For over a decade, WebUrbanist has featured a wide range of innovative and inspiring urban art and design projects from around the world. The website has attracted more than 500,000 subscribers and been visited over 100,000,000 times since it was launched in 2007. And while WU will remain online, we are not currently planning to publish new pieces going forward. We greatly appreciate your readership and hope you will continue to explore the site and enjoy the thousands of articles in its archives.

The main page of WebUrbanist features a curated series of resource-rich articles covering some of the site’s most popular and timeless themes — these are intended to be a jumping-off point for diving deeper into topics of interest. Or seek out specific subjects like adaptive reuse, vertical farming, cargo container architecture and space-saving design using the search box.

Kurt Kohlstedt, the founder of WebUrbanist, is currently focused on his work as a writer, editor and digital director at 99% Invisible, a radio show and website about design. With over 500,000,000 downloads to date, 99pi is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. These media projects have a lot in common, so fans of WU are encouraged to check out more articles on 99pi and subscribe to the show.

Kurt was a big fan of 99pi long before joining the show in 2015 and has since become a regular voice on the podcast. He has gone on tour with the show, given talks and participated in panels on subjects ranging from how the invention of Kindergarten fundamentally shaped Modern art and design to the improbable rise of tree-covered skyscrapers.

In 2020, currently co-authored a National Bestselling book with 99pi host Roman Mars: The 99% Invisible City:A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design. You can also follow Kurt for semi-regular tweets about design, cities, urbanism and synanthropes.  From the start, WebUrbanist was about making urban architecture, art and design more accessible and engaging to all kinds of people. As you continue to explore the world around you: stay curious, fellow urbanists.

From the creators of WebUrbanist and 99% Invisible comes a new beautifully designed and illustrated guide to cities. In their New York Times best-selling book, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars zoom in to tell fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and drinking fountains to fire escapes and street signs. In the US, you can click here to order a copy — or check out this page for international options!

What reviewers are saying about The 99% Invisible City

“Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t see, see but don’t know. Each entry is a compact, surprising story, a thought piece, an invitation to marvel. Together, they are almost transformative. To know why things are as they are adds a satisfying richness to daily existence. This book is terrific, just terrific.” —Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Gulp, Stiff, and Grunt

“We usually define cities in terms of their bigness, so it’s easy to forget that our daily experience of any city is made up of countless tiny, intimate encounters. Just as Jane Jacobs did fifty years ago, Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt provide a new way of seeing urban life, finding secrets and surprises behind every sewer grate, storefront, and street sign.” —Michael Bierut, design critic and author of How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World

“The 99% Invisible City brings into view the fascinating but often unnoticed worlds we walk and drive through every day, and to read it is to feel newly alive and aware of your place in the world. This book made me laugh, and it made me cry, and it reminded me to always read the plaque.” —John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars

“The 99% Invisible City is not a book, but a pair of magic glasses that transform the mundane city around you into a vibrant museum of human ingenuity.” —Justin McElroy, three-time New York Times best-selling author

“The ideal companion for city buffs, who’ll come away seeing the streets in an entirely different light.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Conversational, bite-size entries [and] beautiful tricolor illustrations ….  A field guide for anywhere.” —Booklist

“A brief review cannot do justice to such a diverse and enlightening book …. The 99% Invisible City is altogether fresh and imaginative when it comes to thinking about urban spaces.” —Kenneth T. Jackson, book reviewer for The New York Times 

Much like WebUrbanist, 99% Invisible is a big-ideas production about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive on, and sidewalks we traverse. 99pi celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with tales of exceptional designers but also everyday designs. This book will captivate devoted fans of WU and 99pi plus anyone curious about design processes, urban environments, and other unsung marvels of the world. If you’ve enjoyed WebUrbanist, you’ll love The 99% Invisible City!

Before it was abandoned in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Pripyat was a thriving Ukrainian city with a population of nearly 50,000. The relatively sudden exodus of its inhabitants left behind a physical snapshot of the times, preserved by the absence of humans intervention for fear of fallout.

Despite the dangers of returning, urban explorers have been visiting the place for years. Some photographers use cameras mounted on aerial drones to maintain a safer distance. Other in-person visitors less concerned about safety have gone in and looted old buildings. Most, though, go simply to observe, drawn to the deserted city by those mysterious forces that attract people to derelict places — embodied history, transgressive impulses and human curiosity among them.

