Talking Walls: What Graffiti Should be Saved?
MusicEntertainment / Music 4 months ago 30 Views 0 comments
These days, town halls tend to equate unsanctioned graffiti with vandalism, identifying it as a costly “problem” or eyesore. All too often local administrations prioritize the quick removal of graffiti, following the lead of the now defunct broken windows theory, proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, which claims that visible disorder such as graffiti encourages further crime. It’s a theory which anti-graffiti warriors love to quote ad infinitum, particularly followers of the Keep America Beautiful movement, and its ex-sidekick Graffiti Hurts, as well as similar organizations which have popped up throughout the world.
In response to the officially sanctioned whitewashing of graffiti which appeared in Cuenca during the October 2019 indigenous protests in Ecuador, I worked on a research project for the University of Azuay in southern Ecuador evaluating graffiti management strategies being used in different cities across the globe. The aim was to understand other ways in which the Municipality could have reacted. In essence the project was an attempt to answer a question posed by Dr. Richard Clay in the BBC FOUR documentary A Brief History of Graffiti: “Should we always succumb to the knee-jerk reaction of scrubbing it off?”
Cleaning graffiti which states...
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