Legal Walls and Professional Paths: The Mobilities of Graffiti Writers in Sydney

Abstract

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. The analysis considers three lenses on mobility—spatial mobility, social mobility and policy mobilities—in order to interrogate the processes of socio-spatial exclusion faced by young (and not so young) graffiti writers, and the way that mobility can change as writers shift through complex youth–adult transitions. In post-industrial cities like Sydney, engaging the rhetoric of creative cities, the changing landscape of government policy, legislation and funded programmes has implications for the mobility of graffiti writers, with older, more experienced, graffiti writers able to draw on their network capital to facilitate mobile lives, while younger, less experienced, graffiti writers become further fixed in space, less mobile and more prone to the travails of social exclusion.

Introduction: Youth and the Mobilities Paradigm

Geographers and sociologists have recognised the importance of research that investigates the interrelationships between youth and mobility, noting that young people are subject to manifold micro politics of mobility and immobility that differentiate their experiences of urban spaces from the experiences of adults (Barker et al., 2009; see also Barker, 2009; Benwell, 2009; Harker, 2009). Increasingly, in cities characterised as dangerous places (Pain and Smith, 2008), young people’s movements are curtailed. Keeping children safe has driven an increasing tendency to limit movement, by helicopter parents who increase their passive and active surveillance (Holdsworth, 2009) and by authorities who are urged to exercise a duty of care which often results in limiting youth mobility (Malone, 2002). Taking a critical view of urban youth mobilities provides insight into the processes that circumscribe the presence of young people and thereby impact upon youth subjectivities.

Sheller and Urry (2006) point to a new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences that draws critical attention to the normative sedentarist frames used to analyse social phenomena. They urge a greater consideration of mobility, fluidity or liquidity (see Bauman, 2000) in order to move beyond totalising or reductive explanations of the world. A focus on mobility helps to cross the boundaries and to draw connections between places, to map a relational understanding of places as part of the complex networks of flows (Castells, 1996). Mobility does not exist beyond the material; it is “always located and materialised, and occurs through mobilisations of locality and rearrangements of the materiality of places” (Sheller, 2004, in Sheller and Urry, 2006, p. 210). Hence mobility is understandable only through its relationship to the immobile. Multiple fixings and moorings are arrayed in complex patterns that thus “enable the fluidities of liquid modernity” (Sheller and Urry, 2006, p. 210). Following this, mobile subjectivities are not pure ‘romantic’ deterritorialisations, but instead need to be read as the result of the distributions of politics and power that differentiate those who are more mobile from those whose mobilities are more constrained.

This analysis focuses on graffiti writers. As we shall see, the socio-spatial mobility of graffiti writers is mediated by biological and social constructions of age tied to the working of urban politics. In this analysis, the differentiated mobilities of urban graffiti writers help us to understand the patterns of opportunity and constraint encountered by young people. In post-industrial cities engaging the rhetoric of creative cities, the changing landscape of government policy, legislation and funded programmes has implications for the mobility of graffiti writers, with some able to draw on their network capital (Urry, 2007) to facilitate mobile lives and others becoming further fixed in space, less mobile and more prone to the travails of social exclusion.

Through an investigation of the workings of the contemporary politics of graffiti in Sydney, and particularly the role of legal graffiti opportunities, this paper aims to show the ways in which young Sydney graffiti writers are variously included and excluded in networks of mobility and the ways in which im/mobility differentially constitutes urban youth identities. The focus on graffiti in Sydney, a city grappling with the challenges of global city status in part through engagements with creativity, makes this analysis relevant for other post-industrial globalising cities where the creative economy has gained institutional support.

The analysis here approaches the new mobilities paradigm from three different perspectives, framed through a focus on spatial mobility, social mobility and policy mobilities, in an attempt to uncover the manifold ways mobilities impact graffiti writers in Sydney. To achieve this, the discussion begins with an outline of the different theoretical frames used to discuss mobility, followed by an introduction to graffiti writers as mobile subjects and graffiti as a circulating medium of expression. Next, the paper briefly points to the complex position of graffiti and ‘street art’ within the so-called creative city (Landry, 2000) and the embrace of legal graffiti programs by local governments seeking to manage the presence of graffiti. The paper then draws on an empirical analysis of a legal graffiti wall program in the Parramatta local government area (LGA), located in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. This case is then analysed through the lens of spatial, social and policy mobilities to highlight the multiple and intersecting mobilities at work in the constitution of youthful graffiti subjectivities, and the way an emphasis on mobility helps us to understand the processes of socio-spatial exclusion faced by young graffiti writers.

