In his classic text, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch developed a schematic classification of urban elements that make a city legible. He also implied that legibility is synonymous with a ‘pleasing’ aesthetic atmosphere. The drive for legibility and its normative aesthetic vision both rely on the exclusion of elements that disturb the planner’s sense of balance, though, for instance ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ in Lynch’s case. The construction of a desired atmosphere implicitly requires the control of both the aesthetics of the built environment and the aesthetics of the residents’ behavior. Behavior that is disturbing – in every sense of the term – is deemed illegible. What seems like illegibility to the dominant strata, however, may be legible to those ‘below’ and on the margins as they inhabit these spaces and behaviors. Rather than illegible, such spaces and behaviors are anti-legible, carrying equal weight and right as the dominant strains of legibility. Can acts of anti-legibility be regarded as creative forms of endurance and persistence? Or is there a danger in heroicizing anti-legibility as outright resistance and romanticizing the conditions of structural domination that create the necessity for survival strategies in the first place?