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.

Architectural trends come and go, but some visions are more persistent than others, and Brutalism could have been among them. This artist asks and answers the question: what if concrete monstrosities of the 1960s and 70s had somehow won the war against the steel-and-glass towers that dominate contemporary skylines?

German digital artist Clemens Gritl has built a virtual world around this retro-futuristic vision, dubbed “A Future City from the Past”, populated with extreme forms of concrete idealism. His “super-brutalist” metropolis extrapolates the revolutionary aesthetic of this harsh material, seen for a time as representing social progress and democratic ideals in architectural form.

Through 3D modeling (exhibited as black-and-white 2D images), this series presents something that could have been seen as utopian but inevitably, with Brutalism in hindsight, feels oppressive and dystopian. His renditions are meant to look like products of a past time, capturing Modernist-worthy views of these giant-sized Brutalist creations.

“All buildings and structures are homogenic,” says the artist. “The differentiations of architectural styles and eras are eliminated and replaced by geometric structures, repetition and absolute materiality.”

“Ballard’s novel paints a dark dystopian picture — the architecture of a single residential tower becomes the driving force for mysterious changes of the tenants behaviour. Can the presence of a high-rise structure truly create such a threatening atmosphere and social tension, culminating in murder, decay, destruction and even anarchy?”

Individually, various structures recall Modernist greats as well, like a towering residential complex arrayed on piloti (columns) as envisioned and realized by Le Corbusier. But, like Corbu’s masonry towers for his idyllic cities, the results do not look particularly livable. Perhaps the portrayal is also a little unfair — after all, Corbu at least envisioned these things surrounded by green landscapes.

Artist Mathieu Tremblin has hit the streets again, expanding on his portfolio of repainted tags, turning messy walls into neat and readable ‘tag cloud’ arrays.

His past works have turned murals into blocks of color or applied copyright watermarks to urban surfaces so they will show up in photographs, but this series seems to be an audience favorite, perhaps uniquely suited to a digital age.

In most cases, he simply takes a picture, paints over the existing graffiti (which, given public works, would probably not last long anyway), then matches the relative size and color of the vanished tags but in a consistent typographical style.

One could argue he the makes dynamic surfaces of Rennes, France static rather than simply legible, but it does raise questions about the intersection of words and meaning when it comes to street tagging. The content seems lost when rendered in boring fonts rather than a stylized hand.

‘The principle of ‘Tag Clouds’ is to replace the all-over graffiti calligraphy with readable translations like the clouds of keywords which can be found on the internet,’ Tremblin says.

“It shows the analogy between the physical tag and the virtual tag, both in form (tagged wall compositions look the same as tag clouds), and in substance (like keywords which are markers of net surfing, graffiti are markers of urban drifting).”

Oddly, too, the results stand out more than the original graffiti, thanks to familiarity – our mind is so used to seeing and dismissing curvy tags, but comprehending and reading fonted text.

The golden age of hats – what George Costanza called a “bald paradise” – has long passed and along with it, so have hundreds of huge hat-making factories.

Located on the eastern shore of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York’s Byrnsville neighborhood, the Tioronda Hat Works opened in 1879 and closed (as the Merrimack Hat Company) in 1949. The brick buildings were used sporadically as warehouses over the succeeding decades and since about 2010 have been undergoing an agonizingly slow demolition. Kudos to Flickr user Ron Johnson (Ron EJ) for these exquisite photos of the former Tioronda Hat Works taken on May 5th of 2013.

Canada: America’s Hat

Hats were one of the chief reasons the European great powers sought to colonize northern regions of the New World: the place was practically overrun with beavers and beaver fur was essential for hat-making. Times and fashions change, and tri-cornered beaver fur hats are SO 18th century (or so 1966, if you’re a member of Paul Revere & the Raiders). This abandoned hat factory in Guelph, Ontario was visited by Flickr user Dave (creativephotography64) in early August of 2012. Not a hat in site, nor a single beaver. Dam.

Chillin’ In Chile

Abandoned hat factories can be found almost anywhere in the world including Villa Alemana, Chile, a few minutes drive from Valparaiso. The abandoned building above contains a host of salvageable hat-making materials and equipment though the locals appear only interested in ‘boarding on the work tables.

British Beanies

Parts of the abandoned Wilson & Stafford Hat Makers factory in Atherstone, Warwickshire, UK date back to 1828 but the company only acquired full ownership of the site in 1896. From then on it was clear sailing: Wilson & Stafford eventually became the UK’s last remaining felt hat maker before finally slipping into liquidation in 1999. The factory buildings are mostly empty these days but still exude abundant character and the redolent atmosphere of good times past. A tip of the cap to Flickr user Ben Garratt (mookie427) for these outstanding images of a factory without a cause.

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Blocked Out 10 Closed Abandoned Hat Making Factories

This abandoned barber shop triple-quartet collectively echoes with the metallic chattering of honed clippers tempered by hazy undertones of warm conversation.

Losing Your Head

(image via: Adam’s Journey)

The abandoned Richardson’s Barber Shop in Yanceyville, North Carolina, appealed to potential customers by displaying the unique motto “We need your head in our business” on the outside wall. Kudos to roving photographer Adam Prince for snapping the shop in a favorable light, or at least in favorable lighting.

(images via: CCHA and Adam’s Journey)

Evidently the snappy slogan wasn’t the best way to get ahead IN business because by the fall of 2005, Richardson’s was OUT of business. On the bright side, though the ex-clip joint is looking faded and forlorn these days the circus flyers marring its front picture window in the autumn 2005 image above weren’t a permanent addition.

Rest In La Paz

(image via: Photorator)

The conquista-door has long slammed shut at the eerily exquisite La Paz Peluqueria de Caballeros (Gentlemen’s Hairdresser) shop sleepily snuggled in a small southern Spanish city. Shaded by gently waving palm trees and lit by a lone wrought iron lantern, the soot-stained stucco-walled shop exudes an aura of timeless style highlighted by the rich patina coating the frame of its cozy, glassed-in, second floor balcony.

A REALLY Close Shave

(images via: SeaBix, Chuck_893 and Byron Serrano/Pinterest)

The well-preserved ghost town of Bannack, Montana, had a good run: it was founded in 1862 and finally abandoned in the 1970s. The former gold-mining town and territorial capitol boasted a population of around 10,000 and at least four saloons at its peak; one of which featured a one-seat barber shop in a front corner.

(image via: Chuck_893)

Legend has it that occasionally gunfights would break out among the drinkers, giving whomever was enjoying a trim at the time a close shave without the benefit of razor or cream. A tip of the hat goes to Flickr user Chuck_893 for his snap of the weather-beaten barber chair above

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Cant Be Shaved 12 Abandoned Barber Shops