Spatial Mobilities

Young people disproportionately suffer the burdens of accessibility compared with adults (Skelton, 2000; Valentine, 1996). Gaining access to places, be they places of employment, education or leisure, is often far more difficult for young people than it is for adults. The impact of transport costs, restrictions of movement and entry, and the distance to services can lead to social exclusion. Further, for young people involved in transgressive behaviours that challenge social normativity, the question of access to safe environments is a major concern. As we shall discuss later, the limited availability of places to practise graffiti safely and legally has diverse implications for the different groups of people involved in graffiti, with the burden falling disproportionately on less mobile younger graffiti writers.

The spatial limitations routinely faced by young people are compounded by the impact of the troubling presence of youth. Youth subjectivities are the locus of moral panics (Cohen, 1973; Valentine, 1996), particularly in public spaces where young people are increasingly deemed out of place in the neo-liberal city. Processes of urban regeneration and gentrification in post-industrial cities have increasingly marginalised those whose interests do not align with the needs of capital accumulation. The reconfiguration of public spaces, whether through ever-expanding practices of surveillance and policing (Iveson, 2007) or through the privatisation of public space, most dramatically in the form of the pseudo-public space of the shopping mall (Goss, 1993), draws a focus on those presences who upset the normative consumption practices of the neo-liberal city. Young people are at the forefront of these practices of exclusion, subject to the increasing powers of police and private security forces to police ‘anti-social’ behaviours (Gaskell, 2008). The restrictions of access to public spaces are acutely felt by young people who rely on public spaces as places of freedom away from the restrictions of private spaces where adult control circumscribes the behaviours of children and young people (Valentine, 1996; Skelton, 2000).

Social Mobilities

Limiting youth mobilities can impact their experience of social inclusion in multiple ways. There are many ways to approach questions of inclusion, such as: through a focus on poor access to labour markets and unemployment; deprivation and poverty; lack of education; disability and mobility impairment; lack of community inclusion; geographical isolation; self-exclusion; poor access to facilities; and information deficiency (Cass et al., 2005), some of which may be more sensitive to variations in access and mobility. This analysis approaches the question of social mobility more generally through the lens of youth–adult transitions. The youth–adult transition, traditionally conceived, involves shifts from education into employment, from the dependency of family life into the responsibility of social and economic independence, and the various responsibilities associated with ascension to full citizenship within a society. In developed economies, the conceptual integrity of a discrete youth–adult transition has been undermined by the overlap of life stages. Young people work while undertaking education and the shift from education may not easily translate into employment, or employment may segue into further education. Societal changes due to cultural and economic globalisation, the advancement of new technologies, changes in education and work patterns have all impacted on the way we view life stages (Furstenburg et al., 2005). Bennett (2007) notes that the rise of youth markets in the mid 20th century has produced an elongation of youthful identities into adulthood, as we consume youth identities. The delay of the onset of adulthood has been theorised as a new life stage of emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000). Yet, while the boundaries between youth and adult life stages have become more blurred, the analytical framework of life stages remains relevant to understanding how (and when) young people make the transition to ‘responsible’ adult roles. Despite deviations from the normal pattern of transition, the institutions and policies of the state continue to reinforce a particular vision of youth–adult transition (Settersten, 2005). As detailed later, the policy frames investigated here through this research on legal graffiti in Sydney, indicate continued reproduction of normative understandings of a discrete transition that fails to accord with the way some graffiti writers are performing complex and overlapping transitions to adulthood.

Policy Mobilities

New theories of policy mobility have sought to engage not merely with the way policies travel and are contextualised, but also with the way policy connects places in relational and open-ended network assemblages that engage with cities across a number of scales, drawing practice together with the workings of power, both to guide and to generate the territories of the city (McCann and Ward, 2011a). As McCann and Ward (2011b, p. xx) note, a new focus on urban policy mobilities, “offers opportunities to conceptualise how cities are produced in relation to processes operating across wider geographical fields”. More than just policy transfer, the new policy mobilities perspective allows a consideration of the local globalness of cities tied into circuits of “fast policy transfer” (Peck and Theodore, 2001; in McCann and Ward, 2011b, p. xv). Whilst a deep analysis of the relationality of policy transfer processes and the related formation of policy assemblages is beyond the scope of this analysis, it is worthwhile considering the ways in which certain policies related to graffiti management connect a globalising city like Sydney to other post-industrial global cities and, in particular, the way graffiti policy and creative city discourses tie Sydney to the global centre of New York.

By tracing these three lines of argument, through discussion of spatial and social mobility, along with a consideration of policy mobilities, it is hoped that we can form a clearer picture of the intersecting mobilities and immobilities that inform the lives of young (and not so young) people involved in graffiti.

