Waiting areas as places of encounter between therapy and society

During the pandemic period it became clear that the design and planning of our home and cities had an influence on dealing with the emergency at an individual and collective level, facing the limits of the physical and social body and of their way of life. The physical body was forced to ac-quire a new spatial dimension, a new prossemic. This has emphasized the difficulties of adapta-tion for those who every day, beyond the pandemic, have to deal with a different perception of the environment that surrounds them. Rethinking public spaces is therefore fundamental both as a process of inclusion for people with an atypical sensitivity but also as a form of empathic openness to meeting others. My PhD research focuses on the spaces where this double empathy can manifest itself, within therapeutic and residential structures for people with cognitive disa-bilities and mental disorders. The studies revealed the significant role of the transition spaces between inside and outside, home and city, cities and places of care, as places of encounter be-tween therapy and society. Threshold spaces, shelter and rest, such as entrance, passage and waiting area become fundamental for people who live an atypical sensory experience with the environment, such as places and times of physical and social adaptation. Reflecting on thera-peutic design we could imagine new forms of proximity and a redistribution of care services that would guarantee different degrees of integration according to individual needs, considering de-ficiencies, as they are understood, as mere differences, manifestations of otherness.