345urban spaces having an enclosed feeling. Entire urban dis-
tricts and localities take on the appearance of familiar inte-
riors when they constitute spatial totalities through unifying
architectural features such as building style, scale, number of
storeys, facade details, and materials, and through identical
street paving and plantings, or through the resultant atmos-
phere. Also contributing to such effects is the identity-estab-
lishing role of a structural centre or central plaza. On the one
hand, such features mirror the common history of a locality;
manifested in them on the other is their appropriation and
utilization by specific social groups. Boundaries and distinc-
tions between urban spaces are registered not just in the form
of edges or fringes, i.e. dividing streets, landscaped strips, or
the edges of slopes, and to structural shifts within a devel-
opment, but also through variations in the total atmosphere,
with its typical odours and noises from buildings and on the
street.
The interdependency between mass and void is more de-
cisive in the shaping of urban space than for the individual
house. The degree to which a public building, for example, is
set off as an incisive figure in relation to the empty space sur-
rounding it, or is interwoven with the urban texture, depends
on the figure/ground relationship between body and space.
Clearly, as in the case of Giambattista Nolli’s plan for Rome
of 1748, some public outdoor spaces are by no means infe-
rior to buildings and (semi)public interiors when it comes to
gestalt qualities and > enclosedness, and are hence able to
function as spatial containers for public life.
In contradistinction to a spatial figure or body figure that
is simply detached from its background, an ambiguous figure/
ground relationship or graded transition between building
mass and public space allows a > space-body continuum to
emerge, together with a diversity of > intermediate spaces and
graduated possibilities for stationary activity or movement. In
Modernist urban planning, however, the free positioning of
architectural volumes largely confines amenity qualities in the