Mobility, Youth and Graffiti

It makes sense to approach the study of graffiti from a mobilities perspective. In many ways, graffiti is a mobile medium par excellence, as its presence territorialises and deterritorialises the spaces of the city. Graffiti and the ‘writers’ who practise it,¹ circulate through the city, upsetting the ‘natural order’ of things. The ability to ‘strike anywhere’ constructs all surfaces of the city as a potential canvas, producing perceptions of fear of the disruption of the constructed sanctity of urban space. Much writing on graffiti has focused on the way its mobility challenges normative conceptions of the city. Cresswell (1992) discusses graffiti as a transgressive practice that “upset’s people’s expectations”. For Cresswell, the appearance of graffiti challenges the normal operation of the city representing a discourse of disorder, helping to make visible the normative geographies of the city.

The moral panics that derive from the presence of graffiti justify the reproduction of cycles of investment in its eradication. The wars on graffiti (Iveson, 2009, 2010; Dickenson, 2008) that have been fought in the battlefield of the city take on a moral tone as graffiti is constructed as an infectious presence of dirt, disease and contagion (Cresswell, 1992) and writers are constructed as vandals and thugs roaming the streets, out of control. The disproportionate responses to graffiti by urban authorities (Iveson, 2009) are thus tied to its seeming unfettered mobility in the face of the institutional and material constraints of the city.

Graffiti has ‘gone global’ since its beginnings as a modern urban form in New York and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More recent work by Dickens (2008) has emphasised the shifting conceptualisations of graffiti as it circulates from the street to the gallery, taking on ‘post-graffiti’ forms played out through a differentiated complex of practices. Following the pathways taken by Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring in New York in the 1980s, Dickens traces the differential and contested valuations of a small work by the contemporary street artist, Banksy, as it is drawn into the circuits of high-end contemporary art and museum cultures. The shifting and multiple conceptions of graffiti, as it shifts between train, wall and gallery, challenge the singular view of graffiti as always already out of place in the city.

In contrast, urban policy approaches to graffiti have tended to rely on narrow and static understandings of graffiti as a singular, illegal practice and graffiti writers as ‘graffiti vandals’. This is particularly the case for ‘zero tolerance’ approaches to graffiti, which first came to prominence in Rudolph Giuliani’s New York in the 1990s, where zero tolerance was designed to arrest the slide to disorder represented by anti-social activities such as graffiti (Young, 2010; Dickenson, 2008). As this paper attempts to show, narrow understandings of graffiti vandals deployed in policies, programs and legislation depend on static conceptions of graffiti writers as young people involved in illegal activity. The instruments of urban graffiti management often fail to reflect more fluid conceptualisations of graffiti and graffiti writers, neglecting the fact that, in the contemporary deindustrialised creative city, not all graffiti is illegal and not all graffiti writers are young.

To date, the intellectual trajectory of much of the important research on graffiti has followed an implicit focus on mobilities. In this analysis, the explicit focus on mobilities helps to highlight the limitations of policies and practices that fail to acknowledge: changing youth–adult roles in graffiti and ‘street art’;² the differentiated networks of places used by different writers; and, changing valuations of graffiti and street art within discourses of urban creativity. By doing so, this analysis helps to go beyond research that continually frames graffiti sub-cultures as wholly excluded from the city, helping to draw relational connections that challenge the normative exclusion of young people involved in graffiti, and mapping out pathways to inclusion in the creative city (also see McAuliffe 2012).

Placing Graffiti in the Creative City

Before we go further, it is useful to discuss briefly the implications of the recent embrace of creative cities discourses in post-industrial cities for graffiti and graffiti writers. Richard Florida’s (2002) much critiqued work on the creative class (see Peck, 2005, 2011) and Charles Landry’s (2000) work on the creative city, have popularised alternative valuations of creativity among city managers across the globe. According to the creative city thesis, making real and capturing the intangible value of creativity within traditional economic understandings of urban development have been key to internalising the worth of the creative classes (Scott, 1999, 2000). Vibrant public places activated by exciting public art create a distinctive ‘buzz’ that differentiates cities as they compete for the interests of the creative classes. Aligned with processes of gentrification, urban regeneration and city marketing, of creating ‘artist districts’ and innovation hubs, the search for new ways to invigorate the creative economy has ensured a turn towards (re)valuing creativity as ‘innovation’ and ‘creative growth’. It is not entirely clear how investments in creativity will produce the vaunted economic benefits (Peck, 2005). However, what is clear is that urban managers in many deindustrialising cities have taken on a new appreciation of the value of culture and creativity.

