Space plays an important role in the way we live in cities, having direct relations in our social life, offering preconditions for the patterns of movement, encounter or restriction. In other words, the materiality of the urban built environment is agential in the production of social life and social meaning. Contrasting disciplinary perspectives on the city can be found on urban research. History, sociology and anthropology look at the built environment as a by-product of socio-economic process or as a purely representational process. On the other side, architecture and urbanism do not seek to explain the question of what material arrangements of a society have to do with quotidian practices. Space syntax is an interdisciplinary research tool which intends to facilitate the process of transdisciplinary framing for increasing scholarly interest across the humanities and social sciences in order to explore the relationship between the way cities are structured and the way they function. It is a way of researching cities to understand how social and spatial process shape space over time. The best know aspect of space syntax is a set of methods and techniques for analysing patterns of space or spatial configuration in the built environment. These methods and techniques both uncover spatial structures in cities and relates them to the way people move, stop and interact. A number of these methods have been successfully used for many researchers for more than 30 years including axial and segment analysis (for analysing patterns of street networks), visibility graph analysis or VGA (for analysing patterns of visual fields in public spaces) and spatial agents which evolved from the VGA methods (for creating virtual environments populated with pedestrian agents who have a limited form of forward-facing vision). The objective of this paper is to apply this set of methods and techniques on the study of historical city of Lisbon in order to highlight configurational patterns which are present in different periods of time. Different spatial cultures will be analysed as a result of spatial relationships based on maps and architectural drawings representing spatial layouts before and after the earthquake of 1755

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Configuration, space syntax, spatial cultures, virtual community, spatial modelling and simulation