In recent decades, following changes in various social, cultural, economic and political fields, various types of housing have been formed. In this regard, social housing is one of the forms of responding to housing needs. Social housing is a housing that prevents the formation of social harms and creates social cohesion in the society with the possibility of mixing. Due to the fact that in Iran, the design of this type of housing proceeds with a comprehensive view, it seems necessary to realize housing with a semantic approach, due to the increasing expansion of low-quality settlements in cities, so that in such settlements it can be designed spaces according to human needs. The purpose of this article is to return to the concept of residence and explain its hidden dimensions in social housing with a semantic approach and in order to achieve design policies in order to improve the quality of this type of housing. This article is done with a qualitative approach and qualitative content analysis method in the field of architecture. Data have been collected using the consensus of three methods (library studies, observation and interview). Next, the obtained data were analyzed in the MAXQDA20 software environment, then using coding, the data were converted into concepts, categories, and then into aspects. According to the studies, four aspects including physical-structural, social-cultural, perceptual-aesthetic and environmental are the hidden aspects of living in social housing, each of which refers to a meaning of human needs. In this way, when a person can settle in a place in the real sense, that place is beyond the attention to the quantitative aspect, a representation of the attention to the aspects of his existence, which is the physical-spiritual, social, spiritual and psychological aspect, to all aspects. to meet his various needs
