Cities around the world are feeling increasingly homogenous and gray, so it’s nice to know there are still colorful locales where you can stumble along a hidden cobblestoned alley and take in a rainbow of color, gaze at massive murals splashed across entire neighborhoods and interpret fun artistic flourishes that tell a story about the history of the area. From Colombia to Moscow, here are 11 of the world’s brightest towns and neighborhoods, all with their own unique character.

Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, South Africa

The brightly colored homes and cobblestoned streets of Bo-Kaap, an area of Cape Town formerly known as the Malay Quarter, have a fascinating and inspiring origin. When it was first colonized by the Dutch in the late 1700s, the area’s indigenous tribes fought back, refusing to cede their land or work for the invaders. So, the Dutch kidnapped people from Malaysia, Indonesia and other parts of Africa and forced them into slavery. Most of the slaves were Muslim, and they erected several mosques in the area. Even before the emancipation of the slaves in 1834 and the arrival of more liberated slaves from other areas, Muslims began immigrating to the city, bringing their own cultural traditions with them. While they were on lease from the Dutch, the facades of these buildings were all white. After the liberation, the locals painted them in bright colors, as they remain today. Unfortunately, Bo-Kaap is falling victim to gentrification, some of its distinctive character wearing away as wealthy outsiders move in and purchase property, evicting long-term residents.

Burano, Venice

An island in the Venetian lagoon known for its beautiful traditional lacework, Burano is also one of Venice’s most colorful locales. Accessible by Venetian water bus or via a bridge from Mazzorbo, Burano is densely populated with locals as well as tourists, who flock to the island to see its vividly painted houses. It may look like a color free-for-all, but there’s actually a tightly regulated system to the rainbow, and anyone wishing to paint their home has to go through the government first and choose from a small number of permitted colors for that particular lot.

Rainbow Village, Taiwan

The appropriately named Rainbow Village in Taiwan’s Nantun District was created by former soldier Huang Yung-Fu, who grew up there and saw his once-bustling village of 1,200 homes dwindle down to just 11 by the time he returned from a stint fighting communist troops on the mainland. Developers had begun buying up the land for redevelopment, and it wasn’t long before nearly all of Huang’s neighbors had left, and he became the lone holdout in the village. In a bid to save the remaining 11 homes from demolition, he began covering them in a distinctive pattern of birds, flowers, animals and human figures. When local university students discovered Huang’s work, they campaigned to preserve the village, and it was ultimately made into a cultural area by the authorities. Now it’s a popular tourist attraction drawing in more than a million visitors every year.

Guatapé, Colombia

Guatapé is known as the most colorful town in Colombia, set on the outskirts of Medellín and bordered by a reservoir created for a hydroelectric dam. It’s not clear exactly how and why the tradition began, but at some point in the neighborhood’s history, someone decided to decorate the exterior of a building with custom millwork and illustrated cut-outs depicting the heritage or nature of the family or business inside. The trend took off, and now many of the buildings are covered in these fun little hints at the area’s past and present. Colorful shades and patterns have become such an intrinsic part of the town’s identity, even the tuk-tuks carrying tourists through its streets are decorated.

Neal’s Yard, London

Stumble into the small alleyway in London’s Covent Garden known as ‘Neal’s Yard’ and you’ll feel like you’ve found a whole different city-within-a-city. Taking its name from an old warehouse for the nearby Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, the little square is easy to miss if you don’t know about it. Many of the buildings are painted in vivid colors and decorated by murals.

Political Paint in Tirana, Albania

Prior to the 2000 election of Edi Rama as mayor, who was an artist before becoming a politician, Albania’s capital city of Tirana was looking a little worse for the wear. Hoping to help inspire a sense of pride in his constituents, Rama first painted one peeling gray building a bright sorbet orange. Then he gave another a graphic treatment in red, blue and green. Then came larger, more ambitious makeovers, radically changing the mood of the city. Soon, Rama claimed, locals were dropping less litter and crime rates fell. Though he met with resistance from other members of the European Union for his unusual project, he kept it going until many of the city’s old buildings were works of art.

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Worlds Most Colorful Neighborhoods 11 Bright Spots In Urban Landscapes

Could ‘superblocks’ help Barcelona return to its late-19th-century vision of urban utopia, clearing out the snarled streets so mini neighborhood blocks can literally breathe? The rapidly expanding Catalan city was suffocating within its medieval walls before engineer Ildefons Cerdá came up with his controversial plan to tear them down and build a gridded district called Eixample way back in the 1870s. This orderly block-based approach met with a lot of resistance when it was proposed, yet ultimately became a model for urbanization before the burgeoning density of the industrial era choked it with cars and filled its air with pollution.

The plan was for the population to be spread out equally, with green spaces, schools, markets and other necessary neighborhood functions easily accessible from every block. While it did help make Barcelona healthier at the time, each of those tiny streets has been invaded by too many cars for the city to handle, and apartment blocks have sprouted up where parks used to be. Eixample has just 1.85 meters of green space per inhabitant, compared to Amsterdam’s 87.5, and the air quality and sedentary lifestyle are leading causes of death.

