Urbanism and the Inspiration of the Obscure Cities: Lessons from Fiction for our Cities

Cities are not merely a collection of buildings, streets, and squares, nor are they simple backdrops where human life unfolds. They are living organisms, with their own breath and pulse, that grow, transform, fall asleep, and are reborn, holding overlapping stories like parchments rewritten over time. A true urban palimpsest, where each layer does not completely erase the previous one but coexists with it, revealing traces of past eras, echoes of political and cultural decisions, scars of catastrophes, and visions of the future. Urbanism transcends technique and planning: it is memory, it is narrative, it is imagination.

The intuition that the city possesses a soul of its own, an almost literary destiny, finds one of its most intense expressions in the Belgian comic series The Obscure Cities, created in the 1980s by François Schuiten, a trained architect and illustrator, and Benoît Peeters, a writer and visual narrative theorist. The series transports us to a parallel universe where each city is a unique entity, a character with its own identity and personality. They are not just settings; they are protagonists. Each city communicates through its form, architectural style, and social organization. Every line by Schuiten and every word by Peeters build cities that do not exist in our world but could, inviting us to look at our own cities with a more attentive, critical, and sensitive eye.

In Brüsel, for example, Schuiten and Peeters reimagine Brussels as a city in constant conflict between its Art Nouveau heritage and the pressure of a monumental and industrial modernism. It is a divided urban organism that exposes the tensions between tradition and progress. In Urbicande, one of the most emblematic volumes of the series, an infinite geometric structure mysteriously emerges and grows over the city, crossing streets, houses, and squares, radically transforming mobility and daily life. The network of Urbicande is not just a metaphor for technology and expansion; it embodies the way architecture and urban planning shape and condition human experience, creating new possibilities and new limits. In other cities of the cycle, such as Taxandria or Samaris, we find a critique of homogenization, the illusion of progress, and the forgetting of memory. The universe of The Obscure Cities functions as a distorted mirror where our urban choices are reflected, amplified and exposed in their fragility.

Looking at our real cities, we perceive the clear application of the palimpsest concept. Lisbon is a paradigmatic example: after the earthquake of 1755, the city was rebuilt under the direction of the Marquês de Pombal and his team of military engineers. A regular and rational grid, inspired by Enlightenment ideals, was superimposed on the surviving medieval city. However, this superimposition did not erase the old Lisbon: the Baixa Pombalina coexists with the hills of Alfama, Mouraria, and Castelo, establishing a constant dialogue between order and organicity, planning and improvisation. Lisbon is, therefore, a living palimpsest, where each era has left its mark and where memory resists forgetting.

Edinburgh offers another notable example: the medieval, dense, and irregular Old Town, with its narrow streets and labyrinthine alleys, coexists with the New Town, planned in the 18th century, with wide avenues and a rational geometry inspired by neoclassicism. The coexistence of these two cities in one shows that urbanism does not erase but accumulates and transforms, in a process of permanent dialogue and conflict.

The palimpsest also manifests itself in the urban atmosphere. Ghent, with its canals, narrow streets, and squares that favour close social interaction, demonstrates how the human scale generates an intimate relationship with space. Lisbon, in contrast, offers a different experience at Parque das Nações, a legacy of Expo 98: wide avenues, contemporary buildings, direct contact with the Tagus River, and a feeling of openness and light. Each city, just like in the books by Schuiten and Peeters, reveals multiple layers of experience and identity.

Today, just as in the Obscure Cities, we try out utopian and dystopian visions. Some projects seem to emerge directly from fiction. The Superkilen, in Copenhagen, designed by BIG Architects in partnership with Topotek 1 and the Superflex collective, transformed a multicultural neighbourhood into a vibrant public space where objects from more than fifty countries coexist, creating a global urban narrative, almost a city within a city. In the Middle East, The Line project, part of the NEOM initiative in Saudi Arabia and designed by Thom Mayne’s Morphosis studio, proposes a 170-kilometre linear city, car-free and powered by renewable energy: a geometric line in the desert, a utopia or dystopia yet to be confirmed? On the other side of the Atlantic, Telosa, conceptualized by entrepreneur Marc Lore and designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group, proposes to be born out of nothing in the American desert as a just, sustainable, and egalitarian city where urbanism merges with a social manifesto.
Other examples abound: Stockholm Wood City, promoted by Atrium Ljungberg, promises to be the world's largest solid wood neighbourhood; Unicorn Island, in Chengdu, by Zaha Hadid Architects, conceived as a technological innovation ecosystem; the Green River Park, in Egypt, crossing the new administrative capital with 2,500 hectares of green spaces; the monumental New Murabba, in Riyadh, whose giant cube, the Mukaab, presents itself as a city within a city; and also the Oxagon and Trojena projects, also in NEOM, which experiment with new forms of industrial and tourist cities. In Africa, Isimi Lagos, by Landwey, proposes to be the first Nigerian smart city, combining nature, technology, and well-being.
Each of these projects adds new layers to the contemporary urban imagination, confronting us with ethical, environmental, and social issues that cannot be ignored.

However, it is not always mega-projects that transform urban life. Often, change occurs through minimal, almost invisible, yet powerful gestures: true acts of urban acupuncture. Just as in traditional Chinese medicine, where pressure on specific points unblocks vital flows, small strategic interventions can regenerate the urban organism. Paris illustrates this with the "urban forests" planted by the City Council: islands of green that cool the environment, reduce pollution, and create new meeting points. In Milan, Stefano Boeri designed the Bosco Verticale, two residential buildings transformed into suspended gardens that redefined the city's landscape and became icons of global bio-architecture. In the field of research, the European project Flora Robotica proposes the fusion of plants and robotics, creating living structures that grow, adapt, and regenerate, extending urban acupuncture to a biotechnological scale.

It is in this tension between the large scale of palimpsests and the delicacy of acupuncture points that cities breathe and reinvent themselves. Sometimes with monumental gestures that redesign entire neighbourhoods, other times with subtle interventions that silently transform daily experience. Urbanism, as in the Obscure Cities, is simultaneously memory, experience, and imagination. But cities are not just created by architects and urban planners. Each of us, in our daily journeys and in the way we relate to space, contributes to their narrative.
Every square is a stage where collective history is performed, every street is a thread of memory woven with anonymous footsteps, every building is a secondary character in a larger plot. Cities are unfinished books, rewritten manuscripts, living palimpsests where hopes and disappointments are inscribed. It is up to us, as architects, urban planners, and citizens, to continue writing these narratives, aware that the true challenge lies not only in planning or building but in co-creating functional and beautiful, sustainable and human places capable of telling stories to future generations. Places that, as in the pages of fiction, will never cease to be living cities.