Such dangerous or hard-to-reach abandoned places can particularly alluring, especially when their stories are compelling. Take Hashima, just one of many Japanese islands but unusually packed with old buildings. A thriving coal-mining city in times past, “Battleship Island” once had the highest population density on planet — until a drop in coal production led to its desertion. In recent years, more and more photos and videos of the place have proliferated thanks to the internet, in turn raising questions about how much to repair, restore or change it in order to make it more accessible for an increasing number of people visiting by boat.

While some architectural artifacts in remote locations like this have been left largely alone by visitors or modified simply to accommodate tourists, others have gone through generations of much more radical change. Off the coast of Great Britain, army and navy sea forts have been turned into everything from private retreats and luxury resorts to pirate radio stations and rogue micro-nations. Here, a combination of factors, including abandonment by the government and somewhat more accessible (yet still aquatic) locations have conspired to make these structures more appealing for different kinds of adaptive reuse.

Preservation, Restoration & Contention

In central locations with more people (and thus opinions) the fate of historical places has often been the subject of controversy. In many cities, preservation of a current state tends to win out. Even such a seemingly neutral position can be contentious, though, particularly when efforts to preserve are partial or seem superficial, as in the case of ‘ghost facades‘ where only thin surfaces are saved.

Rote historicism is a simplistic default that can lead to strange and unexpected results and extreme scenarios, like cities demolishing entire buildings to “preserve” the appearance of historical skylines.

In other cases, restorations are pursued, though choosing a target point of time or period can be fraught — some buildings have been changed substantially over centuries, making it challenging to decide what aspects to restore. Either way, renovations involve modifications, which can quickly divide people who crave a kind of physical authenticity from those who embrace the notion that architecture necessarily changes over time — the situation of Notre Dame after the fire illustrates the point. Supporters of extensions and additions that don’t match the original argue that visible differences will help people in the future understand what is truly old and new, while critics note that most famous old structures have already been damaged, rebuilt and changed for centuries. There is no single solution.

Ruination, Rediscovery & Reclamation

There are people, too, who think that historical ruins should simply be left alone to decay. Along those lines, many building infiltrators and urban explorers in the United States, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world where urbex is popular follow an unwritten code to leave no trace of their presence, allowing subsequent visitors to experience a disused space as they did. There is beauty in glimpsing snapshots of history and watching nature slowly reclaim a structure.

Some abandoned places endure through careful consideration and the avoidance of further damage, but many persist in their current form simply because they are less accessible in the first place — the latter status applies to many underwater towns and archaeological sites as well as underground tunnels, crypts and caverns.

Once rediscovered, though, the fates of such places depend on where they are located and current attitudes toward ruination, preservation and restoration, which continue to change over time, much like the locations in question will do … with or without further human intervention.

The word “graffiti” usually conjures images of people with spray cans illegally making murals or jotting down tags using colorful paints. A lot artistic interventions use other tools and materials, though, subverting expectations and working in (literal and legal) gray areas to create works without leaving a conventional trace. Consider, for instance, the massive deep sea monsters, jungle predators and swamp creatures of Russian illustrator Nikita Golubev that lurk in the grimy shadows on the sides and backs of trucks.

Along similar lines, this series of skulls by artist Orion was made by scrubbing car exhaust from an active tunnel. For those looking to deter street art and artists, subtractive interventions like these can be tricky to pin down. After all, Golubev and Orion are simply cleaning vehicles or public surfaces, albeit very selectively. In many cases, the end result is actually further cleaning — art like this often pushes municipalities to send out teams that then wash off entire areas to make them look consistent again.

This artistic approach draws different reactions depending on the scale and situation. Take snow calligraphy, for instance — few people seem to mind a nice message traced into the hood of their car. Artist Faust notes that virtually “everyone has an affinity for writing in the snow as a child,” so perhaps it’s also something people feel they can relate to on a more experiential level.

Reverse graffiti not only provokes different response—it also spans a variety of materials and methods and can work with greenery as well as it does with snow or grime. Some moss artists work additively, creating mixtures to apply to surfaces and thus encouraging moss to follow particular grown patterns to produce an specific result. Others, however, actively remove moss to create desired words, patterns and illustrations.

