Envelopes are an important topic in the study of architecture and urbanism and have a profound impact on our daily lives. They form boundaries, edges, enclosures and joints with ecological, territorial and representational functions that have social, cultural, economic, technological, environmental and political significance. Referring to warnings about capsular civilisation, this paper promotes the metaphorically telling concept of capsularity, in order to overcome terminological inconsistency as a characteristic phenomenon that denotes enclosures at different scales. It includes both capsules as small-scale cellular units on an architectural or industrial design scale - referred to as units of individual capsularity - and extended structures and territorial enclosures as manifestations of collective capsularity. Furthermore, a typology of collective capsularity is proposed. While complete and permeable envelopes entail physical spatial demarcation, diffuse envelopes are based on a technological system of control and surveillance. However, diffuse envelopes also complement both complete envelopes and permeable envelopes, forming masked capsular hybrids. After contextualising the proposed typology according to accessibility and its representation, the ambivalences of collective capsularities are considered through the lens of three selected and distinctive co-existing effects: Freedom/ Control, Reality/Simulation and Seclusion/Exclusion. These effects present the concept and associated discourse as critical, pertinent and stimulating for imagining, inventing, proposing and implementing democratic, participatory and caring urban(istic) activities. The exposed typology and narratives of antagonisms involved in the operation of capsularities propose further research, policy development and planning directed towards the decapsularisation of contemporary space and promote democratic and caring possibilities for urban living in the future.

Streets with an increasingly important place function play a significant role in the contemporary discourse on sustainable cities. The paper addresses urban streets that, observed from the urban planning perspective, have the potential to be transformed into either commercial or residential shared streets. After defining urban planning parameters identified as characteristic of shared streets, streets were quantified based on an analysis of the existing shared streets in Central Europe. By setting up distinctive scenarios that could help to detect specific types of streets, open spatial datasets were used for the mapping and identification of streets that could be transformed into shared streets. The methodology was tested on the example of the city of Maribor in Slovenia. The results of the research show that the selected urban planning parameters can help to identify streets with transformation potential, whereas the basic parameters, such as the building use and the length and width of the street, help us to better understand the urban fabric in which street spaces acquire new functions. The presented mapping method could serve as a testing tool for experts, planners, decision-makers, and the interested public to identify potential street transformations.

Architecture of minimum dwellings has been a hot topic recently. When minimum dwellings are compact, well-equipped, connected to the network, structurally, functionally and visually recognized as one thing, temporary and mobile or transportable, they may be designated as capsule architecture. Temporary by nature, these small dwellings, shelters, redesigned container units, special technological structures, parasites and other manifestations of the capsules concept encompass the logic of technological facilities with a distinct architectural expression. At the same time, it is a manifestation of the rule of sustainable design, sustainable architecture and sustainability in general. In this context, the case of small dwellings shows its difference as opposed to other sustainable architecture approaches and aesthetics. It subverts the generally sustainable approaches with exposed importance of locality within the global forces, usually relying on context - location, local culture and environmental characteristics, etc. The aesthetic regime of temporary, changeable, a-contextual and autonomous architectural structures can be regarded as an aesthetics of otherness, which relates them to the legacy of the Modern movement's existenzminimum experiments, the New Brutalism, radical experiments of the 1960s and other avantgarde and NEO-avantgarde practices of the twentieth century, but firmly placed in the context of individualized, indeterminate, dispersed and ambiguous contemporaneity.

The paper examines the phenomenon of urban envelopes, a conceptual parallel to building envelopes, which is considered an emerging theme in studies of the built environment. The term ‘envelope’ refers to various physical and non-physical occurrences in the built environment that delimit, enclose, or demarcate spatial configurations. In the first part of the paper, six distinct types of urban envelopes are identified: physical, programmatic, technological, ecological, environmental, and representational. These are defined based on a systematic literature review to clarify their form, role, and meaning in the context of contemporary cities. All six urban envelope types are formalised using ontology-building methods in Protégé and visualised through WebVOWL, producing domain-agnostic RDF/OWL models that support semantic interoperability. The results provide a concise definition of urban envelopes, which are becoming increasingly relevant in their non-physical representations, such as spaces of control (surveillance of public urban spaces), dynamic environmental and ecological phenomena (pollution, heat islands, and more), temporal or dynamic definitions of space use, and many others in the context of contemporary smart city development. The analysis of possible alignment with existing smart city-related ontologies is presented. By providing the methodology for linking urbanistic principles with data-driven smart city frameworks, the paper provides a unified methodological foundation for incorporating such emerging spatial phenomena into formal urban models.