From the very origins of the city, human scale forged physical environment and imaginaries about built urban form. From the sinuous streets of medieval towns ingeniously adapted to human walking, to Haussmannian boulevards in industrialized Europe, human movement and practices, structure the matrices of public space infrastructure. The question of human scale was however underlined -in a more conscious way- among urban studies and humanities mostly after the second world war in a context of international criticism towards Modern Movement’s rigidity and remoteness from the scale of senses and perceptions of the individual. The quest to return to the city center and revisit values of walking in historical nuclei, marked a turn that will ultimately transform objectives and priorities in urban planning in the following years. Social sciences will nourish the debate by highlighting the imminent role of human walking and experience while studying the city. As a result, new methods of observation, mapping, analysis of daily practices within collective spaces have emerged and sow the ground for the development of new disciplinary approaches, focusing on emotions or atmospheres. The paper is structured as follows. In the first part, we retrace the evolution of the concept of ‘human scale’ within planning and design principles emerged after World War II. In a second part, we aim to examine – drawing on three case studies- the imminent role that walking has in actual debate on public space’s adaptability towards future crisis and investigate its unique characteristic as an urban practice weaving together human body experience, physical space and social interaction. Through direct observations and in situ interviews in three public spaces in Milano, the paper proposes to re-approach ‘human scale’ not as prerequisite in design process but rather as a robust tool (both for planners and citizens) of negotiating plural forms of urbanity in a global context of transition.