The Poetry of Pavements

Paris city pavement, so abused and trampled underfoot. We walk on you, head in the clouds, rushing to school, running for a bus or just dragging our tired, old bones back home. We look at our watches, glimpse into shop windows and just try to avoid colliding with each other, but we never look down at you, poor pavement at our feet.

In the city, your surface is an obstacle course of chewing gum, strewn motorbikes and canine waste. If we look carefully though, we’ll see that you also proudly present to us a curious world of markings, messages and symbols. You are not just a street for feet, but also a roof over a land of tunnels, gas pipes and electric cables. The windows to this world are the messages that engineers pass on to each other, making you also a kind of urban macadam blackboard. These messages are often just date-stamps, but sometimes the symbols have a graphic, almost mysterious beauty.

The bright colours and bold forms of these symbols almost seem to be designed to attract the eyes of children. What do you look like to children? I grew up in a small-town suburb on a quiet side road and had time to investigate you in minute detail. I could crouch down and watch the nests ants had built in you, or just sit and pick at bits of you when you melted on hot summer days. Is it possible to do this in the rush of a city? I wandered around your dull, quiet lengths, seeing significance in everything I passed. Markings on the trees that pushed through you were actually messages being passed between smugglers, and the sticks scattered along you were leading me towards their lair. Do city children read similar messages in the markings we have left on you?

It was not intended, but you have always been a playground for children. In urban environments, you are the track on which we make our first tentative revolutions on bikes, stabilisers removed and parents running behind. We skip on you, and chalk out the shapes of our games. You are a safe zone next to the danger of the road, but in Paris, you seem to be just too busy for children. Cities give little opportunity for adventure, but children could adopt you and include you in their imagined outdoor worlds. Instead they are encouraged to stay indoors, look at you from above and explore virtual digital worlds.

Yet in Paris, you are still awash with life. You are a gathering space for bored teenagers and an observation point for clients at bars and restaurants. You are the working territory of people selling their bodies and people selling illicit substances. You are a giant canvas for artists. You are where we are stopped and asked for money or opinions. You provide additional browsing space for shops and give a home to phone booths and letter boxes. You are one of the last free territories for smokers, who are now forced outside to stand on you in guilty groups. On rainy evenings you are our reflection, a watery neon mirror. You even provide a bed for the night for those who have run out of other choices. You are the city, and we should not forget you.