Most cities have so much in common that a generic “map of every city” can seem similarly familiar to people living in London, Paris, New York or another metropolis entirely. General types of neighborhoods aren’t the only things different cities share, though — much less obvious but pervasive are sets of codes, symbols and markings that can communicate meaning across different times and urban spaces.

Even though (or perhaps because) people drive over and walk by them every day, it is easy to overlook the rich, colorful and cryptic utility markings spray-painted onto streets and sidewalks. Like graffiti tags or hobo codes, this language of scribbled text, dots, lines and arrows may seem indecipherable at first, but lives depend on engineers, city workers and utility companies understanding what they mean.

Utility markings tell excavators working on subsurface projects where to dig and (more importantly) where not to dig. A vocabulary of symbols (with its associated grammar of colors) helps diggers steer clear of dangerous power, sewer and water lines as well as other pipes and cables.

Like any language, utility codes have evolved what one could call regional “accents” of a sort — linguistic conventions that vary from one state or country to the next. Standardization, though, is important in helping keep people safe, which is why there are often local or national rules governing what different colors and symbols represent.

Long before cities came around to the idea of utility markings, train-hopping nomads were working out similarly symbol-based systems of communication. As these travelers roamed America looking for work, particularly during the Great Depression, they learned to leave messages for one another — so-called “hobo codes.” These relatively simple symbols could help fellow travelers find good places to camp and kind people who might give them meals, for instance.

At the time, being nomadic was a mixed bag — some travelers were known as bums or tramps, disparaged for drinking or idling rather than working. The term hobo, though, was more specifically applied to those actively seeking work and willing to take on jobs others didn’t want to do — hobos were met with various degrees of caution and generosity. Many were illiterate, however, so coded symbols with intuitive meanings helped them convey messages through etched or chalked markings. The relatively discreet size and abstract shapes made these marks easy for people not in the know to overlook.

Some symbols represented fairly specific suggestions about how to behave and what to avoid. A cross, for instance, could indicate that talking about religion might help a person get free food from a particular resident. Other markings might caution hobos about heightened crackdowns on vagrants and beggars by local police. While train-jumping culture has changed, some modern travelers have attempted to digitize the idea of hobo symbols through QR codes.

Mural and graffiti art sit somewhere between officially sanctioned and illicit urban communication, depending on the location and surface being tagged. These interventions, too, have evolved a lot over the years. Definitions and genres have sprung up along the way, helpful for tracking and analyzing but also understanding different works — there are pieces, tags, stickers (or: slaps), throw-ups, stencils, heavens, blockbusters, wildstyles and more.

A piece, for instance (short for “masterpiece”) and is usually a complex and multicolored affair difficult to do illegally given the time they take to make. A blockbuster can go either way, often made using rollers and designed to cover up a surface — sometimes one that has already been tagged. A heaven, however, is generally illegal, defined by the difficulty of putting a work up high on something like the back (or front) of a highway sign or the surface of a billboard advertisement — not generally places where one can get official approval to paint.

Some typologies are pretty self-explanatory, like bubble letters or fat caps, the latter of which are usually done with wide spray tips, making them both easy to deploy and easy to read (in turn rendering them useful for get-in-and-out-quickly situations). Shadow letters can also take a bit more work, but help a tag pop off a surface, giving it a somewhat more weighty and three-dimensional appearance. Indirectly, the forms and shapes of letters and symbols tell the observer something about the artist’s intent and constraints. Graffiti can even be broken down into characters, alphabets and fonts, which an informed onlooker can use to better understand a given work.

Some artists and art fans have gone to great lengths to classify different types of graffiti, but such a task is destined to be forever incomplete — graffiti is personal and location-specific, not based on any shared font or type. But some, like artist Evan Roth, try anyway to collect, identify and compare examples of letters, creating order out of the seeming chaos of conflicting tags. He also took his project full circle by pasting up alphabets along the city blocks in which they were originally found, encouraging people to look at tags in a new light, offering temporary glimpses into the linguistic ties that bind them loosely together. With any street communication, legal or illegal, there will always be some give and take between fluid creativity and efforts to categorize, standardize and simply understand.

When the city of Toronto forcibly cleared a homeless encampment beneath a downtown section of Gardiner Expressway only to turn it over to a luxury outdoor restaurant pop-up, people paying $545 per party got prime views of unappetizing protests. “Dinner with a View” set up heated glass domes near the site of the former camp, offering a three-course meal prepared by Top Chef Canada winner René Rodriguez “in a highly unexpected setting.” Critics called it tone deaf at best, “obscene” and “dystopian” at worst. Why didn’t planners see this reaction coming?

