Graffiti, Street Art and Ambivalence

Abstract

The article considers the practice and praxis of graffiti and street art from the perspectives of law enforcement, local government and placemaking, and between the production and consumption of this ambivalent form of cultural expression. The work is based on primary, site-based research and visualisation undertaken in Europe, North America and Australia.

1. Introduction

Modern art and ambivalence have co-existed since artists have engendered love/hate, attract/repel reactions and responses from their viewers, who also express their ambivalence towards such artworks, of the is it art, good/bad art, what is it/does it mean or represent? variety. The ‘discovery’ of graffiti can also be associated with the modernist cult of the untamed—which the surrealist movement found in street art—from the photographer Brassai who captured strange, demonic graffiti etched on Parisian walls, to the French artist Dubuffet who championed graffiti amongst outsider art brut (Jones 2021). Graffiti and its contemporary incarnation as street art can also be seen as an ambivalent practice and phenomenon, carried out in social and semi-public space and representing a particular genre with a millennia-old presence and contemporary interpretation. Indeed, the term ‘street art’ as opposed to vandalistic ‘graffiti’ indicates both a valorisation and cultural shift in public art itself, with which street art is now conflated. Areas that are the subject of intensive and expansive graffiti and street art could be said to represent museums ‘without walls’ (Meades 2013), creating cultural markers on surfaces that were not intended for such use. As such, graffiti and street art production sit uncomfortably between architecture (surface), advertising (artist/group), protest (artivism), and the culture (identity) of a place. This association can be highly localised, or as with much mainstream culture, highly globalised—or at least, seemingly familiar, such as in the case of graffiti on bridges and transport facilities and on redundant buildings and shopfront shutters.

Graffiti, and even the more refined street art, tends to cluster and repeat itself. This is not surprising given the local conditions usually required—available ‘wall space’, a public viewing location (without the potential for an audience, graffiti cannot exist other than as some personal record, e.g., on a prison wall) and the scope for working without the risk of being caught in the act and/or prosecuted. However, the presence of graffiti attracts further graffiti, often over-writing or extending, whether competitive or collegial in motivation. Graffiti as a visual manifestation of vandalism has also been associated with urban decline, a heightened risk of crime and threat to community safety at a neighbourhood level. In criminology, broken window theory, for example, suggests that as more dereliction takes hold on buildings in an area, this generates a spiral of decline as neglect leads to more deterioration of the built environment, including unchecked graffiti (Wilson and Kelling 1982). This theory suggests that visible signs of disorder can lead to more (and more serious) crime and disorder—for instance, signalling to potential criminals that residents are indifferent to crime—and therefore responsive clean-up of affected areas can prevent this cycle. The ability of local authorities to respond is also a function of their resources, land and building ownership and responsibilities, as well as the power of local voices. More vulnerable areas include those where authorities lack budgets and manpower to quickly clean up sites, particularly where they are the subject of repeat graffiti. It is no coincidence therefore that graffiti and street art have flourished in cities and poorer districts in economic and social decline and in areas of post-industrial redundancy and restructuring. The common practice of spray-painting on closed shop shutters (Figure 1) provides some break to the monotony of this anti-social security system; however. this makes no difference to the loss of natural surveillance or window-shopping available previously.

However, the transformation of graffiti to street art as a social and visual practice challenges these assumptions, with street art being a visitor attraction and celebration rather than a symbol of decline and no longer associated with vandalism and loss of control. The ‘contract’ obviously assumes that property owners (private, commercial and public utilities) and occupants, as well as local agencies—police and local authorities—at least tolerate street art and, in some cases, encourage it as part of placemaking and regeneration strategies. In practice, however, this is a meanwhile situation in the period between area and building redevelopment and re-use, when occupiers (including artists) are short-term dwellers. In areas of long-term regeneration, this can amount to several years, whilst in other areas, street art is normalized and part of an accepted practice and presence, where there is stability in the property market, at least in the medium term. Here, graffiti can be seen as a post-occupancy architectural element in building façades or equivalent to advertising billboards and signage. This is not limited to post-industrial buildings and redundant housing and left-over plots however. New buildings can also fall victim to the touch of graffiti when left in an incomplete state. In Los Angeles, an abandoned high-rise development known as ‘Graffiti Tower’ has become a magnet for parachuting graffiti artists. The USD 1 billion Oceanwide Plaza complex has been in limbo since its Chinese developer announced the site was temporally on hold in 2019, citing financial problems. At least 27 floors of the tower have been tagged by different artists, although as the frustrated LA Police Chief claimed, ‘this isn’t art, it’s a crime’ (Beckett 2024). Residents, on the other hand, have had to live with this dysfunctional eyesore and blot on their landscape, arguably a far greater crime. In the longer term, however, gentrification can eventually ‘clean up’ an area or particular buildings and estates as rents rise and private corporate interests trump area-based identities. There are parallels therefore with the treatment of street art and the occupation of unoccupied, redundant and former industrial spaces by artists—to use the apt quote from Montreal graffiti: ‘Artists are the stormtroopers of gentrification’ (TAC 1988). Recently, street artist CSRK has been fusing well-known film characters with the streets of Montreal. From stormtroopers holding cans of poutine and construction signs to Han Solo’s blaster gun being replaced with French fries, cheese curds and gravy, the force has become strong on certain walls around town, a blast perhaps of post-irony or just opportunism1.

Graffiti and street art therefore now co-exist in a state of ambivalence, projecting contradictory and mixed messages and evoking mixed feelings from residents, public authorities, police and other users of the city. Lefebvre had earlier observed that we do not use a work of art, such as a piece of public sculpture, but we experience it, as both sensorially perceived and as lived ‘everyday’ space (Lefebvre 1991). In Lefebvre’s triad of social production, ‘conceived space’ is associated with planners, urbanists, social engineers and designers—to which we should now add place-makers, including some street artists and public street art intermediaries in the conquest of urban space. Romero (2017) writes of ‘bittersweet ambivalence’ arising from collaborations between street artists and the elite, and their ambivalent (my emphasis) attitude towards the gentrification process and the benefits (exposure, paid work) they perceive from the expansion of their urban canvas. This article considers this ambivalence and varying treatment and reception across numerous locations through site-based engagement with graffiti and street art in situ and through interviews with public and other landowners, residents, cultural groups and local police and transport agencies. Whilst not a comprehensive or exhaustive range, by engaging with wider stakeholder perspectives and revisiting sites over time, I seek to represent both the phenomenon as it has evolved and is lived and the extent to which the form of function of graffiti and street art has become, on the one hand, globalised, (universal), and, on the other, highly localised (particular) (Wallerstein 1991).

