Urban rhythms in the contemporary city

In order to describe, represent and plan the territory, some disciplines and some practices look at the city from the tower to the ground. Nowadays, it could be useful to try and change the point of view we use to design and plan towns and territories. We need to get closer to things and people, to describe the space-time life-cycle of the different kinds of people who live in a territory. In order to obtain such change of perspective I propose to analyse urban rhythms that offer a new sensitivity and some specific tools to understand contemporary cities and their peculiar problems. Such renewed sensitivity, can enrich the patterns of social and urban analysis concerning planning tools and urban projects. The chapter proposes three reasons which support a new interest in the analysis of urban rhythms and examines the access key to represent territories and the rhythms of their uses (working hours and their morphological transformations, obliged and chosen time schedules, new life and consumption styles, urban populations, everyday life, widespread mobility patterns) and the elements of urban score, as an attempt. In conclusion, the chapter underlines the reasons why such renewed sensitivity can be considered an enrichment of urban descriptions: reading the urban score helps to pay attention to the lived landscape; proposes a new way to survey the needs and the desires which are different from the traditional urban, territorial and social analysis; and combines a vision from the top and a vision from inside the city.