With the presence of creative cities discourses, opportunities arise for graffiti writers to have their graffiti recognised as something of value—as a manifestation of innovation and creative energy. Within creative cities discourses, ‘street art’ has increasingly gained a foothold as a valid and valued medium. Yet in practice there is no strict delineation between street art and graffiti, with graffiti writers sometimes straddling these categorisations of urban creative practice. In Sydney, as in many post-industrial Western cities pursuing creative cities strategies, ‘street art’ has begun to be recognised as a legitimate urban artistic practice, whilst ‘graffiti’ remains a transgressive and illegal practice.

This has important implications for this analysis where there are different responses to graffiti and street art at the local level in Sydney. The rise to prominence of cultural planning and the promotion of the values of public art highlight the way in which young people are included and excluded from official versions of the creative city. In order to interrogate some of these interesting policy intersections and the impact on spatial and social mobility, we focus here on what has become known as ‘legal graffiti’.

Legal Graffiti

Public discussion of graffiti often distils to a moral politics of the good city versus the bad graffiti vandals (McAuliffe and Iveson, 2011). In contrast, the pervasive and enduring presence of graffiti has resulted in more nuanced policy responses, including the sanctioning of legal zones where graffiti is tolerated. Legal graffiti walls (legal walls, or ‘legals’) are delimited spaces where this normally illegal practice is allowed to occur. We focus here on public legal graffiti walls designated by local authorities in Sydney.³

These public legal walls can operate as the site of engagement or diversionary programs aimed at young people at risk of sliding into criminal behaviour. By making space where illegal activity is ‘legalised’, legal graffiti walls challenge the normative geographies of the city.

For the writers themselves, legal graffiti walls are problematic, as the performative power of graffiti resides for many writers in the illegal act itself. Ferrell (1996) and MacDonald (2001) have focused on the centrality of social deviance and the necessity of the illegal act in the understanding of graffiti sub-cultures. In sub-cultural relations, graffiti writers accrue fame and respect among other writers through their daring escapades; risk-taking behaviour and the breaking of laws become significant ways through which graffiti writers move up the hierarchy towards recognition and respect by their peers. Within these sub-cultural framings, the legal wall appears as a contradiction, undermining sub-cultural relations built around respect. Thus, doing ‘legals’ appears as a highly contested practice somewhat marginalised in the ethnographic graffiti literature.

In contrast, this research has found that legal sites play a significant role in the maintenance of graffiti sub-cultures and that legal work by graffiti writers helps in the conceptualisation of the graffiti writer as artist, set in context with the present success of creative cities discourses and the subsequent revaluing of creativity in the city.

The Research

In 2009, the Writing Ways research project investigated the legal graffiti walls program in Parramatta LGA in Sydney.⁴ Parramatta is often presented figuratively as the capital of Western Sydney, which is widely represented as Sydney’s most disadvantaged and least sophisticated region (Powell, 1993). The Parramatta LGA is one of 40 local government areas that make up the Sydney metropolitan area,⁵ and includes Parramatta along with all, or part of, 30 surrounding suburbs. The research itself involved a visual ethnography of seven legal wall sites (13 walls altogether), taking photos of them from week to week for 28 weeks to gain a clearer understanding of the practices and performance of legal graffiti at these sites and in part also to form a body of evidence for use in the contemporary politics surrounding the walls. I also interviewed graffiti writers I met working at the legal walls, as well as writers with whom I became acquainted through the course of the research.

Policy Mobilities

Local–Global Wars on Graffiti

Graffiti arrived in Sydney, to the tune of Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’, in the early 1980s (Iveson, 2007).⁶ Early influences from New York included the seminal book of photographs Subway Art (Cooper and Chalfant, 1984) and the documentary film Style Wars (1984), both documenting the New York graffiti scene. These sub-cultural products were later augmented by a slew of glossy magazines dedicated to documenting graffiti cultures (see Snyder, 2006).

The networks of cultural connections that linked graffiti writers in New York and Sydney were soon followed by policy and program connections as the New South Wales state government and Sydney local governments pursued New-York-style ‘wars on graffiti’ (Iveson, 2007). By the end of the 1980s, the battles waged between graffiti writers and the transit police on the Sydney metropolitan train network had displaced graffiti from the trains into the surrounding suburbs (Iveson, 2007, 2010), mirroring the earlier displacement of graffiti that had occurred in New York. Iveson (2010) points to the ‘new military urbanism’ at work in the expanding ‘wars on graffiti’ in Sydney. Newspaper headlines, such as “Libs vow war on graffiti vandals” (Woolley, 2010), “The latest weapon in graffiti war” (Blacktown Advocate, 2010) and “Social media enlisted in the war on graffiti” (Catt, 2010), found in Sydney local newspapers, typify and reproduce this adversarial position.

