First Published:
13 Jun 2024, 5:42 pm
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First Published:
13 Jun 2024, 5:42 pm
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Sabina Andron, Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City: Space, Materiality and the Normative, Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2024; 212 pp.: ISBN: 978-1-032-59751-5, £36.99 (pbk)
Graffiti has long been a topic of writing in urban studies. Marks on surfaces, that often appear overnight, and are constantly changing, have fascinated observers for a number of reasons. Writers have considered their aesthetics, their anti-establishment provocations, their challenge to property and their alleged links to serious crime through the largely discredited ‘broken windows’ hypothesis (Bloch, 2020; Cresswell, 1992; Dickens, 2008; Ley and Cybriwksy, 1974). Scholars have fixated on the status of graffiti both as a lively form of art, apparently emerging from ‘below’, and as a form of deviance and criminality. While some have been happy to observe, map and critique graffiti, others have conducted elaborate ethnographies of graffiti artists as one of a long list of urban subcultures (Lesh, 2022). Given this crowded field it is surprising, therefore, that Sabina Andron has been able to write an account of graffiti that departs from all of these and adds something genuinely new to this hefty corpus.
Andron develops her original approach to understanding graffiti in Chapter 1, ‘Surface Semiotics’. It is here that she asks us to pay attention to the role that surfaces play in urban environments. The chapter mixes recent theoretical explorations of the idea of ‘surface’ with close-up examinations of actual urban surfaces – surfaces that have tactile layering of paint and paper. She tells us that there has long been an idea of plain white surfaces as the ultimate form of urban order. On pages 32–33, we encounter three images of white surfaces all dramatically different from each other – with patches of weathering and blistering paint. Then she shows us layers peeling, revealing palimpsests of former inscription and decoration. The surface, it turns out, is layered. Graffiti, then, forms part of this layering – and it is in the layering of inscriptions that Andron finds a kind of urban commons where graffiti jostles with other graffiti as well as more formal or allowable kinds of inscription. While it is obvious that graffiti exists on surfaces, Andron pays more attention to these surfaces as sites of dialogue than previous work on graffiti has done. The book is as much about surfaces as it is about graffiti.
In Chapter 2, ‘Beyond Art and Crime’, Andron provides a typology of urban inscriptions linking the tags of graffitists to street art and murals. Part of her point is to show how the democratic liveliness of graffiti as layered and temporary inscription has been co-opted and neutralised by apolitical, or even straightforwardly commercial, simulations of the graffiti spirit – a process she calls ‘artwashing’. Her discussion of murals and muralism paints them as part of a corporate process of aesthetic co-option marked by ‘compliance, convenience, and political neutrality – all the attributes that graffiti never had in its engagement with the city’ (p. 93). This argument reflects Andron’s London-centric perspective perhaps. Elsewhere, murals have a long history of being very political and pointedly anti-establishment. The story of murals in Mexico since the 1920s, for instance, would be one of constant political engagement and provocation. A walk around Manhattan’s Lower East Side includes encounters with murals depicting victims of police violence. Even in the celebrated mural district of San Francisco’s Mission District, complete with its community-led mural tours, you will see murals imagining the end of capitalism and calls for social, environmental and economic justice. While these are clearly not graffiti, they are nonetheless far from apolitical.
Chapter 3 focuses on graffiti’s relationship to law and, as such, represents a novel contribution to the field of critical legal geography. Surfaces in cities are configured as either public or private. They are part of the materiality of property and often form the boundary between one kind of property and another. It is on surfaces, Andron tells us, that graffiti intervenes in urban lawscapes and becomes categorised as crime. The chapter provides a very detailed account of various sets of legal codes, mostly in the UK and USA, that have explicitly attempted to criminalise graffiti while allowing other forms of inscription such as advertising. Criminalisation has rested on the idea of damage to property, aesthetic disruption, causing offence, links to more serious crimes (broken windows hypothesis) and a host of other rationales. Andron’s argument is that graffiti forms part of a tenuous urban commons and conflict over surfaces is part of a process of spatial justice. She returns to her focus on the thick materiality of surfaces, arguing that:
The thicker the surface, the harder for the law to issue comprehensive mechanisms to control it, and so surfaces become a third type of space in between the public and the private. They are common; it’s not yours but you can touch: you (too) can make some rules, although you are not the owner. Open to access and vulnerable to conflict, surfaces as commons are sites of tactile engagement and spatial co-production where censorship and exclusion are co-designed out of the picture. (p. 152)
Chapter 4 is a case study of the play of graffiti and surfaces in one particular place – Leake Street in London’s Southbank arts district. This once neglected space has become a site where graffiti is allowed and encouraged. In some senses, Andron’s choice of this street works against her wider argument about the surface commons and her provocation that ‘design a place for street art, and you will have designed street art out of the place’ (p. 108). It is a site that has become part of the Southbank spectacle that also includes a well-known, and often threatened, site for skateboarders to perform in front of the tourists. Nevertheless, the street is a site where Andron effectively mobilises all the ideas she has generated in the previous chapters.