This is revolting.

Emergency shelters are bursting at the seams and homeless people get evicted even from the OUTDOORS, all so the people who whine most about high taxes can eat *ONE* meal that costs more than a single month's rent. #topoli #raisetaxes
https://t.co/rB1uCH66wN

— Kelly Thomas (@kelwinds) April 2, 2019

In a statement, Dinner with a View stressed that their installation is located about a mile east of the dismantled homeless camp, saying “we are sympathetic to those impacted by the City’s actions and were in no way involved with the decision making process [to evict the camp.] No encampments were removed to make way for Dinner With A View.”

That didn’t stop organizers with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) from planning their own three-course meals right next to the installation, in full view of the domes, which were prepared by volunteers and served for free. Noting the “brazenness” of the city’s decision to house a luxury dining pop-up under the very same highway as the evicted camp, they called it “Dinner With a View – of the Rich.”

The conflict plays into a larger conversation around urban renewal, gentrification and the social and economic inequality that leads to homelessness in the first place. When we talk about “reclaiming public spaces,” particularly underpasses and other areas that are often occupied by people who have nowhere else to go, are we thinking enough about who’s being displaced by these projects, or what kind of domino effect they might have on the affordability of the neighborhood? When we say these areas are “disused,” what do we mean by that?

Historically, “urban renewal” has often been code for racist practices like redlining, the discriminatory displacement of black people from certain neighborhoods. Displaced people weren’t always compensated, and entire communities were razed as cities used federal money to make way for wealthier (and whiter) developments, often worsening poverty and overcrowding. The impacts of these practices are documented by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond on a website called Renewing Inequality. Today, the neighborhoods those displaced people moved into back in the ‘50s and ‘60s are frequent targets of new “urban renewal” projects, continuing the cycle.

The “reclamation” of urban spaces is often a euphemism for “cleaning up” areas where the full impact of poverty is on display, making something many of us would rather not think about impossible to ignore. In cities like San Francisco and Seattle, where the sky high cost of living and lack of adequate public services produces higher than average rates of homelessness, encampments are everywhere because people simply have nowhere else to go.

City policies that criminalize homelessness (like panhandling bans and laws against urban camping) jail people for minor offenses, making it even harder for unhoused people to gain access to affordable housing, employment and health care. Plus, public restrooms are often intentionally hard to find in cities thanks to fears that unhoused people will use them, while those same people are vilified for fulfilling a basic human need in the streets.

This is often where “hostile urbanism” comes in. Benches are designed to prevent people from getting comfortable, spikes are set into concrete beneath overpasses and sidewalks are broken up by posts and planters to disallow tents. It’s as if the people who demand and design these features think they can humiliate and terrorize unhoused people, poor people and addicts out of existence. A humane solution that wouldn’t “litter” our public spaces or force us to confront evidence of extreme inequality is actually a lot more simple: ensure that people’s basic human needs are met. Those of us who create, use and enjoy urban spaces can start by making sure new projects popping up in our neighborhoods are inclusive to every member of society.

Just as design can produce objects and structures that are intentionally hostile, it can be a powerful tool for good. It’s one thing to rehabilitate a polluted industrial site or push a city to open up urban areas that have been fenced off to prevent “undesirable activity,” and then create something the entire population of the city can enjoy. Vacant lots that developers hold hostage and liminal spaces that perhaps shouldn’t exist in the first place – like the spaces beneath noisy, polluting elevated highways – can and arguably should be subverted, whether via official or guerrilla means. But when we plan and support such projects, we should consider who might be negatively affected and how we can mitigate that harm. That might require confronting our own discomfort with poverty and inequality, and the ways in which we dehumanize other people without even realizing it. It also requires taking action.

One example of what this can look like is Montreal’s plan to address homelessness, which includes a philosophy of “social inclusion” along with housing and job assistance. The plan points out that homeless people are members of the larger community, and includes strategies and activities that invite participation in the fabric of the city. It’s not perfect, and some critics say it’s still undermined by criminalization and racism, but it’s a step in the right direction. “Community-first” projects that provide housing, support and social inclusion go a long way as well.

Not every misguided “urban revitalization” project carries such overt symbols of wealth and privilege displacing the poor as Toronto’s Dinner with a View, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a similar impact.

Top image via Dinner with a View

It seems like proposals to restore the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris came pouring in before the blaze that destroyed its spire and roof was even extinguished. Grappling with devastating damage to a historic and architectural icon, observers around the world immediately began to debate whether the cathedral should be recreated as faithfully as possible in its former image (a serious challenge, considering the contemporary lack of massive old-growth timber) or radically reimagined.