2. Graffiti and Street Art Treatment

Graffiti and street art have received a variety of treatments, from artist, art history, political, subcultural, ethnographic and criminogenic perspectives, which are reflected in the literature on individual graffiti and street artists, gangs and genres, with a growth in art monographs, coffee-table-style pictorials and online archives: ‘street art is… defined more by real-time practice than by any sense of unified theory, movement, or message’ (Irvine 2012, p. 235); moreover, there has been a distinct lack of empirical and theoretical critique (Ross 2016a), including the role of place and reception (Nitzsche 2020). A cluster of open-access journals offer specialist critiques of the phenomenon, which locates the practice under the rubric of ‘urban creativity’, whilst attempts to define and distinguish between graffiti and street art in its several and evolving forms have emanated from aesthetic, art history/criticism and visual culture perspectives, being largely productionist in nature. However, consensus on universal definitions remain elusive (see Riggle 2016; Baldini 2015, 2022; Blanché 2015).Whilst there is generally an accepted separation between crude tagging, writing and political and other slogans and the more artistic/creative/decorative street art, contributors to the debate disagree over the conditions that should qualify street art, such as aconsensuality (Bacharach 2015), ‘street’ location and an essential subversive intent, acknowledging that these distinctions are both blurred (including between graffiti and street art) and not pre-conditions; e.g., not all street art is subversive or necessarily on or of ‘the street’ and consent can be partial and post hoc. Whilst crude and simple tagging would not normally be considered street ‘art’, more elaborate tags, bubble-writing and larger ‘pieces’ can start to emulate more creative wall painting, and, on the other hand, some renown street artists use quite simple motifs and cartoon-like characters as their repetitive ‘signature’ (e.g., Stik, below). Well-known practitioners refer to themselves as ‘graffiti artists’ (Banksy, CSRK) and ‘wall (e.g., mural) artists’ (Blu), whilst in practice, the terms are used loosely, interchangeably and increasingly in combination, such as in exhibitions and published collections (Ross 2016b). The eponymous ‘street’ in street art has become a metaphor in popular culture commodified through fashion (street wear) and music (e.g., hip hop) and increasingly so through generic street art. In graffiti and street art, terminology, classification and form often belie intent. Ross (2021) also notes the centrality of crime and danger to street culture, whilst graffiti and street art are not, of course, exclusively to be found at ’street level’ or on ‘walls’, as images can be seen on flyovers, bridges, installations, and on roads, pavements and mobile transport, with the challenge of tagging seemingly inaccessible and risky locations and highpoints guaranteeing their author maximum exposure and longevity.

The productionist dialectic between graffiti as vandalism and as street art (including in galleries and auction houses) has however not considered the wider aspects of the role and place of graffiti and street art in the city; responses from city authorities, local communities, visitors and property owners; and how different places and city cultures receive and react in different ways, including graffiti and street art now used in placemaking and destination strategies. This includes the growth of graffiti- and street-art-commissioning agencies and organisations (e.g., BookanArtist.co2), often established by former graffiti and street artists employed by clients such as retail and advertising firms (Borghini et al. 2010) and local authorities who legitimise spaces and walls for safe experimentation. In the Bronx district for example, The POINT Community Development Center houses the graffiti operations base of the crew that once covered the New York subway trains and led to the mayor’s zero tolerance regime. These once infamous street artists have gone ‘legit’, training aspiring young artists and working for advertising firms and department stores in Manhattan on large-scale shop displays and billboards (Evans 2007, p. 35): ‘in effect, we have something in common with advertising…a deep link. Not only the format: large posters and billboards…also the place: on walls, like advertising. The invasive effect is the same, the attack is the same’ (Matteo, street artist, in Borghini et al. 2010, p. 125).

The cultural content of graffiti and street art also reflects local conditions and contexts, whether protest, political, territorial, vernacular (e.g., local events, characters) or playful in nature. Graffiti and street art therefore now occupy an enduring place in the image of the city and our urban heritage and, not surprisingly, increasingly feature in city tours and trails. Graffiti has thus come a long way from its modern roots in the 1960s, commonly attributed to tagging/signatures in ethnic ghettoes of New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, although parallel outpourings were evident in other cities such as London, including protest and wall poster art (Dawson 2021). What this has signalled is the beginning of a commodification of this activity, with a widening of graffiti into other cultural forms such as music (e.g., rap, with graffiti one of the four ‘core elements of hip hop’, Nitzsche 2020); fashion (e.g., street artist Mau Mau graduated from T-shirt design to graffiti art), film (e.g., animation, pop videos), visual ‘pop’ art, advertising, architecture/urban design and public art—which collectively has extended its shelf life. Early forays of artists who first worked ‘on the street’ and in ‘street style’ into art galleries and public venues, such as the late Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring in the USA, were less commercially successful during their lifetimes (although Haring had opened the Pop Shop in 1986 to sell his merchandise), but the rapid valorisation of graffiti art in recent years has seen Banksy’s distinctive stencil murals fetch over USD 18 million, often sold to US buyers and film/rock star celebrities. This reached a nadir in 2014—from Banksy’s street-cred perspective—in an unauthorised retrospective of his ‘works’ by the international auction house Sotheby’s in London (Lazarides 2014). Here, however, the work has been first validated in situ (a fundamental element in its value and authenticity) and then removed, much like a historic mural or fresco, into a private collection. Another sign that street art has fully joined the art market is the growth in copying and fake works. A forgery ring was recently broken by Spanish police with over 25 fake Banksy’s sold worldwide, including the requisite certificates of authenticity (sic) issued to validate (i.e., for resale) original Banksy work. In Italy, police uncovered a large-scale cross-European forgery network, with Banksy joining the panoply of modern and contemporary art, including Picasso and Warhol. In order to boost their credentials, the forgery gang organised two Banksy exhibitions with accompanying catalogue in galleries near Venice and Cortona, Tuscany, and exhibitions of Banksy’s work, including fakes, are now not uncommon.

Since the late 1970s/early 1980s, galleries have embraced graffiti as an international art form3, but public art museums have taken longer to incorporate this genre into their collections, by which time these ‘post-graffiti’ artists had moved from the street into the gallery and institution. For example, in 2008, Tate Modern’s Street Art commission and exhibition brought together six internationally acclaimed artists whose work is linked to the urban environment. Sponsored by the Japanese car firm Nissan, this was the first major public display of Street Art in London. In order to give it artistic validation, ‘good’ street art, in this case, was distinguished from the more low-brow graffiti and tagging, thus seeking to ‘insert graffiti into its proper place and rob it of its denaturalising power’ (Creswell 1996, p. 55). The link with the sponsor Nissan was also significant since the Qashqai car it launched the year before utilised striking street art in its advertisements. This also provides a clue to the current ambiguous place and relationship between graffiti/art and the city. In one sense, this reflects the consumption and visual culture prevalent in the contemporary city environment—the merger of commerce and culture in highly visualised form. As Banet-Weiser shows, those involved in the branding of creativity, such as street artists Banksy and Shepard Fairey, labour in the creation of a ‘non-brand brand’ that further contributes to the development of a creative city (Florida 2005). Street art is considered particularly authentic especially because it is illegal and transgressive; however, this is complicated when artists team up with corporate and public clients as ‘creative labourers’: ‘within an advanced capitalist environment, the individual entrepreneur is the archetypal labourer; the labour that is performed is proof that the individual can “free” him-or herself from the state (Banet-Weiser 2012, p. 118).

