Painted patterns turn ordinary sidewalks and other urban surfaces into geometric artworks, creating a level of creative interaction as well as domestic intimacy in public spaces.

European artist Ali (Arthur-Louis Ignoré) takes cues from ancient decorative rug design traditions as well natural and geometric forms from other ornamental sources.

Using simple white-on-gray, the drawings themselves can be simple at times, or playful. Their contrast with monotonous paving stones and asphalt brings dull areas to life with a bit of unconventional decor.

Some span entire alleys, streets or even rooftops, reaching up to 10,000 square feet in size, and spanning cities in France, Finland, Canada and the United States.

But while these larger works are impressive, there is something simple and subversive about sketching out, using simple lines and patterns, a little cozy place-making rug on a street for all to share.

Mounting maps on walls is nothing new, but getting floor-to-ceiling wallpaper designed to fit in a wide variety of individual spaces and existing color schemes allows a lot of fresh possibilities.

Point Two Design has a collection of maps spanning 30 major global cities (and more on demand), including Seattle, London, Amsterdam, Manhattan, Tokyo and others. Land and water hues, meanwhile, can be set to enhance contrasts or blend into backgrounds.

There are two options, aimed at renters and owners, respectively — a removable vinyl version designed to stick but also come back off, as well as a more permanent suede-finish variant aimed to livening up spaces for years to come.

Bought by the square foot, the featured areas can be selected by the buyer, and cut to fit individual living spaces and selected by color to match existing painted surfaces, furniture, fixtures and other household accessories.

If you have ever opened a side door to see the lines of a parking space, or asked a passenger to get out and guide you in, you may be wondering where this simple solution has been for all your years of urban driving.

In some cases, like parallel street parking, it would be hard to implement. But in open lots or interior garages — anywhere with a wall, fence, guardrail or space for posts — it is just too obvious and easy not to do, yet too few places realize the opportunity.

In areas where it snows, these lines do a lot more than just help guide people into their final parking position — buried under fresh powder, they can represent the only way to keep a lot from devolving into a state of anarchy.

Seeming to rise up off the canvass, a viewer would be impressed to discover these swaths of paint to be two-dimensional in nature, but then further shocked to realize the material isn’t paint at all but pencil.

Australian artist Cj Hendry has an eye for hyper-realism, but in this series: instead of using it to draft convincing landscapes or portraits has turned to emulating oil paint.

Layers of carefully applied pencil slowly add depth and dimension to the flat surface, capturing the lush appearance of semi-liquid paints. The effect is so convincing the artist often includes a hand and pencil in photographs of the work to highlight the fact that what is being seen is both two-dimensional and drawn with pencils.

It is a dramatic shift from previous work by Hendry done in black and white. And going to color didn’t mean just picking one per piece, either — each of these colorful works employs a number of different colors, which is not at all obvious at a glance.

Thanks in part to heat-absorbing materials and colors, cities tend to be warmer than their natural surroundings, and in hot places with lots of dark roads like Los Angeles that can prove a serious public health hazard.The mayor has pledged to reduce temperatures in the city by 3 degrees over the next 20 years, in part by dealing with urban heat island effects in new and different ways.

As part of this promise to help make bring down temperatures for its millions of residents, LA is trying something that could dramatically change its urban landscape: repainting roads in white. The aim is to reflect rather than absorb heat and so far the results are extremely promising.

“We found that on average the area covered in CoolSeal is 10 degrees cooler than black asphalt on the same parking lot,” said Greg Spotts, the assistant director of the Bureau of Street Services for San Fernando Valley, an area with particularly severe heat problems.

It’s not just about open public spaces either: reducing exterior temperatures has impacts on adjacent interiors. Heat reductions outside and mean cooler spaces inside area homes and businesses. In turn, this can help residents and owners save on cooling costs. It also isn’t just a daytime problem: heat captured during the day is released into the night air, keeping things hotter around the clock.

The process doesn’t come cheap, however: each coat lasts for around seven years but prices out around $40,000 per linear mile. If it works, though, the cost could be offset in part by savings on other fronts, in addition to making for a more healthy metropolis all around. Meanwhile, other strategies are also in play — the city is looking to make roofs brighter, for instance, and bring more green into the mix. (via Inhabitat and L.A. Times, images by Greg Spotts and Giuseppe Milo).