The contemporary city undergoes continuous anthropic pressures and multiple crises that make it an organism in continuous transformation, which is complex to understand. The public realm and the socio-spatial dynamics at the urban scale can be an expression of this complexity when observed from the different perspectives that are integrated in urban studies and with multiple methods that deepen and foster the relational dynamics between the physical environment and those who inhabit and manage it. The understanding of urban cultures, in their multiple expressions, is realised through the interpretation of the cultural practices recorded in urban spaces, which allows for the updating of concepts in the field of social theory. Moreover, urban cultures provide an understanding of the relationships between cultural phenomena and urban transformations, to implement knowledge in the analytical phase of territorial governance processes. This issue proposes to focus on the binomial 'public space – urban cultures' to both contextualise phenomena related to distributed inequalities, conflicts, and forms of socio-spatial segregation, and to reflect and integrate forms of social innovation and processes of self-determination, the constitution of talents, tendencies and competences, which contribute to the complex transformation of the city.