One notable proposal released by Studio NAB takes the latter approach with a visionary reconstruction symbolizing rebirth, new growth and hope for the future. The design recreates Notre Dame’s silhouette in a framework of gold-tone steel and glass, transforming the uppermost levels of the church into a lush greenhouse, an active community space and an educational facility. A new “arrow” spire would house apiaries, producing on a large scale “the honey of Notre Dame de Paris.” The rest of the cathedral beneath this new roof would remain as it has always looked and functioned.

It’s a direct rebuke of the idea that we can or should attempt to recapture the past, adapting instead and acknowledging the need to change along with the world around us.

“On this fire and in the period of crisis that the country and the world are currently going through, we have the chance to build a place of reference where conservation, enrichment of an exceptional heritage and taken into account the challenges of societies ecology and equal opportunities. Protecting the living being reintroducing biodiversity, educating consciences and being in solidarity, all are symbols, faithful to the values of France and those of the church, that we could defend and promote for this project.”

“This is the symbol of acceptance of the course of history and the metaphorical illustration that this ‘forest’ became burnt wood, can serve as a cradle to the new vegetation,” say the architects. “The design will feed the all-important conversation and add an element of reflection as to how the building could be transformed to focus on issues concerning today’s society. The greenhouse is imagined as a place to enable to professional reintegration of the poor by learning urban agriculture, horticulture and permaculture while connecting children to nature and educating them through workshops.”

It’s an interesting way to approach the problem of restoration, and one that will undoubtedly stir controversy. But Studio NAB’s proposal creates a ghostly yet optimistic memory of the lost parts of the cathedral, maintaining the silhouette to which Paris has grown so accustomed, without introducing any garishly contrasting contemporary elements. You can safely bet that proposals recalling Daniel Libeskind’s highly controversial Royal Ontario Museum Extension are forthcoming, along with calls to be far more conservative, using modern technology like engineered wood to replace the burned beams and reinforce damaged structural elements.

Though it comes early in the game, Studio NAB’s proposal will likely end up looking like a compromise between these two extremes by the time France’s competition to redesign Notre Dame selects its winner.

In Japan, an island nation, waves are symbols long found in a vast array of art, design and craft from around the country, which one author decided to systemize in a three-book series now available for free online.

Myriad ancient wave and ripple examples were carefully compiled and catalogued in black ink by little-known artist Mori Yuzan just over a hundred years ago, detailing different motifs and patterns for other creators and craftspeople to emulate

The sheer variety of waves in these volumes alone is mesmerizing, all fitting into a style yet representing various applications as borders, backgrounds and design details suitable for all sorts of applications..

These Nihonga style (Japanese painting) graphics, typically applied to Japanese washi paper with brushes, can also be applied to anything from everyday ceramics to religious objects, swords, scrolls and wall art.

Perhaps the most famous application of waves remains the Great Wave of Kanagawa, a classic image from the 1800s featuring an enormous wave threatening boats off the coast of the present-day city of Yokohama. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is more likely to be a large rogue wave. As in many of the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.

Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan ended a long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West. In turn, much Japanese art came to Europe and America and quickly gained popularity. The influence of Japanese art on Western culture became known as Japonism. Japanese woodblock prints became a source of inspiration for artists in many genres, particularly the Impressionists. Hokusai was seen as the emblematic Japanese artist and images from his prints and books influenced many different works.

The map is not the territory, but the exception also proves the rule, as in the case of this book, which samples over 1,000 different maps to deconstruct their design approaches and inspire designers through their visuals. It’s not about the territories the original maps were made to represent, but all of the different design strategies embedded in the pages of past atlases.

Kerim Bayer combined over 5,000 small map images in Map Section. “Deconstructing them really did help me personally to double down on my interest in the graphics, in reducing them to their empirical elements and appreciating them mainly for their beauty,” he explains. “Although presented in a book the size of an atlas, it contains not maps of countries but maps of the graphic devices we use to translate and produce spatial information: lines, dots, colours, symbols, illustrations, shading, text, insets, hachures, legends, grids and contours.”

At first, Bayer considered selecting the thumbnails manually, but worried that would lead to biases in the results — instead, he tapped into his collection of scientific, transit and city planning maps programatically, letting randomness work for him. “For the purpose of highlighting the graphics of the maps and providing a resource, which is the mission of the project was anyway, randomisation worked just as well, if not better.”

“I’ve been looking for a way to better relate to my own maps for a long time,” says the book’s creator. “Maps always have been a learning tool, even if I don’t necessarily fully yet understand how. They’ve also been a resource and an aide for learning a great many other things.”