All through the eighties and nineties Profumo continued, with increasing enthusiasm, to collaborate in city projects, directly related to his former artistic activity. His interest in the chromatic combinations and in the effects of light on both the plaster finishes of the houses and the landscape, already present in his artistic research in the fifties, now found an outlet in the renovation of historical buildings and, above all, in urban requalification projects: from the Galleria Mazzini in the Genoa historical centre to council blocks of flats in the Quarto area, to single buildings in Via Nizza, corso Carbonara, corso Armellini and corso Solferino. In line with the most intelligent post-modern criticism of Modernist building with no history and no ties to the territory, the use of colour became an instrument to link the single building as well as the whole district to the geographical and historical reality to which they belonged and, above all, to better, with very little expense, the quality and liveability of a building for those who lived there. It is significant that, in those years, Profumo produced some paintings representing imaginary urban landscapes.

The size, subject and colours of these paintings recall the Sienese frescoes, from Simone Martini's to Ambrogio Lorenzetti's, depicting colourful medieval towns not very different from Profumo's urban projects. The artist was obviously not satisfied with his work because, between 1977 and1989, he did not exhibit his paintings, but it was, nevertheless, an interesting step in the direction of a fervent, new artistic phase.

In the second half of the decade, the urban landscapes, progressively simplified, became first volumes and then bi-dimensional geometrical planes. With the paintings exhibited in 1989 at the Punto Gallery in Genoa, the range of colours also became scantier achieving a balance made up of very slight tonal differences and faint luminescences that led the way to the last intense phase of his research.