When you walk around the city “at street level” —that is, at eye level with pedestrians— abstract forms appear that compete with other more realistic images.

In this way, as if they were musical notes or sequences for an urban symphony, we see architectural elements —balconies, zebra crossings, lampposts or porches— that are half functionality, half volumetric fantasy.

Sometimes public space hides the ductile and offers up what is structured. Sometimes cities need “editorial guidelines” to democratize the way we experience them. Yet each inhabitant or each neighbourhood imagines unforeseen uses, so that the delirium about Manhattan that Rem Koolhaas propagated more than half a century ago, the spontaneity counteracting the weight of the most hardcore urbanism, does not always need its respective manifesto: in some cases, streets are laboratories in spite of themselves.

Hard lines, we might say; cement, tar, concrete and universal signs against a rather specific character of nature, a nature that tends to introduce suspicion and possibility where others see something iron-hard and authoritarian.