The poleis of Western Greece provide in many perspectives a privileged observatory for the study of city formation in the Archaic period. Indeed, ‘colonial' foundations offer a complex and highly varied archaeological overview of patterns and strategies of settlement planning. The emergence and structuring of the polis determines processes of change that affect urban centers as well as the landscapes surrounding them at different scales. The range of possible outcomes of these transformations varies on the basis of the different local contexts and multiple variables, such as the nature of the functional relationships developped with the environment in which the polis is established (natural resources, morphological and hydrological features of places, connecting routes) and the strategies of interaction implemented with the socio-cultural entities present in the territory. In this ‘changing landscape', even the intermediate spaces between asty and chora offer a wide range of organization patterns, in which the concepts of ‘inside and ‘outside' sometimes interpenetrate and sometimes reflect more marked morphological and functional differences. This paper aims to propose a schematic survey of patterns and outcomes of these processes of organizing the spaces between asty and chora in the Archaic poleis of Western Greece.