Barcelona’s urban planning committee wants to reverse that with ‘superilles,’ or superblocks. First, traffic would routed to larger roads on the perimeters, with cars, trucks and scooters only allowed within each block if they belong to residents. 186 new miles of cycling lanes throughout the city will encourage biking, and an orthogonal bus network keeps public transit on main thoroughfares. Each superblock would become like its own little city, with its own character.

This new city structure would free up 160 intersections for foot traffic, events, gatherings and other community-based purposes. The process is being conducted through gradual changes utilizing existing infrastructure, starting with nine areas. Sant Martí, a district that already hosts car-free days, will act as one of the main guinea pigs in a series of trial and error experiments the councillors call “tactical urbanism.”

“We have, as a base [for the plan], Cerdá’s Eixample, which was undermined by greed,” says Salvador Rueda, director of Barcelona’s urban ecology agency. “What was green in the plan was slowly overtaken and built on. And then, when cars arrived, they slowly overtook more and more space… We want to reclaim those green spaces and that can only be done through a drastic mobility change.”

If you long for the days when everyone in the neighborhood knew each other’s names – and business – you’ll either be delighted or horrified by Nextdoor, an app that lets you get to know your neighbors without ever actually talking to them. The app offers a private social network accessible only to those in a certain neighborhood so you can invite people to social events, find babysitters, organize a neighborhood watch or locate a lost pet.

Nextdoor can be accessed through the mobile app or on the web, with over 17,000 neighborhoods currently in its database. The idea is to connect with your neighbors to share important local information, goods and recommendations. Participants can discuss suspicious activity, share numbers for reliable plumbers, notify each other of special local events or report found items like wallets and keys. Every neighbor has to sign in with their real name and verify their address.

In an age when most people communicate through Facebook and Twitter, and nearly all of us have smart phones semi-permanently glued to our palms, apps like Nextdoor can re-forge the connection between neighbors that has degraded over time.

Some may mourn the loss of real, face-to-face interactions between neighbors, and fear that apps like Nextdoor will make it worse – but how else can you get to know the recluse on the hill who’s averse to barbecues but acutely interested in the identity of a local mail thief? Online neighborhood communities could be particularly helpful in emergency situations, as well. Check it out at Nextdoor.com.

When a tornado comes blowing through, you can sit vulnerable in a flimsy wooden box, or you can be like a turtle, pulling its head and limbs into its impervious shell. Turtles were among the inspirations for a tornado-proof suburb concept by Ted Givens of 10 Design in Hong Kong. Entitled ‘Erupting Stability’, the concept explores ways to apply kinetic design to architecture to provide safe shelter in unsafe environments.

Assessing the damaging forces of tornadoes and high-velocity winds, 10 Design created a plan for a neighborhood that features futuristic pod-like homes that descend into the ground when threatening storms approach.

The homes are on hydraulic levers that help the homes descend into the ground and re-emerge when the danger is past. According to Givens, enabling a house to respond to its environment is somewhere “between garage doors, flowers, and the survival mentality of a turtle.”

The hydraulic levers also control the outer skin of the buildings, which can change in response to environmental conditions like high-speed winds. Acting as a passive weather barrier, it consists of clear insulation between two layers of kevlar that allow light to penetrate into the interior spaces.

The response of the building itself and the entire neighborhood – which can collapse in seconds in response to warning sirens indicating extreme weather threats – is designed to mimic the way a living organism reacts in the same situation. The community has a collective response, behaving as a singular organism, passively protecting itself from harm. Givens is currently developing a prototype in collaboration with a group of ship builders.

The carefully-crafted streets and avenues of the suburban neighborhood rarely strike anyone as artistic, though they do demonstrate a certain orderly attractiveness. The artwork of Ross Racine takes the suburban landscape to a place it’s never before been: the realm of fine art.

(all images via: Ross Racine)

Racine creates fictional suburban layouts, giving them each the kind of detail and symmetry that one expects to see in an actual neighborhood aerial photograph. Lovely little houses with perfectly landscaped yards surround clean, litter-free streets. Each community boasts an appropriately nonsensical suburban-planned-community-sounding name: Goldenwood Shores, Hickoryglen Estates, Sweetwind Junction, Stonywater Cove.

But there are notable differences between the real thing and Racine’s created worlds. While an actual neighborhood may consist of sharply-defined blocks and lazily curving cul-de-sacs, Racine’s communities feature dizzying concentric circles, impossibly jumbled street systems, insane layouts, and roads that lead nowhere.

It seems that the artist has skillfully blended real aerial neighborhood photos with his imaginary renderings of communities, but the truth is so much more impressive. Ross Racine draws all of his works digitally and freehand.

Using no photographs or scanned materials, he creates the types of suburbs he sees in his head. The neatly-lined-up homes and the lush vegetation are all directly from the artist’s mind – though he does take a measure of inspiration from Google Maps and other aerial suburban snapshots.

These idyllic little scenes are a playful examination of the way we plot out our world. The imagery is recognizable to just about everyone who has ever used a computer to look up an address or directions, but it is warped in a fun and rather loving way.

To Racine, the suburb is a type of organism. It is both abstract and deliberate; chaotic and organized; global and local. Like nature, these man-made constructs are fascinating in their complexity. And like aerial pictures of real suburbs, Racine’s fictional neighborhoods manage to be endearing yet removed enough to highlight the over-consumption that defines our modern lives.