This statement came to be written as an introduction to our proposal to ‘repair’ the urban design and city plan of Salerno, Italy. It was based on three sources: first, the inadequacy of town planning as an instrument to give form to the city, a proposal and experience already applied by Oriol Bohigas as city architect for Barcelona and later carried out by ourselves with the Olympic Village and Port; second, our vocation as architects to see a close relationship between the architecture of buildings and the architecture of the city so much so that many of our earlier buildings were conceived and assembled manipulating metaphors of urban reference and vice versa; third, as a result of working on urban designs in Cardiff and Breda, the text has been further modified to accommodate the different cultural problems involved in Northern European cities.