What makes an open urban space habitable? The answer goes beyond formal design to how we shape streets, plazas, and everyday environments. I propose an expanded understanding of urban domesticity: seeing the city as a shared interior where care, rest, intimacy, and connection are central to urban life.W
Urban domesticity is about creating spaces where people feel welcome and dignified—where bodies of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds can rest, play, and participate. In cities driven by efficiency and spectacle, these qualities have been overlooked, yet they remain essential for mental health, social connection, and belonging.
In 1962 Aldo van Eyck wrote: “A house must be like a small city if it’s to be a real house, a city like a large house if it’s to be a real city.” This idea, echoed by Team 10, reminds us that streets and plazas can act as living rooms—spaces of encounter, care, and rest.
Drawing on strategies from interior architecture, neuroaesthetics, and play theory, I reimagine the sidewalk as a social corridor, the plaza as an urban salon, and the bench as a site of dignity and encounter.
We occupy the city, but too often we do not truly dwell in it. Urban domesticity argues for bringing the attention we give to our homes into public space—so that streets, plazas, and thresholds become places where we can belong, together.
Habitable Furniture as Micro-Urbanism
After spending more than a decade researching the intersection of buildings (immeubles) and furniture (meubles), I turned in 2020 to explore how interior architecture might transform open urban space. This inquiry builds on the concept of Petite Architecture (Rodríguez, 2014): habitable furniture capable of reshaping not only interiors but also cities. The last chapter of my book on Charlotte Perriand and Kazuyo Sejima carried the title De la silla a la ciudad—from the chair to the city.
“From the chair to the city” means designing urban environments with the same intimacy and attention as a chair—precise, relational, and sensorial. It is about detail, touch, and lived experience. A chair supports, adapts, and invites—and so should the city. What if furniture could foster urban imagination?
Furniture operates as a social invitation, where micro-gestures reimagine how we inhabit urban life. Transformation begins at the scale of use, intimacy, and atmosphere. A chair is never just an object: it is an invitation to rest, a gesture of care, a proposition for how strangers might come together. Extended, this logic becomes a room, a plaza, a city.
William H. Whyte demonstrated how the type and placement of seating shape patterns of gathering. Movable chairs, he observed, sparked longer stays and richer interactions than fixed ones. Laurie Olin, in Be Seated (2017), emphasized how details—a backrest, a patch of shade, the tilt of a seat—determine how people relate to one another. Similarly, Izaskun Chinchilla designs movable, adaptable furniture that allows people to rest, play, and connect on their own terms, encouraging shared inhabitation through flexibility.
Our project Living Chair (2025) explores this balance of intimacy and social connection, flowing with its surroundings and inspired by nature’s adaptable organisms. Chairs embrace or turn away, shaping a seating experience of movement and stillness. Its satin-finished skeleton, crafted from recycled resin composite, provides strength and flexibility, while the woven fungal mycelium skin flexes like tissue around bone, adjusting to pressure and movement. Designed for indoor and outdoor use, it integrates solar-powered extensions that glow like antennae, reinforcing its self-sustaining nature. More than seating, it is celebratory furniture, seamlessly blending with human activity and its environment.
Other projects extend this inquiry. Urban Biombo (2019), a portable, modular structure inspired by Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study, layers thresholds in urban space so that a vast plaza becomes a place to sit, pause, or simply be. Similarly, works such as Ludens Prototype (2020) and Shared Beds (2019) fold domesticity into public life. They prioritize experience over object, proposing a performative, relational architecture activated by action, perception, and play.
Urban Salons: Interiors Without Walls
In Spring 2025, I taught a studio titled Urban Salon: Furniture as Intergenerational Playground at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Inspired by the salons of 18th-century Europe—spaces that blurred private and public, feminine and intellectual, leisure and politics—the course invited students to rethink the city through the lens of interior architecture, using urban furniture as a tool to transform plazas, sidewalks, and underused corners into collective, playful environments. Madrid’s Salón del Prado offered a point of departure: not a room but a boulevard, where trees formed the ceiling, benches the sofas, and walking itself became conversation. These historic salons extended domestic rituals into urban space, becoming places to see and be seen, to flirt, converse, and linger. In this spirit, the Urban Salon was reimagined as an open-air living room for civic life, blending the comfort of the interior with the openness of the public realm.
The Urban Salon became both pedagogical experiment and spatial prototype. Rather than reducing urban life to movement or spectacle, it cultivated conditions for lingering, listening, improvisation, and inclusion. It treated furniture as invitation, shade as gathering space, and modularity as a form of hospitality. It was not a fixed form but a changing constellation that welcomed multiple bodies, voices, and stories into the city. Materials such as bamboo, textiles, inflatable plastic, and recycled paper were selected not only for their appearance but for how they shaped touch, temperature, sound, and atmosphere, transforming abstract play into embodied and affective experience.
