The square is the city's living room.

Every piazza we have worked on started with the same question: where would you sit? Not where the architect would like to be photographed, but where a grandmother waits for the bus, where students eat lunch, where a tired walker stops in August.

The answers are always local and always specific — the shade of a particular plane tree, the warm stone of a south-facing wall, the step outside the bakery. Good urban design is mostly the patient work of protecting these places, and making a few more.

In this issue we look back at four projects, from a market square in Ravenna to a hill town that had forgotten its own streets.