INVISIBLE CITIES

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities was required reading when I studied art and architecture. Some books settle into your brain and resurface when something triggers them. This one keeps coming back.

Now that I'm researching graffiti writers—interviewing them, studying their throw-ups and tags—I see a different city. Not just new marks on walls, but a system. A language operating parallel to official urban planning, written by people who refuse to wait for permission.

People call graffiti writers vandals, cavemen. But look closer: this isn't random destruction. It's spatial communication, territorial marking, aesthetic debate played out on bridges and spans. More complex than cave paintings, more urgent than commissioned murals.

What does it say about us? That we can't help but mark our surroundings—on walls, on our own skin. That some people will always write outside the lines, literally. That cities are never just what planners intend but what inhabitants inscribe.

I imagine someone arriving after we've all left Earth, trying to read these layered marks. What would they conclude? That we had official culture in museums and unauthorized culture on the streets, and the unauthorized one was more alive?

The scars on the surface tell you what's happening in the gut of things.

 Photo: Micawber™ @Roffa ( @__micawber__ )