As with advertisement, large-scale graffiti constructions are also used as a backdrop to fashion catwalks, such as Diesel’s 2025 Milan show, as brands seek to inject ‘street cred’ into their products. Chang states, ‘saturated by images, the contemporary city has been theorised as a site legislated by the eyes’ (Chang 2013, p. 216), while street art today in Irvine’s view ‘is a paradigm of hybridity in global visual culture’ (Irvine 2012, p. 235). Commercial galleries have inevitably followed the suit of public art museums, with over 100 international artists featured in the Beyond The Streets London exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, London, sponsored by the sports brand, Adidas, and taking over all three floors of this iconic gallery (Saatchi had pioneered the Young British Artists (YBAs) from the late-1980s, e.g., Damian Hirst). Following successful exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York, in gallery-speak, Beyond The Streets ‘pays homage to the monumental moments from the worlds of graffiti, street art, hip-hop and punk rock as well as the artists who immortalized them. From painting trains to social activism, to the clothes we wear and the soundtracks of our lives, examin(ing) how these cultural narratives shifted the public’s perception of underground art and culture—leading to a global creative revolution..a celebration of graffiti’s core ethos of an innate desire for mark-making and challenging authority. By its very nature, graffiti is ephemeral, its own existence is temporary, but the culture and its rebellious spirit prevails’ https://beyondthestreets.com/blogs/articles/announcing-beyond-the-streets-london (accessed 11 March 2025).

Despite the valorisation of celebrity post-graffiti artists, however, most everyday graffiti has largely resisted (art) museumification and thrives primarily in a museum-without-walls—but very much on a city’s walls. The varying treatment and cultural significance of graffiti was also observed by Walter Benjamin in his essay on the walls of 1920s Marseilles:

Admirable, the discipline to which they are subject, in this city. The better ones, in the center, wear livery and are in the pay of the ruling class. They are covered with gaudy patterns and have sold their whole length many hundreds of times to the latest brand of aperitif, to department stores, to the ‘Chocolat Menier’, or Dolores del Rio. In the poorer quarters they are politically mobilized and post their spacious red letters as the forerunners of red guards in front of dockyards and arsenals (Benjamin 1999, p. 135).

Today, graffiti in Marseilles continues to reflect this socio-spatial divide, with international graffiti artists exhibited at the newly refurbished grand projet Museum of the Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEUM) during the city’s European Capital of Culture festival in 2013, whilst across town, the depiction of local tragic events (a 19-year-old shot by police), serves as a familiar backdrop to skateboarders and passersby at La Friche Belle de Mai (Figure 2) in one of the poorest districts of the city, now transformed by a large community arts centre that has occupied a disused tobacco factory since the 1990s.

However, it was the appropriation of the post-industrial city’s walls by what are perceived as undemocratic and unwanted advertising images that has provided the political impetus for contemporary graffiti artists such as Banksy, with graffiti ‘principally an anti-art movement, making art form out of vandalism’ (Armstrong 2019, p. 15). As Banksy (2002, np) himself proclaims: ‘Twisted little people go out everyday and deface this great city. Leaving their idiotic little scribblings, invading communities and making people feel dirty and used. They just take, take, take and they don’t put anything back. They’re mean and selfish and they make the world an ugly place to be. We call them advertising agencies and town planners’.

Cronin goes as far to suggest that outdoor advertising and graffiti should be studied together, in terms of their ubiquity and visual impact (Cronin 2008). As Borghini et al. also observe: ‘Street art is a product that embodies its own advertising…a countercultural response to commercially or statist-induced alienation, street art as a populist aesthetic, a consumerist critique, and urban development project. Street art espouses a vision of space reappropriated as place, where commercially noisy or entirely silent streets are reclaimed by artists for their “owners”’ (Borghini et al. 2010, p. 113). Zieleniec, in analysing graffiti through the prism of Lefebvre’s right to write the city optimistically (and perhaps naively) asserts that ‘graffiti makes space social and public, through the promotion of use values and meaningful acts of colonisation and inhabitation versus the homogenising practices of planning, design, commerce, and their overarching concern with surveillance, order and security’ (Zieleniec 2016, p. 2).

3. Vandalism, Vacancy and Valorisation

Until recently, official responses to graffiti have placed it squarely in the criminal ‘vandalism’ sphere (Ferrell 1993) and early commentators fuelled this view: ‘graffiti disrespects private property and official notions of order and aesthetics’ (Lachmann 1995, p. 100). Early responses to the graffiti ‘epidemic’ in New York and Los Angeles saw criminal sentences increase and special task forces established, claiming that the order of the landscape had been disrupted, and clean-up costs were rising: more than USD 50 million a year in both cities by the late 1980s. It is estimated that in the USA municipalities spent between USD 8 and USD 12 billion annually on clean-up activities (Cities of Service 2017, graffitihurts.org), with Chicago alone spending USD 6 million, whilst some imposed a sales tax on spray paint to both deter perpetrators and offset the cost of abatement (Ross 2016b). Authorities are encouraged to clean up graffiti quickly since this reduces the impact and subsequent re-writing (Bragg and Bond 2008). Today, in the UK, clean-up of graffiti is still estimated to cost GBP 1 million per year. A national UK initiative, Alliance to Reduce Crime Against Heritage, monitors damage to heritage buildings and sites which are particularly vulnerable—English Heritage estimates that 70,000 heritage buildings and monuments have been vandalised and defaced by graffiti, with porous stonework, bricks and lime mortar especially vulnerable and not able to take anti-graffiti protective paints since they are not suitable to these types of heritage material. Artists also adopt strategies to reduce the risk of detection by using materials that blend in to the local environment. For example in Budapest, the Hungarian artist Bamamo uses wheatpaste to make his images, producing a similar effect to that of commercial and state/party wall posters. Established graffitists, on the other hand, distinguish between houses, businesses or monuments and surfaces that are ‘fair game’ but acknowledge that ‘today this has changed—and it’s giving graffiti a really bad name. Kids nowadays graffiti anything, even monuments and other works of art, and that’s disrespectful. It becomes vandalism when you destroy someone else’s creation’ (Proulx 2008). Of course, most of our urban space has been ‘created’ at some point and makes up the everyday environment that we experience but is largely out of citizen control—including graffiti and street art (Riggle 2010)—with a priori value judgements made over urban space and its usage by the ‘conceivers’ of social space and how it is represented in the city (Lefebvre 1991).

