The word non-place identifies two different aspects of the reality: spaces created in relation to sites used for transport, transit, commerce or leisure, and the relation between people and those spaces. The increasing loss of meaning of place as a recipient of social customs, historical memories and symbolic contents has led to the emergence of these non-places with provisional uses, linked to a contemporaneity which cares more about satisfying immediate consumption than sedimenting traces of culture. Indeed, places and non-places often overlap and intertwine. And in any place there is the possibility of becoming a non-place and vice versa. Starting from these premises, aim of this paper is to explore the more common examples of non-places in order to understand "if" and "how" their perception and use by people is currently changed or is changing from "non-places to intertwining places".

Urban Health and happiness are two topics which have a lot of factors in common and represent important elements for the design of contemporary urban sustainability. The origin of these concepts and the current use in the the design of place and city are the main arguments of the paper.

The paper deals with questions related to contemporary cities and competition deriving from innovation and integration topics

The term contemporary city is synonymous with a multiplicity of appellatives which are symptomatic of a territory in transformation and in a process of interpretation. Compared to the past, present-day urban conditions appear rich in differentiation with regard to the times and ways in which the city is used: in the modalities of inhabiting, working, moving and enjoying. In this framework, people and their activities are as important as the fixed elements around them and share part of the scene as co-protagonists. In this way, the city becomes a result of complex intersections created by multiple operators which modify the urban system for different reasons. With the arising of new typologies of places and the changes into the modalities of use of those already existing, cities with different urban conditions have appeared. New opportunities for socialization are created outside of consolidated urban spaces and assume different thicknesses until a dematerialization of physicalness is reached. New forms and practices of encounter - less traditional but not less full of meaning - are affirmed through a plurality of ways of appropriation of the space, creating new parts of metropolis. Railway stations are becoming places for shopping, libraries are becoming bookshops as well as shops for gadgets and restaurants; homes are transformed into places of work, cinemas into supermarkets and quiet streets into motorways. Widening of functions and conversion of uses are interweaved, creating new cultural problems. Starting from those premises, this work aims at identifying the new elements that characterize urban environments, investigating characteristics and effects on the territory with the objective of contributing to their sustainable planning and management. In this framework, the place - porous, but at the same time resistant and able to receive complex interactions - is meant as a micro-system within the city macro-system, able to make urban transformations comprehensible. New spaces of socialization, urban containers, virtual places and infrastructures, places of perceptions and territories of control - which, taken together represent the object of this study - constitute the main places which can define the contemporary city.