Filipa Matos Wunderlich’s Temporal Urban Design: Temporality, Rhythm and Place redefines urban design as a discipline concerned not solely with spatial composition, visual legibility or formal permanence, but with the temporal aesthetics through which places are experienced, performed and culturally sustained. The book’s central argument is that every urban environment possesses a distinctive place-temporality: a sensed configuration of pace, rhythm, recurrence, pause, atmosphere, affect and social behaviour that shapes how people inhabit public space. Rather than asking only what a place looks like, Wunderlich asks “what time” a place is, thereby shifting attention towards the lived qualities that make some environments feel slow, hospitable and socially resonant, while others appear accelerated, fragmented or emotionally impoverished. This proposition emerges from a critique of contemporary metropolitan acceleration, growth-led intensification and homogenising development, which frequently erode ecological balance, social memory and cultural identity. Against such tendencies, Temporal Urban Design proposes a regenerative and interdisciplinary framework informed by philosophy, urban critical theory, sensory urbanism, musical aesthetics and research-by-design methods. Its most significant methodological contribution is urban place-rhythmanalysis, a mode of inquiry that examines how everyday rhythms—walking, lingering, commuting, resting, conversing, seasonal change, sound, light and collective ritual—compose the affective and performative identity of urban places. Drawing on Bergsonian duration, Bachelardian poetics, Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis and Deleuzian notions of refrain and territoriality, Wunderlich conceptualises rhythm as the architecture of lived time, capable of revealing the hidden temporal order of public life. The analogy with music is particularly productive, since it enables urban designers to understand places through intensity, accentuation, tonality, repetition, interruption and eurhythmia rather than through static morphology alone. The Fitzroy Square case study demonstrates this approach in practice by synthesising immersive fieldwork, spatial and temporal observation, and representational devices such as place-scores and rhythmic barcodes to disclose the square’s “rhythmic DNA”. Through this analysis, the book shows that place is never reducible to built form; it is an evolving palimpsest of sensory, social and affective temporalities. Consequently, the designer’s task is not merely to organise space efficiently, but to compose conditions for meaningful urban time: time for encounter, rest, memory, ecological continuity and civic belonging. Wunderlich’s contribution is therefore both theoretical and operative, offering a sophisticated paradigm through which urban design may resist acceleration, sustain socio-cultural rhythms and cultivate more liveable, sensorially rich and temporally distinctive cities.