The street represents the public space of the city by excellence, the place where the main functions defining urban life are located: residences and offices, commercial, public and cultural activities, spaces for mobility, spaces for leisure. On a formal level, quoting the modern movement, it represents the most pronounced expression of the form-function relationship, even though the invention of the automobile has made it primarily a place of mobility (mainly individual).

This ‘specialisation’ of the street as a space for mobility, has caused the loss of some of the typical characteristics of our cities, where the street was the main place for socialising and developing commercial and personal relationships. Its transformation into a mere infrastructure for mobility has degraded its essence and often, as represented in the first edition of Time To Imagine by the illustrations ‘CITY WALLS’, it represents a real physical barrier making the city hostile to a wide category of citizens who are not experiencing it as drivers.As architects and planners, leaving aside the mere standard technical solutions widespread throughout the world, what can we do to intervene on the quality of urban life and improve our streets, transforming them into quality public spaces?

Quoting Bernardo Secchi, ‘the mediation of the relation ship between the street and the individual architectures is the urban lot and the block. Their shapes and sizes constitute the first point of observation of that relationship. The street determines the shape and size of the urban lot, or at least it determines its position and accessibility. It is the results of the allotment operation, […] and it defines the perimeter of private property within which building is permitted […] It must be accessible and therefore served by a street’.

This assumption represents the design input of the second edition of Time To Imagine, whose proposals are inspired by the connection between the street and the urban lot, between public and private, with the idea of “bringing the street inside the built lot” by exploiting the existing architecture in the inner courtyards. The result of this operation is the birth of a new infrastructure whose programme will increase places for sociality and recreation, towards a vital, inclusive, safe city that transforms under-used spaces into new urban opportunities.

Let’s take the streets up!