Mirroring New York’s metropolitan graffiti policies, in 2005/06 the NSW state government ushered in a hard-line ‘zero tolerance’ approach to graffiti in its various forms. State government funding was cut to local governments and youth agencies operating youth engagement programs involving ‘aerosol art’. A new graffiti Control Act (2008) was passed into law criminalising aerosol spray paint and other ‘graffiti implements’. The legislation reinforced powers for police to stop-and-search young people and it became an offence for young people under 18 to carry spray cans. As detailed later, this has had implications for the operation of youth engagement programs and the spatial mobility of young graffiti writers.

In contrast, some local councils in Sydney, fuelled by previous policy failures designed around costly zero tolerance programs (Dickenson, 2008; Iveson, 2009) have developed complex graffiti management strategies that include elements of crime reduction along with more proactive engagement with young graffiti writers. In their analysis of the municipal responses to graffiti in Australia, Halsey and Young (2002) set out a typology of responses including removal, criminalisation, welfarism and acceptance of graffiti. Their survey of local government graffiti policies and programs across 38 councils in four states notes that only seven councils showed an acceptance of graffiti culture (all in combination with programs to remove illegal graffiti). Halsey and Young singled out Parramatta City Council (PCC) for its program of “council run workshops to improve the techniques of those interested in legal graffiti” (Halsey and Young, 2002, p. 179). Out of this series of workshops came the recognition that dedicated spaces were needed for graffiti writers to practice legal graffiti in safety.

In December 2002, Parramatta council adopted a Graffiti Management Plan. In addition to a focus on removal and enforcement, the plan recommended the commencement of a Legal Arts Program, incorporating legal graffiti walls. From an initial list of 30 prospective sites, the final eight legal graffiti walls were agreed by the PCC in 2004 (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Details of the Parramatta legal walls, including text from the original Parramatta City Council site audit and images reflecting the variable use of the walls.

Site name	Audit comments	Photograph
Rydalmere Park Wall, Rydalmere	Site heavily affected by graffiti Wall side-on to only commercial building nearby
Guilford Park Wall, Guilford	Site heavily affected by graffiti Not in view from residences
Harry Gapes Reserve Wall, Guilford	Site heavily affected by graffiti Not in view from residences Wall is side on to and some distance from nearby road
Horlyck Reserve Toilet Block, South Granville	Site heavily affected by graffiti Not in view from residences
Sturt Park Wall, Telopea	Site heavily affected by graffiti Not in direct line-of-sight of residents, but is side-on to a primary school. Very close to Dundas Area Youth Service for monitoring
Richill Park Wall, Constitution Hill	Youth worker reported wall constructed as graffiti site Not visible from houses nearby Located near Nicholli Cottage who are happy to monitor site
Charlemont Way, Constitution Hill	Local youth worker reported that site was developed for legal graffiti Not in view from nearby homes Access is limited and parking for no more than one vehicle

Sources: Parramatta City Council, 2004; photos by the author.

The legal walls manifested an attempt by PCC to create a geography of managed ‘hot spots’, away from commercial and residential premises, and away from the transport corridors so popular with graffiti writers (Austin, 2001). The very location of these legal walls, at the back end of parks, the rear of basketball courts at the end of dead-end streets, away from commercial centres, signified the fear of youth, feeding moral panics around the threat of youth, and the need to keep youth at a distance in places that are marginal to the operation of the rest of society (White, 1990; Vanderbeck and Johnson, 2000).

Parramatta as a Clean Creative City

Approximately concurrent with the development of the legal walls initiative, PCC began exploring and investing in the creative cities policy discourse, looking to revitalise Parramatta as a creative place. A range of policy documents were developed to guide this process as Parramatta sought to differentiate itself within the metropolitan fabric of Sydney as the ‘second CBD’ and the cultural capital of (Western) Sydney. The Graffiti Management Plan was not seen as a part of the Parramatta arts policy framework, which included an Art Facilities and Cultural Places Framework (2005) and Public Art Policy (2005). Rather, it was framed as a part of the crime prevention and reduction framework of the council, eventually forming a part of the revised Parramatta City Centre Crime Prevention Plan 2008–13 designed to ensure the success of the regeneration of the Parramatta city centre and the associated investment in the ‘night-time economy’ (Rowe et al., 2008). The creative cities policies that were developed for Parramatta, tended to give preference to adult professional roles associated with Florida’s creative class; there was little or no room for the young users of the Parramatta legal graffiti walls.

