Semiological aspects of urban maps: A case study from the Holy city of Mecca

摘要

During the last decades, the cartographic discipline has accompli shed, an electronic "tran sition" (Monmonier, 1989). Tremendous advances were made in the Cartographic design as well as in the Cartographic production. However, the overall positive develop ment provoked by map automation has taken different forms and has not come without serious pitfalls with regards to the semiological aspects of the resulting maps or graphic documents. For instance, map automation has had very little effect on the multivariate maps, the preferred tools of the planners or urban developers. These professionals working on space still need to put side by side more data on the same space, to link these data and generate a summary or to make a decision depending on all these data. In planning studies, in particular, automation has not solved the problem of traditional sketches, or master plans, even if the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have provided powerful tools to storing, handling, analyzing and visualizing data and therefore giving interesting solutions. In this research, and through some planning students' works in Jeddah, we intend to give some cartographic comments and reflections when handling several layers of data. In particular, visualization and map reading are profoundly discussed with regards to Robinson design principles to wards colors typestyles and other graphical signs (Robinson, A. H., 1952) and Bertin's theory on signs perception and on semiological aspects of maps (Bertin, J., 1999).