Stefaan de Croock falls into the latter category, using power-washing tools to create cityscapes and other whimsical scenes on surfaces previously covered in layers of moss. As with a lot of reverse graffiti projects, his pieces are generally temporary — the moss simply grows back in to fill the voids over time.

SpY’s work in Besancon, France, combines elements of reverse graffiti and tree sculpting. Turning topiary approaches into a mural-making technique, he shaped vines into a circular work of wall art using an elevated work platform, trimming his way toward a perfect circle.

Light art and projection bombing are even more temporary and generally even less invasive than reverse graffiti. Lighting machines aimed at buildings to create patterns or spell out messages can be targeted and disabled if they persist, but ephemeral light painting like the above work by Lichtfaktor are deployed quickly using glowsticks or other portable devices and have to be captured on camera to work, making them brilliantly elusive.

Meanwhile, if light art is about brief visibility, then hydrophobic spray art is about lasting invisibility. Both are made to be seen and not seen in particular ways, but the latter has a key ingredient that determines when a design or artwork is visible: wetness.

When the hydrophobic NeverWet spray came out, it promised to waterproof everything, but some users found they had mixed results in applying it to things like clothing and touchscreens – it discolored shoes and left a sticky film on devices. Then someone thought to create a stencil and tag sidewalks with the stuff and a new type of visible-when-wet graffiti was born. One can, of course, free-spray with it as well, but stencils help make the outcome more controlled and predictable.

The same basic artistic idea has been applied in other contexts by designers, too — selective hydrophobia can be incorporated into brick pavers or concrete sidewalks, for instance, to create patterns that change with the weather. Clever urbanists might consider ways to integrate useful messages or wayfinding elements into such projects, like arrows pointing to nearest sources of shelter in a storm. Similarly, messages that appear on surfaces that change color with temperature could be used to guide people on particularly hot or cold days.

Practical designs aside, artists continue to experiment outside of traditional material palettes with works that raise questions about visibility and invisibility. There is fun to be found at the intersections of these ideas, embodied in projects like this one by 3D artist Milane Ramsi, who combined different approaches into a single installation — a concrete pillar appears to vanish while simultaneously revealing three-dimensional lettering more reminiscent of conventional graffiti.

Additive or subtractive, vandalism has its grey areas, but what about the seemingly more straightforward removal of graffiti? Here again there are shades of gray. Some artists, like Mathieu Tremblin, paint a surface clean then write over graffiti with their own work — in his case: humorously replacing loose tags with digital-style tag clouds. That, clearly, is of a kind with what was underneath; in places where tagging is illegal, replacement tags are too.

Then there is the saga of the infamous Banksy and the so-called Gray Ghost, an anti-street artist who leaves signature splotches of gray in the wake of his graffiti removals. Some argue the Ghost’s work vandalizes art — others say it is itself art. Legally, like Banksy’s illegal murals, both artists work in a similar space, though in Banksy’s case building owners often go to great lengths to preserve his art, in part for its monetary value.

Exceptions aside, municipal laws are usually clear on painted public art and the goal is generally total graffiti erasure, though it doesn’t always work out that way. This kind of official cleanup usually draws binary responses, viewed by some as a welcome fix and by others as an act of defacement. One award-winning film, however, argues for a third point of view: graffiti removal as the ultimate next step in the progression of modern art. Despite its semi-satirical intent, The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal raises provocative questions about what constitutes street artwork in the gray areas of additive and subtractive graffiti.

The world is full of architectural fake overs, from individual facades to entire buildings designed to look like something other than what they really are. Historically, some of these disguises have been less well-intentioned than others. During World War II, Nazis gave the Red Cross access to a concentration camp but they controlled the experience, putting up false fronts to make it seem more humane. Along similarly duplicitous lines, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reportedly had workers paint the bottoms of potholes along the routes taken by foreign dignitaries to disguise the degree of road disrepair.

When President Vladimir Putin was scheduled to visit a largely abandoned town, entire vernacular facade-covering banners were hung over rundown building exteriors. Colorful faux painted walls, windows and even cats were draped over the sides of derelict structures. Some of these quirky examples may sound outdated or limited to extreme regimes, but similar trickery can be found around the world. In anticipation of an upcoming G8 summit in 2013, for instance, closed storefront windows in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland were populated with images depicting open businesses stocked with goods, an illusion set up to impress visitors.

