In his book ‘Building and Dwelling’, Richard Sennett distinguishes between ‘ville’ and ‘cité’ in current city spaces. The former is the physical actuality of the place, the latter the life that is led in that place. How ‘ville’ and ‘cité’ respond to each other is the main focus of my work. Is it possible to engineer a ‘ville’ that will condition, maybe improve, the live led in it? And how can an urban structure be designed that is open enough for the ‘cité’ to influence and change it? Working as an urbanist, I try to connect city ethnography as a frame to analyse and understand complex relationships between space and patterns of everyday life, with urbanism as a tool to offer spatial interventions, to interfere with spatial design. In my research- and design project for the Talent Development Grant of the Creative Industries Fund NL, I combined micro-storia of inhabitants and macro structures of city planning. The links between these scales often seem to be missing and become increasingly relevant. This is also reflected in my work for the Chief Government Architect in The Hague, where I collaborate with inhabitants as well as with various public institutions and stakeholders in diverse projects.