The notion of the 'urban', which encompasses a diversity of territorial configurations that are difficult to synthesise, is in practice often still reduced to a conventional representation compromised between the medieval city and the industrial city, which dominates the citizen's imagination and therefore conditions the architect's and urban planner's instrumental apparatus. The book is based on two texts that discuss the contemporary city, reflecting on and proposing urban planning tools and principles for understanding it, hopefully contributing to the exercise of planning/design, and calling for recognition of an urban reality that has not yet been recognised as a specific 'figure', either among architects/urban planners or by the public bodies responsible for land use planning.