A governmental response to the ‘demand’ for graffiti by young people is also seen in various schemes which seek to offer a safe (from prosecution) opportunity for budding Banksys to practice their art with impunity. For example in Wales, The Heritage Graffiti Project helps young offenders ‘learn valuable lessons from their heritage’4 by introducing them to archaeological artefacts and explaining what they mean to the people who used them (e.g., Roman soldiers, miners, canal boaters). A mural was created, Our Wales, by the young people depicting their interpretation and experience that was documented and opened to the public. In the DPM Park in Dundee, Scotland, the longest legal graffiti wall in the UK at 110 metres is open for all to use at any time, and the council-run project holds workshops for local children. How far these participants subsequently refrain from illegal graffiti activity is not, however, measured. Two studies in Western Australia found that legal walls and sanctioned murals only have a short-term effect in the locale and do not eradicate or minimize the existence of graffiti (Craw et al. 2006; Taylor and Marais 2009). Glasgow is one of the latest Scottish cities to celebrate and promote street art with an annual Yardworks festival held around the SWG3 arts venue in a former galvanisers yard near the River Clyde. Here, the city council is also exploring setting up legal walls where graffiti artists can develop their work without fear of arrest. This is in a council which spends double its nearest rival (the London borough of Hackney—see Shoreditch, below) on graffiti removal. James Klinge, a Glasgow street artist, states, ‘people can think of a gallery as a really intimidating place to go into, but anyone who can walk down the street and see this mural in its progress—that’s their art gallery’ (Brooks 2022, p. 7). In Iowa, the Marshalltown Skatepark Graffiti Rotating Art Wall is maintained by the Parks and Recreation Department and is open for use of the community on a first-come, first-served basis and is whitewashed once per month. The use of graffiti as a participatory arts-based intervention also formed part of a project with marginalised and excluded young people in the Binga region in rural Zimbabwe, aiming to make a democratic space for engagement and opportunity for them to tell stories about their experiences and aspirations via street art—in this case, in the absence of walls, on portable boards (Marovah and Mkwananzi 2020), which were subsequently exhibited in the local museum.

The attitudes of local police are also variable, and their stance on graffiti and street art can be determined by a number of factors. In the USA, research on a mid-Atlantic police department found that the race of police officer and the shift (e.g., day or night) affected the attitude towards graffiti crime and therefore towards perpetrators and enforcement (Ross and Wright 2014). The race of the artist also influences their treatment—in 1980s New York, the celebrated artist Keith Haring ‘usually got off with a slap on the wrist if caught painting graffiti by the New York cops’, but at the same time, the 25-year old black artist, Michael Stewart, was allegedly beaten into a coma whilst in police custody after being arrested for scrawling on a subway wall (Needham 2024, p. 49). The event and artist was later celebrated at an exhibition that took as its starting point the painting The Death of Michael Stewart, informally known as Defacement, created by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Originally painted on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio within a week of Stewart’s death, Basquiat’s painting was a deeply personal lamentation that has rarely been exhibited in a public context. With The Death of Michael Stewart as its centrepiece, this exhibition examined Basquiat’s exploration of Black identity, his protest against police brutality and his attempts to craft a singular aesthetic language of empowerment (LaBouvier et al. 2019). More recently, in the UK, a craft shop refused to sell spray paint to a black father shopping for his 4-year-old son (to paint his bicycle helmet) because the shop staff thought he may use the paint to “do graffiti”—a white relative had to buy the paint instead (Pidd 2024, p. 2). Spray can manufacturers, on the other hand, specifically market their products for graffiti/spray painting.

Safer Neighbourhood Teams in London also follow a priority crime regime as a form of resource efficiency and policy/political targeting (e.g., burglary, mugging), leaving graffiti deprioritized unless literally the perpetrator is caught in the act or in response to complaints. This contrasts with the British Transport Police who operate a zero tolerance regime, recording and attributing graffiti to identify subsequent offences and provide evidence to support prosecution of what they term ‘serious vandals’. Police officers in Scotland collect ‘tags’ in a database which is then used to pinpoint where a particular tag is being used so that officers can narrow their hunt, which has led to several arrests. Today, this duality—vandalism or art—continues, reflected in prohibitory sentences—in the UK up to ten years imprisonment where criminal damage by an adult (18 years+) exceeds GBP 5000 and detention/training order of up to two years for 12 to 17 year olds. For minor offences, sentences are much lower, and fixed penalty charges can also be issued (up to GBP 100) without court proceedings, so there is some discretion over the response if found guilty/caught in the act.

Network Rail also spends GBP 5 million and London Transport GBP 10 million a year on graffiti clean-up, a reflection of the appeal of public transport and moving targets of trains and ubiquitous railway systems. In 1960s/1970s New York, gang graffiti-ists (although they prefer the term ‘crew’ not the pejorative ‘gang’) were also enabled by the subway system that took their tags across all of the city’s boroughs and away from their local territories, with large (master)pieces covering whole carriages (today, transport police advise operators to take trains out of commission quickly to reduce this incentive). While the New York subway was successfully cleaned up, transport still remains a key site for graffiti—attractive for its wide availability and high audience potential (Creswell 1992). For visitors to many cities, whether by road or rail, the first visual sign they will see is graffiti and tags along motorway walls and bridges and on the interstitial approaches to railway stations. Despite the advent of CCTV and other surveillance, stations and bus stops receive both unwanted tagging (Figure 3a), as well as commissioned artworks (Figure 3b), for example, Art on the Underground in Stockholm and the ongoing programmes of Art Posters and Poetry on the Underground in London. In this example, a poem written on an underground poster would be legitimate, whilst the same poem written on the same wall would be treated as prosecutable vandalism.

Graffiti and street art have therefore been faced with a dual onslaught from different dominant forces—police/city politicians, advertisers and art curators/galleries—to remove or control its practice and impact but in an ambivalent and inconsistent way. However, despite this, or perhaps spurred on by this marginalisation, counterhegemonic discourses have emerged which, in some senses, have kept graffiti alive as both a cultural concept and a practice that is now evident in many forms internationally—that is, graffiti is now a global cultural phenomenon. Lachmann’s observation in 1988 is therefore still valid today: ‘Graffiti in some forms can challenge hegemony by drawing on particular experiences and customs of their communities, ethnic groups and age cohorts, thereby demonstrating that social life can be constructed in ways different from the dominant conceptions of reality’ (Lachmann 1988, pp. 231–32).

