Among the challenges that cities will face in the postpandemic future, reconciling the sphere of the individual living with the collective one appears to be central, by acting on the backbone of public spaces through a substantial modification of its models. In this perspective,
the reflection that the contribution proposes focuses on the necessary rethinking of an intermediate scale for the design of the open spaces, and on the modalities of intervention increasingly characterized by a permanent temporality in the dynamics of transformation of urban and metropolitan systems. These are discrete and incremental practices within an uncertain horizon, not only referring to the consequences of the ongoing pandemic, which today becomes a constitutive point of reference for the design action.