Urban time policies are public policies that intervene in the time schedules and time organization that regulate human relationships at the urban level. Urban time policies were launched in Italy at the end of the 1980s. Within a span of 10 to 15 years, 170 municipalities have been involved in time-oriented projects or timetable plans, or in studies of urban social time. There has also been a diffusion into several countries of the European Union, especially in Germany and France. Now the diffusion is starting in Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. In this article, the development of urban time policies in Italy is reviewed up to the new national law of 2000. The article examines how urban and social time emerged as a new theme of public policy, and the way it has been translated into public actions. In Italy, 15 years of experience and a new national law brought urban planners, sociologists and policy makers to think over the role of these city actions and over the nature of innovation in these policies. In conclusion, the article underlines the innovative aspects of Italian urban time policies (urban and social time became a new way to examine urban transformations and a new stake for urban policies;it offered an integrated approach to planning management; experimentation has been the driver of innovation) and how urban time policies can be considered an enrichment of traditional town planning (they offered a wider problem solving articulation acting also on timetables; they provided a new concept, chronotopes, to study and design urban transformation and, ® nally, they encouraged social, political and institutional capacity-building in urban action and planning).

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The contemporary comprehensive urban planning in Iran suffers from lack of mechanisms for accountability and monitoring, as well as weak implementation. In response, in the Comprehensive Plan of Tehran, developed in 2007, evaluation and monitoring gained new significance, however, a gap remaining about temporal aspects. This article proposes some criteria of so-called time-oriented policies for evaluating planning practices, through a specific analytical framework. Despite development of theory on time-oriented approach in Europe, such an evaluative framework for plans had not been developed yet. The proposed ‘urban temporal studies framework’ consists of two main groups of attributes: surveying ‘time orders’ such as urban rhythms under descriptive part and considering major normative principles of ‘ordering time’ such as temporal equity, efficiency and institutionalisation. Using a content-analysis methodology, we have applied the proposed framework evaluating the recent Comprehensive Plan of Tehran. The results of the analysis indicate that the planning system in Tehran has mostly considered normative temporal aspects and they are mainly implicit in the plan. The frequent considerations of temporal organisation in our case clarify the strength of ‘planning in time’, occurred implicitly in this plan. On the other hand, the absence of descriptive elements in the plan notices a lack in awareness or a weak interest of planners and decision makers in Tehran about social structure of time of the city.

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Public spaces constitute a relevant part of the landscape of the ordinary city. According to the European Landscape Convention, studies and designs of public spaces, in particular of open spaces, should appropriately focus on the different users who inhabit it and recognise themselves in these spaces. In this sense, close to the traditional studies on morphological characteristics, urban materials and equipment, it is useful to explore the performances of public spaces in innovative ways. This article proposes to come back to emphasise and highlight daily life, still today forgotten as a relevant component of a good design and planning of public spaces. It underlines the importance of the gaze on the everyday and ordinary for urbanism, through some introductory experiences of designed urban spaces and some concepts, such as 'practices' and 'way of uses'. Moreover, it offers a review of different lines of studies on public life and other research interested in daily urban practices. Among these, the article focuses on rhythm and chronographic analysis, which describe practices of use, urban populations and their rhythms of presence within places. In conclusion are presented some opportunities that an adoption of the proposed approaches to everyday could bring to a better management, maintenance and planning of public spaces.