Urban space is presented as a field of meanings, where the city is not merely a built environment but a symbolic and experiential threshold. It is a place of passage and transformation—between inside and outside, self and other, the private and the public. The urban landscape mediates visibility, encounter, and interpretation: windows, thresholds, benches, plazas, and facades are not neutral objects but structures that shape perception, social behavior, and the articulation of identity. Architecture thus becomes a hermeneutic device, and the city a lived text. Every element of urban design holds ethical potential. Benches invite rest and encounter; arcades shelter movement and provoke detours; thresholds frame the act of arriving or departing. The phenomenological gaze focuses on how space is inhabited, not only used. Urban design influences not just circulation, but interpretation—how we understand others, ourselves, and the city as a shared world. This vision critiques technocratic urbanism and instead defends a poetic and existential approach, in which space is a mediator of presence and relational depth. The city is not a problem to be solved, but a question to be posed. Its structures invite reflection, offering the possibility of both intimacy and otherness.