This challenge is evident in graffiti artists’ response to the art market itself, in the case of Banksy’s mockumentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). Here, a fictional filmmaker pursues the underground art scene in Los Angeles, New York, London and Paris, assuming the role of self-styled street artist hyping his avant-garde ‘show’ in LA and creating an art world/underground buzz for the lucky few who could take part: ‘Banksy thus pokes fun at the contemporary art world and its hunt to unearth and exploit underground art scenes. The willingness to validate recycled art and popular cultural symbols, which are rendered empty if not meaningless, is revealed as undiscerning and opportunistic…whereby social critique is downplayed in the pursuit of print, poster, and postcard sales’ (Birdsall 2013, p. 116). (In)famous street artists nonetheless straddle use and exchange values attaching to their work, adopting increasingly performative, disruptive, but also commercially astute, strategies.

For example, the auction of street art-as-performance art was achieved by Banksy again, in 2018, when a version of his Girl with Balloon was put up for sale at Sotheby’s. Originally stencilled on an East London wall, this now-iconic figure and has been reproduced in many different places, making it one of his best-known works of art. A 2006 framed copy of the artwork was sold at auction at Sotheby’s, but in what can be called a quintessential Banksy moment, the moment the hammer slammed down selling Girl with Balloon for USD 1.4 million, the work of art started to lower itself through a shredder built into the bottom of the frame. The bottom half of the painting was cut into strips, but it stopped shredding in time for the heart-shaped balloon to remain visible. As stunned auction-goers looked on and could barely believe what was happening, the moment became ‘instant art world history’. The new owner, who kept the picture in this semi-shredded stated, later loaned the work to the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, where the work was on view between the gallery’s Old Masters and Modern Art masterpieces. Three years later, the picture returned to Sotheby’s for sale again and fetched the incredible price of GBP 18.5 million, much more than its estimated value of GBP 4–6 million.

The mobile value of his own street art has however fuelled a destructive market (another form of vandalism) which sees publicly displayed works cut from walls and shopfronts to disappear then reappear via auction. Curiously, these empty sites continue to attract viewers and subsequent graffiti responses, and place-branding through graffiti can therefore persist despite the absence of the artwork itself following its removal, increasingly for financial gain (although not for the author/originator). Leader (2002) recounts the story of the theft of the Mona Lisa from The Louvre in 1911—after the painting was stolen, thousands of people flocked to see where it had once been on display. Many of them had never seen the painting in the first place, and this phenomenon is repeated each time a Banksy is discovered and ‘lost’ today (Hansen and Flynn 2014, 2016). This cycle therefore recurs when a Banksy appears on a private or municipal wall—local excitement about putting their place on the map, followed by national media attention and a flow of visitors and inevitably its removal/theft and pilgrimage to the site of absence. Meanwhile, commercial gallery owners vied for acquisition with offers to an unsuspecting garage owner (a local steelworker) for a recent Banksy that had appeared in the Taibach neighbourhood of Port Talbot, Wales. The piece, named Season’s Greetings was stencilled onto the corner of a breeze-block garage close to the local steelworks, stood for one year before being bought from the garage owner by an art dealer who temporarily relocated the 4.5 tonnes of a wall section to a former police station nearby. Two years later, the piece was removed from Wales altogether with a candle-lit vigil for its departure featuring a locally penned poem: ‘Port Talbot’s Got a Banksy’, children singing ‘Little Snowflake’—the tune Banksy’s ‘people’ dubbed over video footage of the mural—and speeches imploring the piece stays in the town. One of the organisers (with no sense of irony), stated, ‘we can claim to be the street art capital of Wales. We may not have the funding to build a big art gallery, but we have the power to turn our streets into a gallery’ (Morris 2022).

The latest Banksy oeuvre consists of a daily series of animal stencils placed across London in 2024: the silhouette of a goat perched on a thin wall near Kew Bridge with rocks tumbling perilously down underfoot; two elephants with their trunks reaching towards each other on the edge of a house in Chelsea; a trio of monkeys swinging across a bridge on Brick Lane; a wolf howling on a satellite dish in south London; and two pelicans eating fish on the wall above a fish and chips shop. These were followed by a stretching cat on an unused advertising hoarding; a tank of piranha fish inside a police box; a rhino on a wall, seemingly mounting an actual abandoned car; and finally, a ninth consecutive work outside London Zoo, showing a gorilla appearing to lift up a shutter, letting birds and a seal escape. Their reception and treatment follows the familiar pattern: the Rhino was ‘defaced’ by a young tag artist (pointedly, with a dollar and ‘V-sign’), and the car replaced with a yellow skip; the cat and the howling fox were both removed, seemingly by thieves masquerading as contractors; and the police sentry box was fenced off by the City of London police, who then relocated it to Guildhall Square, a Roman heritage site, to ensure that it is properly protected and open for the public to view safely (no mention of possible arrest or crime committed). This is a remarkable act from one of the most controlling local police forces in the country, protecting commercial and public buildings and sites in the ‘Square Mile’, where any other graffiti, art or unauthorised pieces would guarantee swift removal and prosecution. This consecutive series cleverly ensured daily coverage in the press and media, with the graffiti described as ‘artworks, murals and installations’, whilst the tag ‘artist’ who added his or her own composition was labelled as a ‘mindless vandal’. In another scenario, in Banksy’s home town of Bristol, one of his early works, Well Hung Lover (2006), depicting a man hanging from a window ledge as a cheated rival searches for him while a woman stands by, features on the side of a Grade II listed house now being sold at auction. The sale will include a covenant that the image cannot be removed from the building, although the owner is not required to maintain or insure it against the elements.

Lombard goes further in response to the question of whether the governance of graffiti changed since its more reactive origins. She uses the concept of governmentality (Lombard 2013) or what Gordon (1991, after Foucault 1991) coined “the conduct of conduct” to analyse how graffiti is currently controlled, arguing that while there appears to be a softening of policy and responses towards graffiti, this does not mean that there is less concern, but that this marks a greater acceptance of graffiti due to the effects of a neo-liberal form of governance. Chang also notes the emergence of the countervailing terms—‘post-graffiti’ and ‘neo-graffiti’ ‘signalling some kind of qualitative and stylistic shift in modes of inscribing the city. Encompassing multiple forms or urban inscription like murals, postering and sculpture that move beyond written text… (which) mark the spectacular nature of urban space’ (Chang 2013, p. 217). She critiques the work of artist Blu, who painstakingly paints and photographs over existing graffiti (representing a single film frame) and then turns these into remarkable street life animations (see www.blublu.org). This is one example of artists transforming graffiti into a moving image while drawing and building on its everyday street art nature. This also represents an important cultural practice of capturing and creating graffiti art in a different non-ephemeral form—important with so much street art being time-limited and subject to clean-up, defacing, deterioration due to the weather, etc. Archives of graffiti art also seek to document this work alongside publications and films in a variety of media (DeNotto 2014), including Flickr, bombingscience and Graff.Funk, mixing with online graffiti gallery and equipment sales sites.