Spatial Mobilities

Legal Walls—Fixed in Space

Legal walls are one response to graffiti writers’ ability to ‘strike anywhere’, by attempting to concentrate graffiti in one place. The legal walls territorialise the deterritorialised practice of graffiti; by fixing the space of legal activity, they make visible a group living beyond visibility as transgressive actors on the fringe of socially acceptable behaviour. Legal walls also literally bring graffiti into the light of day. In contrast to the night-time activities of those involved in illegal graffiti, the bulk of the activity at most of the Parramatta legal walls took place at the weekends, during daylight hours.

Despite the threat of surveillance posed by these fixed sites, the Parramatta legal walls were well utilised not only by local inexperienced graffiti writers, but also by the older and most experienced graffiti writers operating in Sydney. In fact, the way some of the walls were used indicated that sub-cultural relations normally spread across urban space were concentrated in operation in these fixed sites (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Sub-cultural sanctions: senior writers leave messages concerning practices at the wall. Left: “Bin Your Rubbish”, integrated into a piece by SAYNT, Guilford Park; Right: “Tagers [sic] clean up your mess”, tagged on the Rydalmere Park wall. Photos: the author.

Older, more experienced writers who used the legal walls did so despite sub-cultural claims that ‘real’ graffiti is done illegally. As the penalties for graffiti have increased over time, writers over the legal age face the real threat of imprisonment. As writers aged and shifted into roles associated with adulthood, such as starting a family and moving into full employment, the risks associated with illegal graffiti further increased. Doing ‘legals’ offered these experienced writers space to safely do their ‘work’. Regarding possible surveillance, several established writers stated that, while others may be concerned, they were beyond worrying about trying to stay hidden—even mentioning that they were known to police, so why bother hiding. For some, doing legals was a part of a wider range of professional activities that tied them into formal labour relations and sometimes involved relationships with funding bodies. Despite making transitions into more formal work in the creative sector (McAuliffe, 2012), they remained embedded within graffiti sub-cultures through their work on legal walls without facing the risks involved with illegal graffiti.

At least two of the Parramatta legal walls were colonised by established graffiti writers who tried to police the walls, making implicit and explicit claims to ownership of these sites. Interestingly, in these cases, the writers were not local, instead seeing these sites as a part of the network of sites they used throughout the metropolitan area.

The End of the Legal Walls—Mobile Responses

In 2009, following local government elections, Parramatta council adopted a hardline position in line with that of the New South Wales state government, announcing a new zero tolerance of graffiti. The legal component of the Graffiti Management Plan was discontinued and in August 2009 all but one of the walls at the seven survey sites were demolished (see Figure 2). PCC also convened a committee to review all murals and public art in the Parramatta LGA, ordering the painting-over of those deemed to be in an ‘urban style’.

Figure 2.

From legal to illegal: the Charlemont Way legal wall (top), like the other walls in the Parramatta programme, was initially made an illegal space (middle) and finally demolished (bottom). Photos: the author.

The closure of the Parramatta walls relied on an essentialised view of the walls as a failure, denying the possibility of diverse and contextualised local relations. In fact, the walls all operated in different ways reflecting different usage patterns based on factors such as the degree of visibility of the wall, knowledge of the wall in graffiti circles, proximity to public transport and the way local and non-local users negotiated the ownership of the walls. For example, the Guilford Park wall, a ‘soccer wall’ in a fairly open location, close to a railway station and in view of a main road, was well utilised with the wall often changing many times in a single weekend. This wall was well known among Sydney graffiti writers and was used by local writers, more mobile writers from across Sydney, as well as writers visiting Sydney. As a writer from Melbourne working on the Guilford Park legal wall noted, he “knew this wall from other guys in Sydney”. In contrast, the Richill Park and Charlemont Way walls, located in difficult-to-access locations on a public housing estate, were almost exclusively used by a local crew the WHB (Wenty Housing Boys) (Figure 3). During the first three months of the visual survey, these walls barely changed as the WHB crew were apparently ‘not in town’. Young people on the estates controlled the walls and did not let outsiders use them. As one young local resident noted, “People who aren’t from here, they come and we don’t let them use the wall”. Other non-local Sydney writers who were aware of the walls described them as a no-go area.

Figure 3.

In contrast to the other legal walls, the Richill Park wall (pictured) and the Charlemont Way wall, changed very little. The WHB piece remained unchanged for more than six months. Photo: the author.

