This is my space: Graffiti in Claremont, Cape Town

The phenomenon of graffiti has received much attention from many sub-disciplines in social science. Scholars often engage with a small fragment of graffiti writing using ideas popular in their own-subdiscipline. This practice has given birth to a rich, but fragmented literature. This paper tries to connect the fragments by focusing on the spatial behaviour of practitioners of graffiti (i.e. (graffiti) writers) in Amsterdam. Interviews with them provide a basis for demonstrating that graffiti is part of a global phenomenon associated with recurrent social features such as the achievement of fame. Moreover, the triggers for graffiti writers to produce graffiti on a certain surface seem to be interconnected with 1) geographical factors such as the visibility of a location and 2) a certain regulatory regime which characteristics writers can observe on a surface. The complex mixture of such factors on a certain place influences the behaviour of individual graffiti writers, it creates a specific sense of place. Nevertheless, there seem to be groups of graffiti writers whose actions are rather similar. In order to understand their spatial behaviour better this paper argues to use a typology with the dimensions “degree of illegality of the graffiti produced” and “connection to graffiti subculture”. Consequently, four types of writers are distinguished: amateurs, outsiders, bombers, and artists, making it possible to research graffiti in a much less fragmented way.

2011

Avramidis, K., & Tsilimpounidi, M. (Eds.). (2017). Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. London: Routledge.

Graffiti and street art images are ubiquitous and enjoy a very special place in collective imaginary due to their ambiguous nature. Sometimes enigmatic in meaning, often stylistically crude and aesthetically aggressive, yet always visually arresting, they fill our field of vision with texts and images that no one can escape. As they take place on surfaces and travel through various channels, they provide viewers an entry point to the subtext of the cities we live in, while questioning how we read, write and represent them. This book is structured around these three distinct, albeit by definition interwoven, key frames. The contributors of this volume critically investigate underexplored urban contexts in which graffiti and street art appear, shed light on previously unexamined aspects of these practices, and introduce innovative methodologies regarding the treatment of these images. Throughout, the focus is on the relationship of graffiti and street art with urban space, and the various manifestations of these idiosyncratic meetings. In this book, the emphasis is shifted from what the physical texts say to what these practices and their produced images do in different contexts. All chapters are original and come from experts in various fields, such as Architecture, Urban Studies, Sociology, Criminology, Anthropology, and Visual Cultures, as well as scholars that transcend traditional disciplinary frameworks. This exciting new collection is an essential reading for advanced undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics interested in the subject matter. It is also accessible to a non-academic audience, such as art practitioners and policy makers alike, or anyone keen in deepening their knowledge on how graffiti and street affect the ways urban environments are experienced, understood and envisioned.

Journal of Urban Design, 2012

Debates over definitions of urban graffiti as either 'street art' or 'vandalism' tend to focus on either contributions to the field of artistic practice or violations of a legal code. This paper explores the place of graffiti as an urban spatial practice-why is graffiti where it is and what is its role in the constructions and experiences of place? Through interviews and mapping in inner-city Melbourne we explore the ways that potential for different types of graffiti is mediated by the micro-morphology of the city and becomes embodied into the urban habitus and field of symbolic capital. From a framework of Deleuzian assemblage theory graffiti negotiates ambiguous territories between public/private, visible/invisible, street/laneway and art/advertising. Graffiti is produced from intersecting and often conflicting desires to create or protect urban character and place identity. We conclude that desires to write and to erase graffiti are productive urban forces, while desires to promote or protect it are problematic.

Space and Culture, 2018

My research interest lies in understand the spatial behaviour of graffiti writers (van Loon, 2014). Although graffiti writers have unique perspectives on urban landscapes that determine where and what type of graffiti they produce, they also have collective or shared senses of place – i.e., a spatial know-how that structures their production (Castree, 2003). As Table 1 illustrates, it is possible to distinguish four types of writers based on their connection to the graffiti subculture and degree of illegality of their deeds. Arguably, this typology is applicable to most Western cities. This contribution focuses on the two types who stay close to the ‘rules of the game’ the graffiti subculture, namely, Artists and Bombers. Which spatial know-how do they produce? How is it shared, and which type of collective spatial action does it elicit? The spatial knowhow of hip hop graffiti has been created in a very specific period in an unique urban context, i.e., New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has spread with the rest of American popular culture.

British Journal of Criminology

Based on three years of ethnographic research undertaken in London amongst a loose network of what British Transport Police term 'serious graffiti vandals', this article considers how we might conceive theoretically of the interrelationships between graffiti writing, urban space and social control. The article proceeds in two parts. By way of introduction, the first half of the article delineates some of the major subcultural elements that comprise the day-today practice of graffiti writing as it exists in present-day London. The second half of the article engages the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre. It is suggested that graffiti can be understood as simultaneously disrupting authoritative spatial orderings, whilst superimposing its own alternative social geography onto the city.

Book Review: Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1974

Wall graffiti can be indicators of attitudes, behavioral dispositions, and social processes in settings where direct measurement is difficult. The autographed inscriptions of inner city "graffiti kings" in Philadelphia are analyzed in terms of their style, motivation, and preferred setting. Graffiti written by teenage gangs delineate their turf or area of control; their content may indicate contested space and gang violence. Graffiti in an ethnic neighborhood identify tension zones related to social change.

