The practice of busking and street music performance is becoming key to the identity of cities. However, although the spatial configuration and acoustics of historic city centres are interrelated, few rigorous studies have been undertaken on this area. The paper presents the results of a quantitative and comparative analysis of the space syntax configuration and on-site sound recordings in four main open environments within the inner core of Barcelona. The aim of this work is to highlight the conflict points between outdoor acoustics and movement flows in order to inform future designs and management of those public spaces.

This work approaches the phenomenon of the outdoor terraces of bars and restaurants, analysing the role of these privately owned collective elements whose layout has shaped the urban landscape at the pavement level for more than a century, and whose presence has become essential in the streets of many cities after a pandemic. The research highlights the interest of terraces as dynamic elements of urbanity: private domains in the public space where people eat collectively; they are apparently simple units that synthesise complex conflicts between individual behaviours and property boundary conditions. The investigation shows the increasing expansion that outdoor terraces have experienced since 2020, using the cities of Barcelona and Milan as case studies. A series of GIS maps show the image of both cities before and after the pandemic, allowing us to evaluate the amount of public space allocated to terraces, measure their increase in number and surface, establish the proportions of occupation of the street and find the patterns of concentration in the public space. Finally, the article offers some policy and planning recommendations based on the research findings.

Within the framework of urban pedestrian networks, this paper presents a method of modeling the street network from the perspective of foot traffic, beyond the vehicle-focused street centerline representation approach in transportation research. A scalable method to extract the centerlines of the complete walkable urban area from its polygon representation at a one-meter resolution is discussed, using open-source tools. To evaluate the betweenness centrality in a spatially directed graph, the process is applied to the study of the ‘walkable Barcelona’, focusing on three key parameters: 1) the street width, 2) the longitudinal slope, and 3) the crosswalks connecting the sidewalk platforms. The results identify the uneven distribution of these parameters within a complex urban fabric, and the high-resolution cartography allows the identification of critical areas within the network, introducing future lines of research and applications of the workflow. This is especially relevant considering the increasing awareness of citizens and the urban agendas worldwide, aimed at improving and widening the sidewalk infrastructure that supports local activity in cities.

Beyond the binary, traditional, figure-ground reading of urban patterns, this research presents a graduated expression of the geometry of urban spaces from a perceptive point of view. This highlights the spatial relationships and introduces a new set of criteria to evaluate contemporary open spaces according to visual experience. The study produces an innovative reading of central Barcelona by mapping of Visual Clustering Coefficient, one of the parameters derived from the Visual Graph Analysis of isovists.

As Manuel de Solà-Morales noted, urbanity relies on the variety and quality of relations between things, materials and human beings. Considered as such, how are we to achieve an underground urbanity? This paper seeks to address this question through a focussed reading of a number of European urban projects from the 20th century; all of which put special care into ensuring the quality of their subterranean passageways. We begin with the carrefour à giration, which was designed by Eugène Hénard in 1906, in order to identify four fundamental attributes of this kind of urbanity: legibility, spatiality, accessibility and activity. We then continue with a qualitative analysis of the 1933 Blå Bodarna passageway designed by Tage William-Olsson and Holger Blom in Slussen (Stockholm). Looking ahead some decades later, the sequence of passages under the Vienna Ring, built during the mayoralty of Franz J. Jonas, provides a good example of how fundamental the connectivity to the underground public transport system was to the success of these spaces. Finally, the article closes with a review of those underground places found in Santiago Calatrava’s Stadelhofen Station and the Stationsplein by Manuel de Solà-Morales: from the carrefour à étages multiples to the ‘inner street’.

Over the last two decades the Slussen in Stockholm designed by Tage William-Olsson in 1935 has been the subject of an intense debate about how to update it to the contemporary needs. Tabula rasa, reconstruction or renovation? This lively discussion, however, has resulted in a final proposal granted by the expertise of an international firm but controversial for its political management, opposed to several social groups and, above all, highly problematic in terms of urban form and sustainability. The strategic location of this place, the indelible presence of its modern shape in the collective imaginary or the overwhelming force of the new paradigms of public space, have ended up provoking a range of more than twenty-five proposals in a short period of time. But while today this process seems to be settled and the demolition works of the original structure has already started, it would be still useful to draw some conclusions relevant to other similar interstitial sites in European compact cities where architecture, infrastructure, public space and landscape meet in such an intense way. Thus, this paper summarizes some of the last arguments of the on-going doctoral thesis about the recent evolution of Slussen according to four different outstanding topics: the form of place and history as an undeniable premise; the strength of tactics versus the power of the image in the process; the importance of time in the sequence of urban decision-making and, finally, the weight of urban culture as a key argument in contemporary urban transformation processes.