there’s a thousand things I want to pict to you, to paraphrase P. Weller.

In last week’s excellent Guardian supplement on urban design, “Cities Reborn”:

“How anyone can say that popular culture does not influence the changes to our cities, that popular culture doesn’t spark urban regeneration, is beyond me,” stresses architectural journalist and presenter Phil Griffin. “It has more influence on cities than anything else.”

A quote from Will Alsop jumps out:

“It was punk and acid house that made people in general visually literate”

Walking through London’s supposedly-hipper districts, you’re bombarded with images on every available surface: aside from graffiti and adverts, it’s a visual cacophony of guerilla-marketing, guerillia-marketing that’s been adbusted, artworks masquerading as guerilla-marketing.

It deafens one’s eye.

It also makes the city a rich source to sample from with your camphone. If you want to compose a witty montage to communicated with friends, then your pallette is all around you. Needless-to-say then, that a mobile phone operator is already using guerilla marketing posters to that effect [requires Flash] to push it’s camphones…

Just like professional photographers have their favourite haunts and locations around the world and within cities to capture and communciate with, we’re all going to have our favourite locations to compose and parcel-up our pictograms of thought and emotion.

These areas may respond – becoming hotspots for public art collectives, graff-writers and other visual urban guerillas. Marketers as always will fast-follow – hunting the new, cool urban upload spots, to try and squeeze some pixels of their own into our pictorial conversations. And, tech-by-tech, step-by-step, arm-in-arm, we all wander into the visual dreamlands imagined by Noon, Stephenson, Gibson, Ballard and Burgess.