4. Street Art as Placemaking

In cities, and in placemaking efforts, urban space is lived and projected through its associated images and symbols (Lefebvre 1991), together with other senses, which stress the essential experiential nature of the relationship with our everyday environment and our identification with discrete places and spaces. In this sense we do not ‘use’ a work of art or our urban environment as consumers (as with branded products), but we experience it individually, productively (i.e., in/through work) and collectively, albeit with diminishing influence over the (re)construction of the public spaces we inhabit—including the presence of graffiti. What is becoming evident therefore is that graffiti and street art have become established visual forms which cities both adopt and project as part of their identity and their destination marketing mix. Street art is therefore now an emerging strategy for placemaking and distinguishing particular areas, which takes it out of its criminogenic roots (Ross 2016a). With the use of international and established artists however (particularly those that use the same images/characters), this distinction is soon lost to a ubiquitous style of work, much like touring art and museum exhibitions worldwide unless based on a local vernacular (e.g., artist, theme, style, subjects).

Given its longevity and duality, attitudes of city residents towards graffiti and street art are also changing—and ambivalent. These not surprisingly also vary within cities, with some neighbourhoods, sites and buildings treated differently in terms of surveillance, prosecution, protection and celebration. For example, in the Colombian capital, Bogota, following the death of a young street artist shot by police in 2011, a new tolerance of street art emerged (Brodzinsky 2013). The city mayor issued a decree to promote the practice of graffiti as a form of artistic and cultural expression, while at the same time defining surfaces that are off limits, including monuments and public buildings. City grants are available for selected artists with two-, three- and even seven-storey walls provided along the main thoroughfares as their canvases. The result is colourful displays with political and social messages. Everyday graffiti has also spread under this liberal regime including on buildings prohibited from writing. This indicates the difficulty of controlling graffiti in this way without rules being observed and the appeal to marking untouched surfaces and public spaces. Local Colombian street artist Praxis uses his stencils and murals to protest against animal cruelty and promote veganism but prefers to work in neighbourhoods without graffiti or street art (seeing little distinction between the two, with both writers and street artists collaborating in practice).

Lisbon is another city that has embraced street art as it tried to move out of austerity and recession (GAU 2014). Large-scale pieces and murals adorn public buildings and industrial districts (Figure 4), which range from artistic and decorative work to protest images and messages.

Here, local artists such as Alexandre Farto (also known as ‘Vhils’) are celebrated and combine the aesthetics of vandalism with social comment. Rather than spray can and stencil, Vhils carves into the render of the walls of buildings using electric drills to produce large scale portraits, often of local community members, and also works on utility installations. As a sign of his acceptance into the city art establishment, his inaugural exhibition was held at the opening of a new art museum based in a converted electricity station Museu Da Electricidade (Figure 5).

Vhils can also be seen as a portrait artist working in community-based art. His pre-production process includes interviews with and photographing of local subjects who are subsequently celebrated in his large-scale pieces. As with Banksy, whose pre-prepared stencils form the basis of his wall art, Vhils photographs are digitally edited, then transferred to the wall and then etched through his drilling method. Another portrait-based graffiti-ist is the Brazilian, Bruna, a female street artist who also specialises in local characters, primarily women, including close-ups of their faces, eyes, etc. Reflecting the extreme gender imbalance in street artists and their recognition, Chinagirl Tile, an Austrian street artist, held the first street art and graffiti festival for women, Hands Off the Wal, in 2016. Chinagirl works in ceramics, using bone china, depicting animals and other characters, further demonstrating the diversity and plurality of the form (Ho et al. 2024).

In post-communist Romania, the capital Bucharest and regional cities have also witnessed an explosion of street art in the last five years in a system that formerly neither tolerated nor recognised the form, aside from political slogans. Its long transition, social and economic, has seen large areas and sites become redundant and heritage buildings demolished and in decline in both city centre and outer areas. With the new freedoms associated with the country’s membership of the European Union in 2007, several initiatives have encouraged the use of street art and murals to brighten this ‘grey city’, and today, street art is credited with transforming new spaces in the city and reinventing areas. It is seen, optimistically, to support hospitality, cultural and creative industries in animating and generating a sense of place that was previously lacking (Cercleux 2021). In Vhils’ home city Lisbon, peripheral neighbourhoods such as Quinta doi Mocho feature in bottom-up cultural tourism initiatives that operate though social media and site-specific public art projects that are ‘mutually developing a renewed economy of attention and system of valorization’ (Castellano and Raposo 2024, p. 533).

Elsewhere, the commissioning of young artists to adorn corporate buildings presents an alternative to the typical public art installation. In Frankfurt, during the 2012 construction of the European Central Bank headquarters, the forty-five storey building was surrounded by a high, protective fence. A local social worker, Stefan Mohr, approached the bank, which agreed to allow him and the ‘troubled’ young children he works with to spray paint a wooden fence that they erected around the site (with few other legal spots for graffiti available in the city): ‘all we wanted to do was find a place for kids to express themselves and show the public that graffiti is art, not vandalism’ (in Neate 2013). With no control or censorship of the content imposed by the bank, European street artists and graffiti writers also took the opportunity to produce works depicting caricatures of the ECB President Mario Draghi and the then Chancellor Merkel (60 per cent of the works reflected the Eurozone crisis, with graffiti writers from Greece, Spain and Portugal, countries particularly affected by the Eurozone financial crisis) and fighting cocks that were displayed within the building when it opened. Baldini sees these ironical and satirical visual representations as carnivalesque strategies of resistance against globalising market forces and financial power (Baldini 2015), whilst acknowledging that they neither follow a programmatic agent nor present coherent alternatives to the status quo. Several of the graffiti artworks from what became an open-air gallery (Brighenti 2016, p. 164) have been purchased via the Under Art Construction programme, ironically, by bankers, such as New York-based hedge fund managers Daniel Shuchman and Michael Dell. The city mayor (a former youth worker) called on other construction sites to emulate this project.

Other ‘meanwhile sites’—vacant or under-utilised premises and spaces—are also the subject of sanctioned graffiti since these can not only animate otherwise ugly hoardings but also prevent/dissuade opportunistic graffiti, as well as divert attention from permanent structures. Meanwhile, usage can be unofficial (illegal) occupation (such as graffiti) (Leyssen 2018) or be granted via temporary licences (much like licenced street art walls) in the period before new owners/landlords move in or as a precursor to regeneration and ‘clean-up’; for example, in Amsterdam, the former Royal Dutch Shell European headquarter awaits redevelopment with temporary occupation by dance event organisers (Figure 6). This part of the city known as Amsterdam-Noord also represents a new creative quarter, served by frequent free ferries from behind the main station, where a cluster of digital media workshops and arts and entertainment venues has replaced this industrial complex and working class district (Evans 2014). In this case, graffiti art might signify transition, fun and creativity—rather than degradation and social unrest, as it might have done in the past. In many situations, it signals a start to a gentrification process whether at a meanwhile stage, as part of resistance and presaging new developments or even celebrating the new or newly conceived place itself.

