The Secret Life of Cities: Stories of Spontaneity And Defiance

The walls of the university where I did my Master’s were once alive with scribblings of song lyrics and poetry: one would find lines of ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, graffiti of Irom Sharmila Chanu, Rohith Vemula woven into the campus walls. They were the raw pulse of student politics, serving as our canvas and bulletin board.

In my second year, the university celebrated its bicentennial. Renovations came with a coat of urgent whitewash, obliterating the student art from the walls. A silent battle ensued between the students who painted the walls overnight and the custodians who erased them with unwavering cruelty, wielding their assumed right to decide what counts as aesthetic. The walls became a site of tussle over who owns the visual grammar of the university space. Ownership was a power play, and only one side’s claim was “allowed” to matter–and needless to say, it was not the students.

Years later, when I was revisiting my college, the walls were alive again. Lines of poetry, graffiti, and song lyrics had reappeared with a dogged declaration of survival. By then, the students had reclaimed their space. This anecdote about my university walls encapsulates a struggle as old as time—who owns a space, who decides how it should look and what happens to it, and who has the last word. More often than not, these battles unfold over public architecture, owned by none, claimed by many, but controlled by a few.

Gävle Goat

Let me cite a few examples where this battle of ownership has popularly played out. There is a 43-foot-tall straw goat, first designed as part of a Christmas decoration in Gävle, Sweden, in 1966, and every year since then. What makes this goat interesting is that the supposed festive centerpiece has now become a site of creative sabotage. Bizarre as it is to believe, the goat has been burnt, destroyed, or vandalized more than 30 times. In 1976, someone ran it over with a car. In 2001, an American tourist placed a bet and burned it down. In 2004, a hacker compromised the security cameras while colluding with an arsonist who set the straw goat on fire. In 2005, the attack involved flaming arrows by people dressed as Santa Claus and Gingerbread Man. Finally, when nothing else could destroy the goat in 2023, birds showed up and pecked away its straws. If the goat survives the holiday season, it is popularly considered to be a miracle.

Every year, during the yuletide season, the live camera streaming the goat has hundreds of eager viewers (myself included) watching from different parts of the world, and often waiting for something sinister to happen to it. Now, this goat has become a battleground where a (mostly) friendly tussle between security measures and creative destruction plays out.

The Gum Wall

There’s a wall near Seattle’s Pike Place Market, tucked beside the Market Theatre, that is unlike anything a tourism brochure would intentionally brag about. It’s made of chewed gum. The tradition began in the 1990s, when theatergoers, who got bored while standing in the ticket line, began pressing their chewed gum onto the wall. Market officials tried to scrape it clean, but the gum always came back—more organized, more colourful, more stubborn—until they had no choice but to relent. Today, the site of “Gum Wall” is a sticky, rainbow-colored spectacle that is a strange fusion of art, bacteria, and rebellion. Now, there are gumball machines installed for anyone willing to stick a piece on the wall. The wall exists only because people randomly decided it should, no matter the official plan. This tug-of-war between the city’s intended use and the people’s actual use of it can be spotted easily if one knows where to look.

John Lennon Wall, Pont des Arts, and Toynbee Tiles

The Gum Wall and the Gävle Goat belong to a family of urban oddities that have escaped the control of their architects and caretakers. Prague’s John Lennon Wall began as an impromptu tribute to the late Beatle, covered with graffiti, lyrics, and political slogans during the communist era. Authorities repeatedly painted over it; each time, people covered it again. Today, it stands as a living mural, constantly being painted.

Or take the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris. No one designed it to hold thousands of padlocks, but couples began attaching “love locks” to its railings and tossing the keys into the Seine. By 2015, the locks weighed so much that parts of the bridge’s structure began to fail, forcing the city to remove them. However, the practice has now simply migrated to other bridges.

Then there are the Toynbee Tiles— messages embedded in asphalt across numerous cities in the United States, appearing without permission or explanation. They speak in riddles about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter. No one, except the maker, knows what it means. And yet they persist. Decades of rain, snow, and sun cannot erase them. Municipal cleaning crews try to scrub them away, but the tiles keep showing up. The tiles are proof that even the most mundane urban surfaces can be hijacked by defiant mystery.

What unites these stories is the way people quietly, and sometimes chaotically, organize themselves to assert ownership over the places they live or pass through. Urban planning draws clean lines and non-negotiable boundaries; human behavior chuckles while scribbling all over them. A wall is just a wall until someone decides it’s a canvas. A giant straw goat can be a holiday mascot, until destroying it becomes an annual challenge. A traffic post is just an object of utilitarian city planning—until someone slaps a witty sticker on it, making anyone who engages with it break into a smile. These sites of eruption highlight a glorious truth: a city has always, and will always, belong to its people, who uphold the casual spontaneity of the human spirit. That the caretakers of a city do not decide its fate or aesthetic, its people do. In the end, these spaces and objects are not just urban curiosities. Far they are from being touted as tourist traps. They are proof that a city’s personality isn’t set by architectural blueprints. It emerges from how people interact with it, and what they are inspired to build, mark, decorate, accept, own, or even destroy.

The walls of my university were alive once. They found a way to be alive again. I was not around to see it happen. I imagine a lot of time and energy went into the back-and-forth of painting and wiping them. But isn’t it a pity that the custodians of the world spend months trying to alter and obliterate the inevitable? Surely there’s a point here somewhere—about their inability to learn, or perhaps about the power of people united… but I rest my case.