Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the Moral Geographies of the Creative City (original) (raw)

2012, Journal of Urban Affairs

In cities such as Sydney, a succession of wars on graffiti has produced a moral geography of artistic practice. At the same time, the rise to prominence of creative cities discourses and the subsequent revaluation of creativity as a postindustrial salve unsettles the dominance of the normative criminalization of graffiti. The profusion of cultural plans and public art policies, along with metropolitan initiatives promoting the creative city, provide opportunities to resignify graffiti as productive creative practice. Set in a discursive world of murals, street art, and "legal graffiti," some graffiti writers are grasping these opportunities, deploying multiple subjectivities in order to negotiate the moral geographies of the creative city. This article looks at contemporary state responses to graffiti in Sydney and the ways graffiti writers and street artists work within and beyond the various attempts to capture, enclose, and engage graffiti and graffiti writers. Graffiti in its various forms has become a perennial feature of life at the edges of the contemporary city. Implicitly set as a challenge to urban relations, as the transgressive act of property crime, graffiti has become an emotionally charged public order issue. Attempts by urban managers to eradicate graffiti have resulted in spiralling costs as increasingly more sophisticated methods are deployed in the various urban "wars on graffiti" (Dickenson, 2008; Iveson, 2009, 2010). Despite the increased mobilization of anti-graffiti technologies, backed by explicit anti-graffiti policies and laws, graffiti and other forms of unsanctioned "public art" persist. The persistence of graffiti can in part be attributed to subcultural responses to the urban wars on graffiti. By framing graffiti as out of place, urban authorities have ensured that successive generations of predominantly young men have taken up graffiti as a risk-laden behavior, as fame and respect are accrued among peers through the brazen transgression of laws and social norms (Ferrell, 1996; MacDonald, 2001). As the wars on graffiti have escalated, so too have the subcultural rewards for those willing to engage in graffiti (Iveson, 2010). But graffiti is also finding a place in the city via the presence of discourses that challenge an indiscriminate criminalization of graffiti. Chief among these discourses is the promise of the creative city. Beyond the framing of tensions between urban authorities and graffiti writers over the presence/absence of graffiti, the rise of creative cities discourses (Florida, 2002; Landry, 2000) has afforded the opportunity to rethink the way the creative practices of graffiti writers and street artists are valued. A reevaluation of graffiti in the light of the importance of creativity to the postindustrial economy aids in the understanding