Our contemporary cities are great textual containers. The presence of written elements in the public space of the city redraws a visually complex landscape, in which diverse uses and meanings are amalgamated.

Permanent inscriptions such as those that facilitate and make visible the instructions for the use and understanding of the city or that fix its memory, coexist with ephemeral messages that slip through the interstices of the everyday experience of citizens.

Writing is a very direct way of intervention on the urban landscape and constitutes the plane on which some of the tensions that arise between the diverse interests that operate on the public space considered as interface are manifested.

The control imposed by normative regulation, linked to the predominance of advertising discourses, reduces the imaginary of what can be represented graphically and immediately in the city.

In opposition to this homogeneity derived from control, there is a proliferation of other modes of individual and spontaneous writing such as graffiti, tags or stickers. In all these cases, writing is linked to its visual materiality since the urban reader is a fragmentary and instantaneous reader.

It is in this framework of reflection on the role of writing in the use and perception of public space in cities where our line of work on Speaking Architectures is situated.