In modern times, where the number of the visits of strangers has changed scale and refers to thousands of people of any ethnicity, the concept of hospitality and ownership is not confined within the barriers of a house but refers also to the city and the country succumbed into the system of globalization. Its users are invited to discover, define and interpret the site through their primary needs such as sleep, rest, eat, walk and eventually identify themselves in a heterogeneous landscape, within which structural and social diversities coexist.
The modern urban environment, falling to the system of globalization, does not entail only the elements of the local society but also those characteristics that designate it as a «global village»` the local features are lost to the multiculturalism and as a result we have uniformity in the way of our living. The citizen is asked to usurp both the local and the global cultural characteristics, to acquire images from around the world and make them a piece of his own experiences and lifestyle.
The public spaces that make up the urban area, which define and prioritize the city by giving it structure, life, diversity and meaning, become consumer goods and the entertainment and the global capital resume their role as moderators. Thus, similar urban settings are created around the world, which are familiar to themodern cosmopolitans, which are residents and visitors to each city. These urban sceneries are also spread through the circulation of intangible goods such as information, expertise and image. This gives now the possibility to familiarize ourselves with spatial entities that are away from home and help us to become world citizens, who have the ability to recognize diversity and accept the differences of foreign cities and lifestyles, as they are structures grown in intellectual space and not in the material one, thus forming the image of the person for a new global neighborhood.
Metropolitan cities and urban centers are multifunctional areas, which produce products, services and facilities not for different users. They consistently attract the interest of travelers due to the fact that they gather and condense the historical and cultural values and they have recreational facilities and developed markets. Therefore, strategies are developed for accommodating and guiding the foreign in order to meet and gain hold of the local culture, lifestyle and the city as a spatial entity. However, ethnic groups open and close their limits` in some circumstances in order to include, to assimilate and integrate, while in others to exclude and expel whatever unfamiliar to them. But when foreigners settle down into the urban area, they are invited to discover the city, adapting it to their images and templates. This creates small towns within the existing urban fabric with their own characteristics that contribute to the creation of a multicultural urban landscape.
The “reading” of the urban landscape is not bided only to the reading of its picture / image but is directly linked with its spatial organization as well. As mentioned by Kevin Lynch in his work «The image of the city», all animated beings have the ability to perceive the environment through the visual sense and create "cognitive maps" that are a combination of mental representations of all those information that a city includes (paths, edges, regions, nodes and landmarks) as well as its diagrams.
However, today the mental maps are partially contradicted by the use of technologies that provide precise images, information and mapping in an effort for a full presentation and integration of the urban fabric.
The art, in its turn, attempts the consolidation of the urban environment. First the Situationists in Paris, during the 60s, offered through their core idea, the “unitary urbanism”, the creation of "statements" throughout the city which would place in contact the human presence and integrate them into a cross-sectional situation. Today the city has the characteristics of a hybrid, transnational community , attempts to create works that will be characterized by the collective participation are needed. The art and architecture is required to contribute to the "diversity" of the memory by presenting multiple versions of the past by different social groups and individuals who coexist and share the same urban environment. So the "urban artifacts" could get a more universal character, so that each town will maintain the "special" characteristics of it, but in the same time become a city of the world, so that each resident can experience the contemporary volatile urban landscape, which is formed based on global rather than local-traditional models.
A modern intervention in the urban area could suggest a form of marches in the city, which will incorporate urban artifacts, tied to historical memory and volatile and ephemeral elements that will allow the user to interpret, identify and organize them through his individual mental perception. This will help the understanding and the intellectual ownership of public space, since all citizens will have the right of action, of reading, of the interpretation of the meanings and the identification of the urban space through the process of using and selecting the information provided by a city file, so as to finally impropriate the volatile modern urban landscape.