Student projects emerged as diverse yet connected explorations of petite architecture. Urban Sensuality used elastic bands to reactivate forgotten plazas and trees, encouraging people to stretch, lean, and wrap themselves into new postures of relation. One participant observed, “We feel like animals,” a reminder of how bodily play restores connection to ourselves and to place. Living Lattice wove bamboo and biodegradable netting into a canopy of shifting shade, recalling Seurat’s park scenes while offering spontaneous settings for picnics, rest, and conversation. Urban Distortion reimagined Diego Rivera’s mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central through a kinetic bamboo pavilion submitted to the Mextropoli 2025 competition. Incorporating mirrors and fabrics inspired by Mexican puppetry, the pavilion distorted reflections, invited play with identity, and returned to its initial form after each interaction. The Hugging Wall built on Shigeru Ban’s paper architecture, adding woven textiles to create a soft, foldable structure that offered privacy without exclusion, like a portable curtain that could turn sidewalks into places of pause, intimacy, and shelter. Wanted Sound developed the Promenade of Public Orchestras, an installation that transformed sidewalks into musical instruments played by footsteps, wind, and rain, turning everyday movement into rhythm and resonance.
These prototypes blurred the lines between furniture, architecture, and infrastructure. A bench that glows, a wall that folds, a sidewalk that sings—each demonstrated how small gestures can reimagine urban life. What stood out most was the immediacy of public engagement. Elders claimed shaded corners for storytelling; children turned structures meant for rest into fortresses, tunnels, and stages. The audience transformed the work in ways students had not anticipated, proving that playful design invites participation and co-creation.
At full scale, these lessons deepened. Students discovered that building with their own hands encouraged empathy: they learned to design not only for users but with them. The Urban Salon revealed that joy, tactility, and openness can make the city feel less like infrastructure and more like home.
Lighting and Sensorial Urbanism
If furniture is how the city touches the body, lighting is how it speaks to the senses. Yet in much contemporary urban design, light is either over-engineered—harsh, uniform, surveillant—or neglected altogether. A street may be statistically safe but still inhospitable in sensory terms. Urban domesticity reclaims atmosphere as infrastructure, insisting that light, sound, texture, and temperature are not embellishments but fundamentals of public life.
This becomes especially important at night, when perception sharpens, solitude deepens, and vulnerability increases. Under these conditions, lighting must do more than illuminate: it must reassure, welcome, and dignify. In Medellín, the Light Up Urban Night initiative introduced warm-toned, solar-powered fixtures in underserved neighborhoods. The aim was not only visibility but a shift in atmosphere. The result was striking: evening gatherings increased, neighbors returned to parks, and families lingered after sunset. Lighting became a tool for social repair, making people visible to one another and to themselves.
For people with sensory sensitivities—children, elders, or neurodivergent individuals—such calibrations are crucial. Standardized lighting and acoustic clutter can overwhelm, while softer, more responsive environments provide calm and predictability. In this sense, sensorial design is inseparable from inclusion.
The work of architect Nerea Feliz underscores this. Her projects use textiles, diffused lighting, and modular thresholds to create what she calls “urban interiority”: spaces that are public yet intimate. In Soft Urban Thresholds (2021), translucent fabrics and suspended partitions carved porous zones of rest within dense environments. Feliz shows that softness is not aesthetic garnish but infrastructure, operating at the scale of sensation. By inviting touch, filtering noise, and slowing movement, her work demonstrates how atmosphere itself can become a form of care.
A softly glowing path is more than wayfinding—it is a line of connection. Sensorial design dignifies urban life by restoring a full-body relationship with space and reminding us that how we feel in a place is inseparable from whether we belong there. Materiality matters. Hard asphalt produces cities of speed and control, where people rush but rarely linger. By contrast, permeable pavements, cobblestones, and textured grounds absorb water, reduce heat, and soften the body’s relation to space. Shade is another form of care. Without trees, awnings, or canopies, plazas exclude by default. Shade, like a chair, is an invitation to stay. It allows elders, children, and caregivers to inhabit the city with dignity.
Play, Joy, and the Inclusive City
A city that makes space for play also makes space for empathy, improvisation, and belonging. Play creates encounters across differences, across generations, and across routines. Urban domesticity reclaims play as a design tool—present not only in playgrounds but in plazas, sidewalks, and gardens, where it supports community life through gestures of movement, imagination, and shared presence.
