It has long been said that cities have transformed, are transforming or will transform. Cities have always been dynamic entities and alive in their own way, constantly in evolution or involution, developing or declining, expanding or in the process of decay. Globalisation makes it possible for us to affirm that there is no single model, but countless models of cities, linked to the territory, economy, culture, history and, above all, to the various forms of mobility, both physical and social, where thousands of people have come together over time in search of better living conditions, housing, coexistence and work, in other words, the city.

Urban places differing in size, geographic location, history and culture are now characterised by widespread mobility and differing behaviour of inhabitants and external visitors. The world's population is becoming increasingly clustered in large cities, which confirms that people prefer to “stay together”, whether they like it or not. Hence the need to structure new spaces and consequently reinterpret areas and or buildings and architecture to be restored, valorised, integrated “with” the new and “between” the existing to improve the proposals and services for citizens.

There is an increasingly shared need to experience the city through places that can be identified and used by everyone, individuals and communities. Designers are now called upon to characterise and personalise urban spaces, neighbourhoods and their architecture by designing the interior and the exterior, which are increasingly interconnected, where services, their mode of delivery and communication form the main part in close contact with the inhabitant and communities. Today, classical urbanism must deal with a number of disciplines specific not only to architecture and design but also the humanities, including sociology and philosophy. Consequently, today's “design approach” is focused on people and communities. This requires the architect designer to understand and identify the intended users, their status, their values, their cultural level - in short, their lifestyle - and to propose solutions that are qualified, comprehensible and accepted by them.

From the cities developed around the historical centres, symbols of power and economies, urban areas are changing according to the quality of life of their inhabitants, where lifestyles and social relations are increasingly interconnected fluidly and on different scales. The criteria, which are at the basis of the choice of a home, have changed accordingly. From the traditional “quantitative” values of a project - housing sizes and square metres - a network of values linked to the quality of living and housing and related spaces, such as wellbeing and the safety of the neighbourhood, places and areas, the availability of indoor and outdoor common spaces to be shared and managed within the new communities and neighbourhoods, have now been added.

Today, urban liveability passes through the pleasantness of places, the welcome, ease of access and inclusiveness of public spaces, and contributes to creating social cohesion, just as the presence and integration of public greenery in the urban context, all of which creates and consolidates an identity and recognisability of places. This is slowly creating a new mindset among citizens and the affirmation of a civic sense and the sharing of solutions and attitudes, such as in the case of the experimental social housing projects in Italy and around the world, the new squares, meeting places and aggregation places, relating to the territory, people's traditions and cultures, and new standards of living. In concrete terms, when one speaks of the “15-minute city”, which envisages short distances to reach services or locations equipped to make the city more accessible, one is speaking of a new model for relaunching the dynamics of relations between the various social elements within the new settlements by improving the management of one's daily life and fostering good neighbourly relations. In addition to offering a greater concentration of services in limited areas and ease of access by all, one consequence of this is a gradual increase in the number of cases where cars are no longer used, a useful and important factor in reducing air pollution and consequently increasing the well-being for all. A sustainable-oriented model with the major objective of reducing private car traffic. The proposal initiated by the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo in 2020, which introduced the 15-minute city model to access places and services at close range and make life easier for the population, has been adopted in many other cities and towns.

In Italy and abroad, decommissioned and degraded urban areas and places, disused and forgotten spaces, buildings known as industrial archaeology, have received attention and been designed to recover, revitalise and effectively transform them, providing new solutions for public use within cities and in the suburbs. Former factories, workshops and laboratories, historic buildings, parking areas, “non-places”, change their use to benefit urban communities made up of young people, children, the elderly, people of various social and cultural backgrounds and characteristics.

New concepts are at the basis of research projects that give identity and contemporaneity to cities by creating functional and pleasant areas integrated into the surroundings, including itineraries and emotional paths, furnishing solutions and new equipment, structured spaces and botanical displays in an outdoor continuum, so that people can enjoy areas for everyone and in every season.