In the 20th arrondisement of Paris, Belleville is associated with a concentration of artists and clubs and a street scene that accommodates local street art. Since the 1980s, Belleville’s walls have become a go-to spot for graffiti artists across generations, which now double as a stage for both unsanctioned street art and participatory urban art projects (Figure 7). Here, as in other sites, it is not always possible for a casual visitor to distinguish between consented and commissioned work, e.g., murals, and aconsensual graffiti and street art. A Montreal-based graffitist noted, ‘The difference between graffiti and a mural, in my opinion, is that one is spontaneous and the other planned. That’s all. Otherwise it’s all creative expression’ (Proulx 2008). Whilst some artists now autograph their work and city and tourist agencies ‘trademark’ their licenced sites (e.g., Graffiti^®madrid.es), most street art is anonymous unless identifiable by its particular style, signature or subject, but even here, may still be subject to copying. The common use of cartoon, film or comic book characters also lessens both originality and any sense of place or subversion.

The dialectic between crime and art and between control and tolerance in practice (McAuliffe and Iveson 2011; Taylor and Marais 2009) is therefore played out in a continuum along which city authorities, the public and graffiti and street artists move as taste, opinion (including local and national media) and place identities shift over time. This can represent a hardening as well as a softening and instrumental use of street art as we have seen it being increasingly used in city branding and placemaking efforts and strategies. The public is of course no longer homogenous as major cosmopolitan cities and historic towns mix tourists and a range of business, education and leisure visitors with residents and commuting workers from many countries, with differing aesthetic and moral positions. The perspective of, for example, an overseas tourist to street art/graffiti may be one of attraction, branded image, and signifier of a cool place or one of fear, decline and poor aesthetic value/appeal. To a resident, the same images may form part of their everyday experience, represent local identity (theirs or others—good, bad or indifferent) or even align with the visitor’s view. These urban imaginaries thus become heterotopian spaces in the Foucauldian sense, representing a particular place, but one experienced over, and in, space-time (Massey 1999; Unwin 2000).

It is more likely, however, that the local resident will engage in a deeper, knowing way, depending on the length of time the graffiti has been there, where it is placed (i.e., on what type of building or structure) and its meaning to them, if any. Graffiti and street art are certainly increasingly being identified with a sense of place than was the case before—aside from the previous tags and territorial/gang variety which are more likely to be cleaned up by city authorities. The attraction of place to graffiti artists is reciprocal. Cities in flux such as post-reunification Berlin were perceived as a ‘graffiti Mecca of the urban art world, the most “bombed” city on Europe’ (Trice, in Arms 2011). Here, its acceptance/approval was associated with Berlin’s designation as UNESCO City of Design and as a growing cultural tourist destination, which is in part fuelled by this urban image of street creativity. This includes international artists, including graffiti artists, whose work moves from street to gallery to street and, of course, via social media. In cities such as Sydney, the creative city and class discourse (Florida 2005) and policies towards public art have also provided ‘opportunities to resignify graffiti as productive creative practice’ (McAuliffe 2012, p. 189).

This is no less the case in London’s East End which has historically been the location and destination for artists and crafts production outside of the walls of the city of London and restrictive control of the craft guilds (Evans 2024). Hackney Wick, in East London, hosts a high concentration of practising artists who work from studios, in temporary gallery spaces, a cluster of industrial buildings and canalside heritage spaces. This concentration has been accelerated as studios have been demolished to make way for the adjoining Olympic facilities and park and new housing in the post-event phase of development, as the cost of workspace has increased in other parts of London. This landscape and post-industrial canvas have provided an opportunity for graffiti artists to create large scale works and also to express their displeasure at the gentrification of this neighbourhood, which may also lead to their eventual displacement (Figure 8).

The neighbourhood also hosted an annual arts festival, Hackney WICKed, and is promoted as a visitor destination by the local authority, the Canals and Rivers Trust and the Olympic Park authority, who see their mission as ‘stitching together’ these divided neighbourhoods and communities and, in the words of the local development corporation, ‘through design quality to create a unique and inspiring place for events, leisure, sport and culture, a hub for enterprise and innovation, and diverse sustainable communities’ (LLDC 2014, p. 5). Smith observes, ‘It’s as if the street art has been given the responsibility of preserving the Wick’s soul as it’s squeezed on all sides by colossal tectonic pressures of redevelopment’ (Lewisohn 2013, p. 5). The agencies that control and legitimise this newly-promoted district have also commissioned graffiti artists to decorate local buildings as part of a curated5 Canal Project initiative which engaged international (as opposed to local) artists (Figure 9).

This project was however met with outrage by local graffiti and other artists and residents, following what had already had been a graffiti clean-up of the area prior to the 2012 Olympics. To add insult to injury, several artists from Brazil, the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy were funded to produce artworks on these same buildings. The funding agency stated: ‘we unashamedly wanted to showcase the best international artists and transform this part of the canal into a destination for street art—I hope people will come on boat tours to see the work’ (in Evans 2016, p. 178). However, local graffiti artist Sweet Toof retorted: ‘with the commercialisation of street art it’s becoming pay-as-you-go wall—every surface sold off to the highest bidder’ (Wainwright 2013). Placemaking that adopts graffiti as an expression of distinction and the vernacular may therefore need to develop strategies which treat such work as part of the area’s built heritage and community culture (Figure 8), and Merrill goes further, suggesting that graffiti and street art should be perceived as an example of ‘alternative heritage’ whose authenticity might only be assured by avoiding the application of official heritage frameworks (Merrill 2014). Whilst extensive graffiti in Hackney Wick attracts both visitors and other graffitists (and over-writing), local residents perceive this intrusion into their urban environment as negative and potentially threatening, engendering ‘fear of crime’ (Edizel 2017), and this highlights a fundamental challenge to both graffiti and even commissioned ‘street art’. There is no community engagement or consultation with local residents and users (including workers) or any role for them in the selection of either content, style or location. This differs from public art commissions which can be subject to citizen votes and local competition and selection.