Urban challenges such as loneliness, polarization, and disconnection are not simply infrastructural but relational. Reframing play as a tool for public life addresses these conditions not by enforcing order, but by softening thresholds and opening possibilities. Whether through temporary interventions like Concéntrico or permanent works such as the Fukita Pavilion, play dissolves barriers and activates the in-between spaces of the city.
A city that plays is a city that listens. It makes room for multiple tempos—fast and slow, solitary and communal, loud and quiet. The examples explored here remind us that play does not require large budgets or permanent infrastructure. It requires intention: a willingness to design with imagination, empathy, and trust in the creative capacities of everyday users.
Play resists extractive and efficiency-driven logics. It is non-linear, excessive, and often seemingly purposeless. Yet its very inefficiency is what allows it to generate new meanings and relationships. A city that values play values people not as consumers, but as co-authors of urban experience. It supports freedom without chaos, intimacy without enclosure, and movement without displacement.
I propose a shift in perspective: from seeing play as peripheral to recognizing it as central to urban renewal. In this vision, playgrounds are not isolated destinations but distributed invitations—woven into sidewalks, walls, courtyards, and the everyday rituals of public life. The city as a playground is not childish. It is courageous. It acknowledges the emotional, social, and creative needs of its inhabitants. It blurs boundaries not to erase difference, but to encourage contact. It asks design to be sensitive, experimental, and alive to the evolving rhythms of communal life. And it reminds us that the most transformative spaces are not always the loudest, but the ones that quietly make room for joy, connection, and becoming.
“The Caring City“
In 1980, Dolores Hayden observed that most cities had been designed by men for men: long commutes, nuclear-family homes, unsafe streets, and invisible care work scattered across services. Her question—what would cities look like if they were planned around care, equity, and community?—remains urgent today.
Building on this, Izaskun Chinchilla has asked what a city organized around care would mean for contemporary life. Her 2019 workshop, The Caring City, presented at MADE LABS, highlighted how urban environments shaped by industrialization often prioritize productivity while neglecting essential human needs such as rest, free access to clean water, and non-commercial leisure.
Paris offers a striking counterexample: over a thousand public fountains—including some that provide sparkling water—quietly affirm that access to water is not a luxury but a civic right. They invite pause, refreshment, and dignity into the everyday urban landscape, showing how infrastructure itself can embody care. Similarly, the Tokyo Toilet Project reimagines restrooms as civic offerings rather than mere utilities. Seventeen public restrooms designed by leading architects transform necessity into hospitality. In Shigeru Ban’s transparent toilet, care is literally made visible: it locks into opacity, building safety through trust rather than fear—a tender, dignified urban gesture. A public toilet becomes an urban gesture of respect.
Caring cities do not erase difference; they design with it. They assume people move at different speeds, inhabit space with different senses, and arrive with different expectations. They see sidewalks not just as corridors of transit but as sites of ritual, where someone might pray, breastfeed, protest, kiss, nap, or cry. To design with these realities in mind is to affirm dignity. It is to expand the vocabulary of urbanism beyond efficiency into care.
A Manifesto for Urban Domesticity
Urban Domesticity proposes that micro-gestures—how we sit, touch, pause, and play—are where the design of urban life must begin.
As I wrote in my book: “A house is not a machine to live in or a work of art. It is a stage for life to unfold.” That is what I propose for the habitable city.
This manifesto begins at the smallest scale: the chair, the bench, the gesture. If architecture provides the backdrop, furniture is the invitation. From these micro-gestures we expand outward—toward sidewalks that feel like corridors, plazas that act as living rooms, and lighting that welcomes rather than surveils. The city becomes legible, intimate, and emotionally resonant. We no longer design only for movement or visibility, but for belonging.
Urban domesticity insists that softness, beauty, and play are not luxuries—they are infrastructure. They are relational, sensory, inclusive, and open. They work through thresholds rather than walls, through encounters rather than divisions.
A domestic public realm does not erase difference—it holds it gently. It creates plural conditions for pausing, meeting, and coexisting. It values surfaces that age with grace, atmospheres that invite touch, and rhythms that allow for wonder as well as rest. Care is not only a social act but a spatial one; it requires us to design environments that nurture presence as much as passage.
People do not live in programs. They live in moments: resting, laughing, waiting, playing, grieving, conversing. To design for these moments is to make the city habitable.
We must design not just for movement but for pause—not just for access but for delight. People don’t live in programs; they live in moments. Urban domesticity begins here: from the chair to the plaza, from the floor to the sidewalk. To make a city habitable is to design for life.