In the summer of 2009 I was invited to give a talk at a research seminar organized by a research group affiliated with the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. The topic of the seminar—“representations of Bahian society”—posed a challenge for me: As an outsider that had been living and working in Brazil for less than a year, how should I approach this presentation to an audience that would be dominated by local scholars, students, and the public? I opted to put together a talk that merged a central aspect of my own research in Brazil—race—with the idea using the urban landscape as a visual medium to understand the racial and identity struggles taking place in Bahian society. Indeed, there had been something about the visual urban landscape that had been nagging at me since I had landed in Bahia the year before: if everyone in the city suddenly disappeared and we were forced to understand the city in terms of images of people in advertising throughout the city, what would we see? If we were to judge Salvador’s human geography based on this capitalist representational landscape, how would our perspective of the city change? The city that is depicted through advertising is a white city. This happens everywhere, from upscale shopping centers to working class markets, from the historic—and historically marginalized—neighborhood of Pelourinho to the elite high rises of the Corredor da Vitória sporting names like “Edificio Yacht Privilege.” In this context of whiteness dominating nearly all visual representations of race in advertising, the graffiti prevalent throughout the city is a pervasive way that representations of race in the urban landscape are re-appropriated, through which dominant representations of whiteness in a Black city are contested. In the words of Don Mitchell (2000: 100), while “one of the chief functions of landscape is precisely to control meaning and to channel it in particular directions… it is also certainly the case that landscape meaning is contested every step of the way.” Mitch Rose (2002) agrees: “Social subjects are not the passive recipients of representation or its inscriptive powers… landscape is a terrain of struggle where various agents continually attempt to impose and/or resist differing representational constructs.” In Salvador, graffiti becomes a tool of those marginalized from view via mainstream commercial advertising for taking back the vertical spaces throughout the city. Graffiti acts to democratize the visual messages sent, and reasserts control of race representations in the Bahian capital. With this chapter, based loosely on that original 2009 talk at the Federal University of Bahia and a short photo essay published a year later (Finn 2010), I further aim to explore the idea of landscape as media. It is widely documented that landscapes are much more than the result of mixing culture and nature (Sauer 1963 [orig. 1925]), or that landscape is, in the words of Lewis (1979: 12), “our unwitting autobiography.” Rather, any landscape is the ephemeral, but very real material product of infinite social processes occurring in place, and it itself is implicated in its own reproduction, normalization, and naturalization. Landscape, in other words, is a powerful communicative medium. It brings the past into the present (Schein 2006: 8), and it pushes the present into the future. As I aim to show in this chapter, the urban landscape itself, and visual representations of race in the landscape, become unique visual modalities of communication by simultaneously reflecting, perpetuating, and naturalizing societal attitudes and constructions of race in the urban form. In the end, my goals are quite simple: 1) to critique and deconstruct racialized/racist visual representations of people in the advertising landscape of Salvador, and 2) to explore the power of alternatives via the afro-graffiti movement and one individual street artist’s efforts to re-represent race in a way that challenges discourses of white supremacy infused in the fully racialized landscape. To do so, it is first necessary to explore recent theoretical developments at the intersection of race, representation, and landscape.

Music-City. Sports-City. Leisure-City. A reader on different concepts of culture, creative industries and urban regeneration attemps.

Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 2012

2018

What is the role of art in the reinforcement or rejection of current models of public space management in our cities? To answer this question, we must attend to the ties of all artwork with public institutions, and whether or not it questions the dominant order. In this article, I will focus on the works of the Ana Botella Crew, a group of artists from Madrid, as an example of "artivism" that challenges the City Council's management of public spaces in Madrid. My aim is to explore how useful internet tools can be to articulate artistic interventions that challenge the hegemonic uses of public space, in what Sassen has called the global city.

2013

In the last ten years, street art has become a very important factor in the international art scene. It has become a precious object to buy and preserve, and yet there is considerable confusion about the generic properties and definition of street art in academic research. As a rightful part of popular culture and urban culture, street art is not pure and independent. It intertwines with different art forms and urban subcultures and nurtures spin-off production. Therefore it is quite hard to trace its borders. Street art is not graffiti. They are different visual expressions and even though they might share the same space, artists and techniques, they still produce visually and conceptually different art works. This confusion produces many layers of problematic issues which put the street artists both on the police wanted lists and in the most important galleries and museums such as the Tate Modern in London, Grand Palais in Paris and MOCA in Los Angeles to name the few. In addition, in some official documents and in auction houses graffiti and street art are referred to as urban art, a term not used or understood by the members of the subculture. It is not clear what graffiti, street art and urban art are and how they are positioned within the contemporary culture. Therefore it is necessary to deal with the generic terms first and only after this issue has been solved, one can look at all these terms from different perspectives. is paper aims at resolving these problems without offering new definitions but by explaining the terms used both in subcultures and in academic research.

Topos, 2011

This article examines graffiti as the illicit strategy of contemporary urban space formation and presents the non-conventional cityscape perception of the graffiti subculture members. The findings of the study based on detailed interviews with graffiti writers from Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, reveal their motivations towards illegal spatial practices and their attitudes towards politics of urban structure and design. The main difference between traditional perception of urban space and the views of graffiti writers lies in the distinction of ‘free’ and controlled, public and private, striated and smooth space experience. The social context of the struggles over ‘free’ urban space is determined by the emergence of symbolic economy in post-industrial city and its hyper-aestheticised and commercialized cityscape that enables the visual resistance – a subversed form of production of symbols known as illegal graffiti practice.