Ever since urban planners, urban designers and architects are more involved in development and transformation processes worldwide, a notable increase in their employment outside their native cultural context is observable. Most of the practices face the problem of merging with natural as well as constructed environment of the unrecognized cultures. Observable lack of awareness of the cultural differences and understanding of everyday experience of their members are often the obstacles in the process of incorporation of the design, usually prepared according to the western methodologies as well as technologies, into the non-western cities. Those methodologies nowadays are usually grounded in the new media technologies and computational principles (including advanced software). Most of them concentrate around the concepts of the “smart city” understood as an organized body, using new technologies to increase efficiency of the infrastructure, creation of the digital dimension of the city and communication interconnectivity (Azkuna, 2012, Schaffers, 2012) or the city as an area implementing activities and effectively acting institutions for knowledge management and solving problems as the key to the assessment of the intelligence (Komninos, 2008).
The nowadays and the future reality seems to have a trans-cultural nature. It is the reality of the cultural diversity immersed in (or merged with?) the scientific and technological reality. In particular activities it demands from acting institutions and subjects the ability to properly evaluate the elements constituting the sphere of trans-cultural “praxis” – cultural values as well as technological instruments - very often founded on locally differentiated life practices (both temporal and spatial). Those life practices usually express different circumstances of cultural development and cultivated heritage. Thus the adaptation of technologically grounded concepts of spatial development (like the "smart city") into cultural contexts demands primarily exploring the original spatial philosophy as well as natural environment of the particular culture. In such context it is necessary to recognize the modes of perception characteristic to the particular culture and the ways of their manifestation, usually acting as medium connecting contemporaneity with cultural resources and new technologies with existing urban tissues.