Reframing the meaning and reading of place: interdisciplinary insights for urban and architectural design

This article examines how “place meaning” and “place reading” have been addressed across built-environment disciplines, with attention to their implications for urban and architectural design. Drawing on 337 WoS-indexed publications (1977–2025), the study combines keyword co-occurrence analysis, exploratory temporal keyword mapping, and qualitative interpretation to examine disciplinary distributions, conceptual associations, and recent thematic orientations. Environmental Studies and Geography account for the largest shares, followed by Sociology and Urban Studies, while Architecture, despite lower counts, offers a limited but relevant connection to design-oriented debates. The keyword co-occurrence analysis identifies a conceptual core around “place meaning”, place attachment, sense of place, identity-related terms, and place-making. In contrast, “place reading” is treated as a bounded interpretive lens that connects these meanings to spatial, cultural, symbolic, and institutional contexts. Temporal mapping suggests changing thematic visibility within the dataset, from affective–experiential and identity-related concerns toward ecological, methodological, and governance-oriented issues. Recent thematic orientations include coastal and rural contexts, participatory and local governance, aesthetic and creative practices, and model-based methods such as structural equation modeling. Overall, the article offers a structured conceptual reference for further research, while recognizing that empirical and practice-based studies are needed to translate these orientations into design- methods and applications.