especially along the coastal ones, is to define the assessment support to be performed in order to balance the preservation of the main landscape aspects, and the local economic development. By referring to the case of the water front of Syracuse (Italy), this contribution aims at defining a semiotic pattern of accounting and assessment concerning the main topics of the Sustainable Development Plan currently in force. The assessment process takes into account the connection of the multiple thematic layers grouping the different functional/symbolic land units that are characterised by a semantic link, within an assessment pattern working as a syntactic field, by highlighting the inner interactions between them. In fact, the main concern of the pattern, is to outline the axiological layout of this landscape unit by making the “facts of nature” and the “narrations of culture” worth together.