A city acts on its inhabitants less as a stable container than as a succession of unequal exposures. Streets, squares, routes, greenery, façades, shade, services and social intensities do not operate separately; they form a variable field through which bodies move, attention is allocated, familiarity accumulates and recovery becomes more or less possible. This shifts the problem of urban well-being away from the search for a universally optimal environment. Spokane et al. make the first decisive move by disaggregating the streetscape to lot and block level: health-relevant urban form becomes legible only when measurement descends below the scale of generic neighbourhood indicators and identifies the physical features through which social processes can occur. Urrutia del Campo reaches a parallel conclusion from Madrid’s public squares.
