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The topic of this paper highlights the relevance of interior design for urban regeneration. The aim of the paper is to outline the role of (urban) interior design as the initiator, with its own specific know-how and tools, from which to promote processes of re-signification of public and collective spaces. It is argued that interior design activity conceived in this way enables citizens, and more generally users of those places, to activate ‘processes of use’ which are more coherent with the logic and needs of contemporary urban culture. The research is grounded in selected definitions in order to build a precise conceptual framework in which to move. This in turn has produced a series of visions and a set of operational tools able to facilitate both the intervention of the designer as conductor/mediator of the process and the community of users involved as future users of that place or environmental system.

The conjunction ‘urban + interior’ brings together two conditions which are often posed as dichotomies. Here rather than a relation of either/or – either interior or urban – the relation is one of addition, of putting together in a propositional manner. Making relations between interior and urban is not new, and especially not in the discourse of interior design and interior architecture. The writings of the philosopher Walter Benjamin are often cited in histories and theories of interiors – dynamics between interior and urban expressed in the relation between the private interior of the collector and the urban industrial city; the flâneur’s urban meanderings and outside-in gaze. Over a hundred years later, the question of how to inhabit the urban is still pertinent but the conditions are different. Delineations of private and public, spatial and temporal relations inflected by industrialisation, globalisation, migration and digital technologies have transformed interior and urban environments. The proposition of the conjunction urban + interior posed in the current issue of this journal invites consideration and experimentation in relation to questions of inhabitation in urban environments and how might the urban infiltrate interior environments. This involves not only thinking about the conjunction coming from interior design in relation to the urban but also the transformation of the interior by the urban. The photographs and writings of Mark Pimlott, addressing the issue of interior territories and the public interior, and the architectural historian Charles Rice and his work on interior urbanism are significant contemporary contributions to and examples of the criticality and potential of this conjunction.    

Background: Uremic toxins are associated with immune dysfunction and inflammation. The inadequate removal by hemodialysis (HD) of serum free light chains (FLCs) determines their accumulation. This study evaluated FLCs in HD patients, analyzing their relations with other biomarkers, such as serum high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1). Methods: FLC and HMGB1 were evaluated in a cohort of 119 HD patients. κFLC and λFLC were summated to give a combined (c) FLC concentration. Patients were followed prospectively until the end of the observation period of four years, or until the endpoint: the patient’s death. Results: cFLC values in HD patients were 244.4 (197.9–273.5) mg/L. We detected a significant reduction in CD8+ cells and a decreased CD4+/CD8+ ratio. HMGB1 levels were 94.5 (55–302) pg/mL. After multivariate analysis, cFLCs correlated with β2-microglobulin and the CD4+/CD8+ ratio. Subjects with cFLC values above 263 mg/L and with sHMGB1 values < 80 pg/mL experienced a significantly faster evolution to the endpoint (mean follow-up time to progression of 27.5 and 28.5 months, respectively; p < 0.001). After an adjusted multivariate Cox analysis, cFLCs were associated with 11% increased risk of death, whereas low sHMGB1 increased this risk by 5%. Conclusions: cFLCs and HMGB1 reflect the inflammation and immune dysfunction in HD patients representing two strong and independent risk markers of mortality.

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