Every city has a particular layout that residents learn to navigate in a way that is specific to their routines, careers, obligations and relationships. We contend with how these cities are designed, carving out a path that is unique to us while still traveling within our own specific set of parameters. It’s like a decentralized network of nodes that we are perpetually traveling through and between.

A new series of screen printed posters by John Breznicky reduces some of the most famous urban transit systems into a series of overlapping lines. They look less like subways than they do the wiring across a microchip, or intricate constellations. By minimizing cities to these networked transit patterns it imagines the true shape of a city as being drawn by the constant motion of its residents rather than as a predetermined, static object. How often do we actually experience a city as a whole, rather than as a pattern of networks that we travel daily forming our own micro-cities that combine into the larger metropolitan area.

You can purchase the posters (which include New York, Boston, Chicago, Rome, Paris, etc) on Breznicky’s Etsy page.

John Breznicky