The text explores the role of design in encouraging forms, tools and processes to innovate the space of cities proximal to people. In the perspective of contemporary challenges oriented to sustainable development, the issue of open space of the city undertakes strategic importance in determining ways of use, collective behavior, and well being. The design, through its ability to act on a dimensional scale of small and close, of habitable and lovable space, contributes to innovate things and environments, services and interfaces, producing a proximal city as a group of shared experiences for the communities that inhabit it. Through experimental actions, participatory processes, it is possible to imagine different fates, unpredictable and flexible, exposed to relationship, slowness, and narration.