Urban open space design. What to do? -- The city around: for an urban space at a walking pace -- Design of the ephemeral in urban spaces -- Reading the current cities to anticipate their changes -- Reuse of contemporary city: experience and ecology -- Atmosphere design of urban places. A scientific phenomenological approach -- Nature and anti-nature: reflections on the contemporary cityscape -- Intangible heritage of Bedouins: habitat, habitus and representations of nomadic culture -- Mapping beauty: narrating relational crossroads and interior pictures -- Semantic and architectural sounds space. Musical creativity and performance.

Through a transdisciplinary perspective, this book examines the complex urban dimension, in front of increasing density, soil consumption, abandoned places, and the recent pandemic which proved megacities particularly inadequate to provide healthy psychophysical conditions. Assuming bodily and emotional comfort as a reference horizon, it tends to inspire the design research overcoming a paradoxical binary logic that separates public and private, outside and inside, culture and nature, mind and places. The first part of the work explores built spaces and addresses sustainable strategies not only to overcome an ecologic and systemic crisis but also to improve places liveability in our contemporary city. The second part deals with our perception of aesthetic spaces, welcoming the stimuli coming from neuro-aesthetics studies on affordances and atmosphere and encouraging the intersection between interior architecture and design culture and arts. The third part examines relational spaces and how they influence human behaviour, starting from psychological, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives. The book benefits scholars and practitioners interested in interior architecture and design, as well as researchers involved in the relationship between people and places. The new challenge posed by the recent pandemic requires more than ever to rely on consciousness, culture and creativity to increase the intelligence of our surroundings, allowing our sense of belonging and improving our personal and mutual well-being.