Legitimising Graffiti Writing in Contemporary Urban Aesthetic Governance

Originated as external to, if not in contrast to, the field of urban planning, informal creative practices, such as graffiti writing, are now central in the discourses of urban planners and their modus operandi (Vivant, 2020). Thus, cultural governmentality, “endogenizing” spaces of critique (Boltanksy and Chiapello, 1999), seems to compel actors with a critical view of urban planning to adapt. Nonetheless, by occupying ordinary or unused spaces, artists offer a singular experience outside of the predetermined, routine frameworks of an increasingly standardized and domesticated city (Chatterton, 2002).

Theorists of aesthetic capitalism (Bohme, 2010, 2017; Murphy and de la Fuente, 2014) highlight the relevance of the visual and the aesthetics for value extraction, stressing the neoliberal nature of current Western cities management of urban order. However, more generally, spatial aesthetics refers to an analysis that focuses on the sensory aspects of our experience as users of a specific space (Carmo et al., 2014).

Graffiti occupies "in-between" places, and rhymes with an aesthetic of "infestation".The ‘in place/out of place’ dialectic is thus central for claims to legitimacy, legality, and intrinsic quality of a given instance of graffiti. Who are the subjects allowed to legitimately assess graffiti, which are the rules and the logics they deploy, and which are the power relations that come into play in this process? To tackle this question, I look at how graffiti concretely relates to the environments in which it features, activating a repertoire of valorisation strategies (including defacement, unsafety, subversion, authenticity, originality, creativity, fame etc.) and engaging a dialectic co-construction of the legal framework of urban surfaces, shedding light on the “lawscape” of cities.