The writing in the book is spirited, engaging and rarely dry. At the end of each chapter, for instance, Andron includes lists of manifesto-like proposals with provocations such as ‘a neutral surface mode does not exist’ (p. 45). Academic writing often likes to swim in nuance and ambivalence. Many academic books are long versions of the well-worn phrase, ‘it’s complicated’. Andron’s direct style of argumentation is refreshing and invites disagreement in its directness. One of her strategies was to design an interview for a wall. She asked a number of scholars (including me) to suggest questions they would like to address to a wall and reproduces these questions as a kind of interview schedule. This request reflects the fact that Andron decided not to conduct an ethnography of graffiti writers but, instead, to ask questions of surfaces. By doing this, she redirects our focus away from the agency of writers and towards the agency of things – surfaces, place, text, image. It is precisely here that the book’s considerable originality lies, but it also takes agency away from a group of people whose voice is rarely heard outside of their marks on walls.
The book is beautifully illustrated with Andron’s own photographs, in colour throughout. These photographs have been overlaid, graffiti-like, with words directing the reader to think about the ways that surfaces can hold multiple meanings and how graffiti sits alongside all kinds of other urban markings from advertisements to road signs. In addition to reminding the reader of graffiti itself – words applied to the surface of the photograph – the images also remind us of memes. They are clever and arresting. Towards the end of the book, in the Leake Street chapter, we encounter a series of images taken of the same spot every day for 100 days. The effect is a Muybridge-like simulation of the processes of change that occur on an urban surface. I encourage readers to look at the animated versions of this and other similar exercises on the connected website –https://sabinaandron.com/leake-street/. In other places, we encounter frames where pictures should be, but no picture. Andron uses this strategy to underline the layers of legal copyright protection that increasingly apply to seeming public images. Again – very clever. Routledge should be congratulated for producing a book with so many colour images – a rare thing these days.
Andron’s book is a treasure. It turns out not to be just another book about graffiti but, rather, a meditation on urban surfaces. The combination of smart use of theory and detailed observation revealed in both the text and (especially) the photographs made me think harder about the role of surfaces in the city. It has made me stop and look with new eyes at the thick layering of the surfaces that surround me. They are not blank pages waiting to be written on but textured plains of dense materiality and meaning – sites, as Andron reminds us, where conflicting forms of discourse happen on a daily basis. Part, perhaps, of a precarious urban commons.
Bloch S (2020) Broken windows ideology and the (mis)reading of graffiti. Critical Criminology 28(4): 703–720. Crossref; Google Scholar
Cresswell T (1992) The crucial ‘where’ of graffiti: A geographical analysis of reactions to graffiti in New York. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10(3): 329–344. Crossref; ISI; Google Scholar
Dickens L (2008) Placing post-graffiti: The journey of the Peckham Rock. cultural geographies 15(4): 471–496. Crossref; ISI; Google Scholar
Lesh CN (2022) The Writing of Where: Graffiti and the Production of Writing Spaces. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Crossref; Google Scholar
Ley D, Cybriwksy R (1974) Urban graffiti as territorial markers. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 64(4): 491–505. Crossref; Google Scholar
If you enjoyed this review, the following articles published in Urban Studies might also be of interest:
Culture and authenticity in urban regeneration processes: Place branding in central Barcelona by Joaquim Rius Ulldemolins
Joaquim Rius Ulldemolins defends the idea that the symbolic processes of urban branding are not a simple consequence of infrastructure creation or the will to strengthen urban governance.
Legal Walls and Professional Paths: The Mobilities of Graffiti Writers in Sydney by Cameron McAuliffe
Through an investigation of the workings of the contemporary politics of legal graffiti walls in Sydney, this paper aims to show the ways in which graffiti writers are variously included and excluded in networks of mobility.