ACADEMIA Letters A HUMANISTIC ADDENDUM TO URBAN DESIGN Lineu Castello Theorizing about contemporary cities as I am focusing on my research projects, is highly ap- pealing, and greatly challenging. Appealing, because it helps to keep my imagination widely open; challenging, because information technologies do not cease to feed my imagination with breaking ground innovations. Otherwise, while theorizing about contemporary cities, schol- ars agree that planet Earth already has more than seventy percent of its inhabitants embodied by urbanites – humans who live in urban environments. Some even claim this fgure suggests planet Earth has reached a millennial malaise expressed by what they consider as an anthro- pocene period – meaning Humanity is entering a new epoch in the planet’s geological history in which humans have, for the frst time, become the primary agents of change on a planetary scale. Understandably, this poses a heavily disturbance in our area of research in Architecture- Urbanism, setting signals that a thorough re-examination of the idea of city – so far, the favourite acknowledged habitat for humans on the planet – needs urgent revising. Indeed, there is all likelihood that new morphological confgurations would be welcome for mod- elling diferent patterns in urban design. Equally obvious, it seems that a previous inventory to assess the structural components that ascribe contemporaneity to a city should be processed beforehand. Adjusting the grain for the design of cities in contemporary times In general terms, a modern city is composed of diferent types of areas: gentrifed city centres, housing estates in open countryside, shantytowns, central business districts, gated communi- ties, shopping areas, industrial zones, residential suburbs, new towns, and more. Surpris- ingly, though quite distinct among themselves, these areas tend to increasingly resemble one Academia Letters, June 2021 Corresponding Author: Lineu Castello, lincastello@terra.com.br Citation: Castello, L. (2021). A HUMANISTIC ADDENDUM TO URBAN DESIGN. Academia Letters, Article 1101. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0