"Who 'owns' those?"

No one owns the town. The closest thing you get to ownership is being a resident by using your housing permit to build your house in a town that has room for you. If towns are destroyed, they are removed from the list. If the game senses a certain threshold of server load, it will create new towns to send brand new players into. All of this can be found in the streams from QGamesTV.

When the game starts you get a 15 minute tutorial. It literally tells you that islands form out of the void, has you dig into an island, and gather resources that you return to the bus stop before sending you into a town. It tells you to avoid the dark so you don't die. It tells you to pay attention to the tranceiver calls that you get because that's how the game helps you when you are having trouble. When you finish it tells you to go to the Ministry of Labor when you arrive in town, where you will earn the currency you need to buy tools and the loop starts over again.

The object of the game isn't to build things, and once again that is covered in the tutorial. Humanity has been destroyed. The Void covers the world and the only way to restore humanity is to rescue the little doll like objects from the islands and revive them in town. Also covered in the first 15 minutes.

I'm not sure what icons you are talking about specifically, but the resource icons all appear in town in the storage area right above their word and supply number. Those same symbols show up in the workbench to tell you what you need to build things.

I've typed this three times because I really don't want to be disrespectful. The game does give you everything you need to get started. The only goal is to restore humanity so far. They have already announced that there will be city goals and inter-city goals and competitions at launch.

Yes, I really do love this game, and am advocating for it from that perspective. If you want more detailed goals than just restoring humanity, talk to the towns people and do what they ask you to do. You'll earn medals (also covered in the tutorial) that will allow you to buy perks from the vending machines.

Hope that helps.