The legal walls were not universally accepted by Sydney graffiti writers and the operation of the legal walls did not go uncontested. There were several instances of crews ‘bombing’, or defacing, the walls as an act of disrespect. One example of this occurred at the Sturt Park wall in the suburb of Telopea. A crew from an outlying Western Sydney suburb of St Mary’s in the Penrith LGA travelled specifically to this wall, a journey of more than 20 km within the metropolitan area, to ‘bomb the wall’, leaving behind crew tags to signify their opposition to the idea of legal graffiti. It was not only those who disagreed with the legal walls who travelled some distance to access them. On two other occasions during the research survey, writers from the Penrith LGA were interviewed whilst working on the Guilford Park legal wall. These writers, in their final year of high school, had taken a day off from school to make “the 40-minute drive” to Guilford Park. Unlike the crew who bombed the Sturt Park wall, these young men valued the legal spaces in Parramatta, lamenting the fact that Penrith had become a zero tolerance council with no legal spaces for writers. They also used the legal walls that were farther afield, in Liverpool in the south-west of Sydney, Hornsby in the northern suburbs, as well as the legal walls in Warringah on the northern beaches. For them, the Parramatta legal walls were important legal sites in the network of legal graffiti spaces in Sydney, a network that had become more accessible once they could drive themselves from Penrith.

In contrast, senior writers who run graffiti workshops for young people in different locations around the city discussed the difficulty of getting young people to attend workshops at legal walls under the Graffiti Control Act (2008). For those under 18, access to legal walls was curtailed by the new law. Despite the designation of these spaces as safe (legal) places to do graffiti, the risks of being stopped-and-searched by police on trips to and from the walls was a primary concern. One interesting result was that parents with knowledge of the activities of these young graffiti writers on occasion assisted by transporting them to and from legal walls, to ensure that they could ‘do the right thing’ free from police harassment.

Social Mobilities

Youth in the Creative City

Local-government-sanctioned legal walls are sites of recognition, providing the opportunity for ‘anti-social’ transgressive actors to be included in wider political and social relations. The recognition afforded by legal walls is related in some ways to wider incorporation of graffiti in popular culture and validation in élite arts networks. The profusion of graffiti style through circuits of popular culture, including the interconnections with other youth cultural phenomena such as hip-hop culture, has in some ways mainstreamed graffiti as an artistic popular cultural practice. Over time, the (still highly contested) validation of graffiti as ‘art’ has seen an increased presence of ‘murals’ and permission sites in many cities, including Sydney. In the contested linguistic terrain within which graffiti writers operate, badging graffiti as murals, or as public art or street art, has become a way to negotiate the legal ramifications of increased criminalisation of graffiti.

Young people’s contribution to the creative economy is often limited to their potential to contribute in the future as productive adults in the creative class. In the planning documents, there were allusions to the important place of young people and graffiti in the emergence of Parramatta as a creative city. However, in practice, graffiti—as a youth activity and a ‘lower-order’ art form—failed to secure serious consideration within the working of Parramatta’s creative city apparatus. The zero tolerance strategies of the PCC imbued graffiti with childish irresponsibility, even when practised by those who were no longer institutionally recognised as ‘young’. Beyond the rhetoric at different levels of government in Parramatta, the contemporary marginalisation of graffiti as merely vandalism failed to activate viable and sustainable developmental pathways for creative young people that were relevant in the present and into the future.

Contrasting the official criminalisation of graffiti and graffiti writers in Parramatta, the rise of creative city discourses and the associated valorisation of creativity have resulted in opportunities for graffiti writers. Some young writers were actively searching for roles in the emergent creative class. For some young graffiti writers, a future as a designer or as a professional artist has emerged as a natural progression from their sub-cultural activities. Certainly, in the research on the Parramatta legal walls, many graffiti writers framed themselves as artists.

Several regular users of the Parramatta graffiti walls have progressed towards roles as recognised creative workers. POIZEN IVEY completed her design degree at the University of Western Sydney, successfully incorporating her graffiti within the design curriculum. She progressed to employment as a graphic designer during the day, whilst also forming part of a two-woman editorial team producing a glossy sub-cultural magazine focusing on women in graffiti. Another regular user of the Sturt Park wall started a small business designing images for t-shirts and skateboards. After a recent appearance in court, another writer, 22-year-old NAES, committed to only doing legal work. He subsequently commenced a sign-writing course at technical college and expressed a desire to set up a private graffiti wall in his backyard. SAYNT trained as a graphic designer. He has run workshops for young writers through youth centres and schools, and sometimes contracts his services to corporate team-building workshops using graffiti. As one older writer stated, his crew of more than 30 members fell into two groups: “half of them are in jail, and the other half are architects” (BC writer no. 1). The pathways to these creative roles are not guaranteed and the lack of official recognition of these pathways makes the transition into the creative economy all the more difficult. However, despite the absence of formal programs, these users of legal walls were meeting with some success.