In another rejuvenated district, located in London’s city fringe, the Shoreditch imaginary combines the post-industrial use of workshops and factories with small crafts and retail outlets, social housing and warehouse loft apartments—and extensive street art on this historic mix of buildings and walls. This has offered an effective graffiti street laboratory within which aspiring artists such as Banksy and Stik first experimented (Figure 10 and Figure 11). As an indication of the importance of street art, several companies provide guided Shoreditch street art tours, with online galleries and listing of artist/artwork profiles: ‘in Shoreditch art is an en plein air affair. From huge murals on buildings to tiny stickers you’ll spot everywhere, the streets are fair game. Who knows, you might even spot a new Banksy’ (Shoreditch Urban Walkabout 2014). As in New York, specialist galleries and agencies also provide commissioning services for clients wishing to hire graffiti and street artists for temporary or permanent work—such as Graffiti Life and Graffiti Kings. The time of the professional graffiti artist and intermediary has therefore come, signalling the inclusion of this practice into the growth-generating creative industries.

This urban district has evolved from a working (class) workshop area servicing the city and its low income residents to a ‘techno-creative habitus’ that ‘presents itself as a loose association of the digerati for whom ‘Shoreditch is a state of mind’ (Foord 2013, p. 57), and within which established graffiti artists mingle and make their street art with impunity (but neither commissioned nor condoned). With the off-beat night-life and café culture supported by this local ecosystem, artists are also guaranteed a growing visitor audience; however, as Foord also observes the following: ‘The gulf between the aspirations of the digerati and those of local communities who are confronted daily by the impacts of recession are unlikely to lessen’ (ibid., p. 59). Graffiti artists increasingly have an ambivalent place in this situation and have in effect joined the other producers of space (Lefebvre 1991) in this self-reverential creative district (Evans 2024). In many ways, graffiti and street art have been overtaken or absorbed into the concept and practice of creative placemaking (Markusen and Gadwa 2010) which seeks to bring together arts and cultural organisations, firms and residents to capture and empower their cultural aspirations, assets and resources and through socially engaged practice, articulate, co-design and co-produce cultural spaces and programmes. Street artists can have a role in this of course, for instance, through community murals, safe walls and commissions and by working with and depicting local characters and events, as discussed here, but the essential authentic, subversive, transgressive, autonomous and individual (and self-promoting) nature of much street art/artists (Jein 2012) seems to contradict this form of a priori engagement and redistribution of power over place, leaving the ’users’ of urban space powerless or at least passive recipients and voyeurs.

5. Conclusions

Graffiti and street art have a complex and ambivalent place in the city. Clearly a duality now exists between ‘high’ street art and (un)popular graffiti. Technically, street art is an illegal activity unless fully commissioned and authorised by property owners and other stakeholders (notably transport and local authorities), but tolerance is evident in cities and areas of a city where either control has diminished or a general laissez faire situation exists. There are currently cities where economic decline and socio-political fragmentation has reduced the power and resources for clean-up or enforcement; for example, in Athens (see Avramidis 2012), the vacuum this has created is also fuelled by political response and resistance to the governance deficit and economic impacts, (e.g., unemployment, debt, cuts in services). Other cities equally affected by the severe economic recession, such as Bogota, Bucharest and Lisbon, have adopted a more creative approach, as discussed above. Graffiti can thus provide key communicative functions through its visual and performative forms—as resistance, particularly from those lacking a voice or power and by providing early warnings of tensions and conflicts, territorial demarcation and even place-marking/making and community memorialization (Migeon and Vogel 2024).

However, in areas undergoing transformation or in interstitial post-industrial zones, where landowners are distant or unconcerned (and property values are not threatened in the short-term), graffiti and street art flourished, as in East London—until clearance, rebuilding and gentrification inevitably occurred as the city grew eastwards to accommodate an expanding population and mega-events such as the 2012 Olympics. More cosmopolitan neighbourhoods, such as Beyoglu in Istanbul, also provide a concentration of street art in a more liberal, if contested, territory than what may be permitted elsewhere in the city (Erdoğan 2014, 2017). In other cities, areas such as Amsterdam’s main university district, are subject(ed) to extensive graffiti, indicating a combination of tolerance, complacency and placemaking by its mainly student residents. This is also evident in more protest-oriented university zones in cities such as Athens, but this also extends to areas around government buildings and conflict zones, including sites where the deaths of protesters have occurred (Avramidis 2012). Graffiti—political, philosophical and poetic—featured of course in the 1968 Paris uprising, starting in the Sorbonne, and captured at the time in The Walls Have the Floor by Julien Besançon, who collected images before the walls were painted over. Elsewhere, street art is seen in commercially driven commissioning, installations and contemporary art interventions in downtown, retail and other locations undergoing gentrification (e.g., Dumbo, Brooklyn, New York), particularly in temporary sites.

Graffiti still persists, however, as a dominant image in derelict sites and in accessible transport facilities and is still associated in this case with decline, insecurity and redundancy. Saturation of street art on extensive surfaces in an area, including over-writing, can also unduly dominate the physical environment, effacing individuality and any sense of place. In other areas, street art reflects a creative quarterisation of a neighbourhood and effectively helps to add value to its image and distinctive brand. This is not limited to larger cities and urban centres however. For example, in central Portugal, the two-week long Covilho Urban (sic) Art Festival was first held in 2011 in this rural university town overlooked by the Serra da Estrela mountains. Here, the WOOL on Residence brings together national graffiti artists and local artists to produce murals across the town, including references to the area’s sheep-rearing roots and wool textile design and manufacturing. Street art has also been embraced in rural Italian villages as an effort in placemaking involving residents and local businesses in order to preserve local identity and revitalise local economies, but this is reliant on international rather than local artists (Bruni and Kompaniets 2024). These ‘non-urban’ locations reflect both the ubiquity and wide appeal of street art and Lefebvre’s claim in The Urban Revolution that Society has become completely urbanised: ‘when the search for solutions and modalities unique to urban society are foremost’ (Lefebvre 2003, p. 5).

An indication of graffiti and street art’s arrival and enviable status is also provided by celebrated contemporary British artist, Grayson Perry, on the launch of the Art Everywhere scheme which placed selected artwork images on over 30,000 billboard and poster sites across the UK: ‘given that street art was everywhere these days, it was nice to put gallery art on the streets’ (Brown 2014, p. 11); in other words, if you can’t beat them, join them. Emulating this initiative, for a month in 2023, the work of eleven artists appeared on thousands of billboards and digital screens across the UK (sponsored by advertising site companies), which aimed to ‘create a new kind of cultural institution, challenging traditional models of viewing and thinking about art. A different kind of national gallery: free and accessible, without walls…out in the “wild” not in a gallery’ (O’Callaghan 2023, p. 2). Street art has of course been doing this for decades but in a non-curated, unself-conscious manner.

Thus, street art has, on the one hand, joined the canon of contemporary art and the art market—if treated with caution and ambivalence by graffiti artists themselves (Brighenti 2010)—and has been appropriated in commercial advertising and media and in sanctioned placemaking efforts; on the other hand, graffiti in its basic (‘authentic’) form continues to inhabit the everyday city environment as a low-level “noise” and nuisance for many, which serves as an almost endless canvas for its producers and ambivalent hosts.