Sometimes, subterfuge is about making something look better, a kind of economic camouflage, but it can also be about political or military concealment. In World War II, a the entire rooftop of a Seattle airplane manufacturing plant was covered with a fake suburb complete with plywood streets, sidewalks, trees and houses. This elaborate deception was erected to conceal a vital piece of wartime infrastructure, confusing potential enemy spy planes and bombers that might pass overhead. In hindsight, attacks on the American mainland might sound improbable, but in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack the people in power were taking no chances.

Many misleading designs are less elaborate but also far more prevalent than most people realize. Hiding in plain sight in cities like New York, London, Paris and Toronto, among others, some architectural facades have been used to cover up infrastructure including sewer and subway exhaust vents. In other cases, entire fake buildings have been built as shells around around facilities like electrical substations. Similar strategies have been employed to reduce the appearance of blight in cities including Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, where fake interior scenes have been applied to boarded-up windows on homes and businesses.

Not all of these fakes are meant to distort reality or create believable illusions. Test track villages in places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, are used to help study road conditions and try out new autonomous vehicle technologies.

There are also “Hogan’s Alleys” around the world — fake towns made for training police, military and other emergency personnel by setting up simulated crimes, riots and terrorist attacks in semi-realistic built environments. Some of these can be quite detailed, like Survival Town, an entire development complete with furniture and mannequins built simply to be blown in bomb tests. Whatever their particular form and intended level of deception, all of these fake places share a common designation — and so-called “Potemkin Villages” have a strangely compelling origin story.

The Original Potempkin Village

A Potempkin Village is a false front designed to cover facts with fictions, painting a better picture (literally or otherwise) over the face of a less attractive reality. The name comes from governor Grigory Potemkin who, as the story goes, wanted to impress his former lover, Russian Empress Catherine II, as she toured the Crimean countryside in the wake of war. To win her approval, he concocted one of the craziest architectural plans in history, involving the erection of entire portable villages at various locations along the way. These fake towns would be disassembled when her delegation passed by on a barge and then moved downstream along the Dnieper River to be rapidly reconstructed at the next stop on the route — the changeovers happened while the empress slept.

Thus, the same faux buildings would be seen over and over again in new contexts by her highness and other ambassadors. Potempkin’s underlings, meanwhile, would dress up and pretend to live in these places along the way. While it can be hard to disentangle facts from fantasies in this particularly peculiar history, one thing is certain: from these stories arose the idea of the “Potemkin Village,” which came to have political and economic as well as architectural meaning.

Potempkin’s story is extreme, but his motivations are relateable — he was driven by that same desire ordinary people have to make their homes a bit tidier than usual when entertaining guests or that inspires business owners to put slightly idealized versions of their wares upfront on display. The difference is arguably one of scale and degree, and his position of power and authority enabled him to take things further. In the realm of international economics, politics, business and military operations, such deceptions can indeed become massive, surreal and in rare cases are persistently maintained, even when people know a place is fake.

The World’s Biggest Facade

Perhaps the most sizable and strange contemporary example is the village of Kijong-dong, located near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. To understand this place, though, one needs to first understand the context in which it was constructed.

The Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) have effectively been at war for over 60 years. The Korean Armistice Agreement brought an end to the active hostilities of the Korean War in 1953, but it was only meant to be a temporary measure. Absent a more permanent settlement, the conflict technically remains open-ended. The resulting KMZ spans 160 miles from coast to coast and is 2.5 miles wide with the Military Demarcation Line running down the center. To this day, the border between remains one of the most militarized in the world as both sides claim the right to govern the whole Korean peninsula. Along the border, both North and South Korea maintain “peace villages,” each of which is peculiar in its own way.

On the south side, residents of Daeseong-dong live tax-free and exempt from military service. The place may seem a bit artificial, but it has real residents living out their real lives. On the north side, the situation appears much stranger — even at a glance, Kijong-dong looks conspicuously luxurious for a rural North Korean town. Interior lights turn on and off at set times while street-sweeping caretakers and other “citizens” are positioned to make it look occupied. “Farmers” show up during the day but depart at night rather than heading into one of the “buildings” where people might be expected to live.

North Korea is well known for guiding visitors through particular routes of its capital city and controlling the experience of travelers to the country, but Kijong-dong takes this kind of coercive deception to the next level, staging an entire town for display complete with a support cast and crew. However real and fake modern accounts of Potempkin’s historical efforts may be, he would presumably at least be impressed by the effort.