Canadian mural in Vancouver - art on a wall
by Mateja Mihinjac
Recently, while walking through a pedestrian underpass in my neighbourhood, I noticed something felt different. Looking more closely, I realised that overnight the walls and stairwells had been covered with new artistic murals. It was a refreshing change in an underpass designated as one of Ljubljana’s 20 legal graffiti locations.
Yet, as I continued, something very different emerged: tags, symbols, barely comprehensible writing on buildings, garages, benches, and bins. Unlike public art, these are commonly experienced as vandalism and can negatively affect perceptions of place and safety.
I wondered: if cities provide legal places for graffiti, why does illegal tagging remain so widespread?
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| Arrrgh.... Pirates in Piran, Slovenia |
DO GRAFFITI PROGRAMS WORK?
Ljubljana has addressed graffiti for years. Its Human, protect your city campaign, launched in 2015, includes a graffiti management strategy. It integrates education, removal, enforcement and designated legal spaces intended to support creative expression while reducing vandalism.
Yet, a 2016 study by Pahor and Zupančič concluded that the designated legal graffiti spaces had not produced a noticeable decrease in graffiti, although the authors viewed legal walls positively.
Evidence for other conventional responses is similarly mixed. Some prevention specialists recommend rapid removal because it reduces the time a graffiti artist receives recognition from their tag. Some prevention guides identify rapid removal as one important response, such as guidebooks from the International CPTED Association and the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing
However, research from inner-city Sydney found that removal policies frequently result in displaced behaviours. Despite criminological claims about crime displacement as minor or rare, the Sydney research shows how taggers can change the location and form of graffiti, encouraging “quick and dirty” forms of graffiti such as tags and stickers rather than more elaborate work.
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| Underpasses are notorious graffiti attractors |
Legal graffiti walls present a similar dilemma. Kobayashi’s research found that legal walls may initially reduce illegal graffiti but, as with the Sydney conclusions on displacement, they can be associated with tagging increases in the immediate vicinity and increases over time.
Kobayashi showed how walls can fill quickly, become practice spaces, or have little influence on taggers attracted to the illegal nature of graffiti. Some interviewees in Kobayashi’s research confirmed that access to legal walls would not stop them from painting illegally.
CPTED offers another set of tools: improving maintenance and visibility, strengthening guardianship and signs of ownership, controlling access, and making surfaces more difficult to tag. Recent research with active taggers suggests that, when tailored to specific places, CPTED measures can influence where they choose to tag.
But if even well-established approaches produce mixed results, perhaps the problem is not simply the intervention.
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| Underpass life in Sao Paulo, Brasil |
MISSING THE MARK - TARGETING MOTIVATION
Cities may be solving the wrong graffiti problem.
Morgan and Louis stress that effective responses should consider what type of graffiti is occurring, who produces it, why they do it and which places are targeted, rather than applying a generic anti-graffiti strategy.
Graffiti writers are not a homogeneous group. Nearly nine years ago, in When Walls Speak – Socio-Political Graffiti in Ljubljana, I distinguished tagging from socio-political graffiti. I described graffiti as a form of bottom-up political expression and public dialogue. For political activists, communication is the point.
Conversely, for taggers, visibility and recognition generates identity status and promotes excitement from risk-taking, particularly when recognisable tags appear repeatedly in highly visible or difficult-to-reach locations.
Tagging can be a reflection of rebellion and a way to interact with peers. When that is the case, a legal wall may not work. It may satisfy someone who wants to paint and create cultural infrastructure. However, it won't satisfy someone who wants to tag for other reasons, like political messaging.
Before choosing the best intervention, the first step is to identify which graffiti problem needs solving.
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| Brussels street corner tagged and ugly |
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
Some graffiti can enrich neighbourhood culture and expression. But excessive, unwanted graffiti can exceed what Second-Generation CPTED describes as the tipping point, or the neighbourhood’s carrying capacity. It might signal declining social ownership and stewardship and, as CPTED practitioners know very well, that is never a good thing in regards to crime.
Kobayashi’s experiments suggest we need a neighbourhood-based approach. In two studies, residents, artists and local stakeholders worked together to create murals and maintain them over time. Those sites experienced substantially less graffiti for over two years, something you rarely see in paint-outs or target hardening.
In both Japanese experiments, participatory murals produced more encouraging results than simply providing walls where graffiti was legal.
Instead of asking where to put more legal graffiti walls, we might ask a different question: why do taggers keep returning to particular places? What attracts them, and what might change that?
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| Murals are seldom tagged, this U.S. example was |
In SafeGrowth we ask a simple question: Why keep hacking at the branches when it is possible to dig at the roots? The answer may lie less in removing graffiti or controlling space and more in getting local people involved in owning the problems in their places.
Legal walls may still have an important role. However, graffiti prevention needs to begin with the behaviour, place and social neighbourhood surrounding it and not with bricks in the wall.