Finally, it is worth noting that for some the separation of their graffiti practice into legal and illegal is not so clear-cut. All the older writers involved in the research did illegal graffiti “when they were young”. Some also expressed contradictory subjectivities as they continued to practise both legal and illegal graffiti, sometimes using different tag names for these different practices. Others made little distinction, stating that they were simply treating the legal walls as just another space to ‘get up’ (see Ferrell and Weide, 2010).

Legal Graffiti and Youth Mobilities

The end of the legal wall program in Parramatta disproportionately impacted younger users of the walls both in terms of their spatial and social mobility. Spatially, the demolition has led to dispersion, with those committed to doing ‘legals’ and possessing the capacity to move, shifting their focus to other sites. Older, more experienced writers, with the capacity to mobilise the accrued skills and artistic knowledge gained through practice of their art/work and with access to greater physical mobility, were not overly impacted by the loss of the legal walls in Parramatta. Their network of legal (and illegal) sites, managed and maintained in different locations throughout metropolitan Sydney, remained as a safety-net—a materialised form of network capital (Urry, 2007). Mirroring other research that has observed dispersion of illegal graffiti (Dickenson, 2008; Iveson, 2009), here the loss of legal walls ensures that the high-quality legal work by older writers moves on, leaving the young writers behind.

Socially, the loss of local access to legal graffiti sites has ramifications for youth–adult transitions into roles in the creative economy. Losing legal walls removes sites where young people can safely practise and hone skills that are increasingly valued in creative city discourses. In particular, these sites promote and reward a focus on style rather than risk and underpin a normative shift from illegal/destructive to legal/productive graffiti practice. In terms of the in situ sub-cultural relations that circulate through these legal walls, the dispersion of more senior writers can lead to the loss of informal conventions that sanction young writers and potentially guide undeveloped writers towards normatively productive forms of creative expression. Thus, for younger, less experienced graffiti writers, the loss of local legal spaces produces a disjuncture in their potential youth–adult transition into the creative sector, with the potential to entrench socio-spatial exclusion.

In terms of policy mobilities, the reinvestment in New-York-style zero tolerance policy at the state government level reflects a dynamic policy environment where policy transfer is not merely ‘fast’, but also cyclical, marking out relational networks of policy movement (McCann and Ward, 2011a). Legal wall programs in Sydney have arisen in part due to the failures of previous cycles of zero tolerance policies to meet their graffiti eradication goals. Set within a policy context where New York’s zero tolerance policies loom large, ready to be rearticulated in the local urban politics, council legal wall programs are themselves justified through reference to networks of other urban policy contexts where legal wall programs have been successfully implemented.

The simultaneous presence of the Parramatta zero tolerance approach with more engagement-based approaches in other Sydney LGAs has produced an uneven geography of legal graffiti sites, stretching networks across the metropolitan space. Despite the opportunities to revalue graffiti practice afforded by the embrace of creative cities discourses, this contested networked politics of graffiti operating in Sydney ensures that legal walls remain highly charged political sites under pressure to conform to a dominant moral politics that continues to claim that all graffiti is out of place.

Graffiti Networks and Mobile Youth Subjectivities

As a mobile performance in the public spaces of the city, graffiti is well suited to a critical mobilities framework. The connections between graffiti sites, both legal and illegal, exemplify dynamic network arrangements as writers of different calibre use specific sites at different times and across different stages of their graffiti ‘career’ (Lachmann, 1988). Whilst graffiti is a mobile networked performance, it does not occur in the absence of structural constraints, both implicit in the landscapes of the city and explicit in the attempts by urban authorities to excise its presences. Legal graffiti walls represent one such structural constraint that attempts to fix this mobile performance in place. Yet, rather than conceptualising legal sites as purely marginal and separate spaces, we find that these spaces are nodes within dynamic networks of legal (and illegal) sites utilised by younger and older writers, by street artists, graffiti writers and taggers, from the local area as well as from other places in the city and beyond. Thus, legal walls are open sites (Malone, 2002) with porous boundaries and differing degrees of articulation within networks of graffiti and street art sites in the city and beyond.

For those variously involved in graffiti, age is an important variable, influencing the relationships that writers have with the state and wider society. In particular, invoking the category of youth in policies, programs and laws designed to control graffiti justifies legal interventions that unduly impact the mobility rights (Urry, 2000) of young people. Yet, the socially constructed nature of youth (James and James, 2004) ensures there is no easy fit between biologically determinist categorisations and the lived experience of youthful identities. Youth now extends well beyond the politico-legal definitions, with recognition of the extension of youth into emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000) where templates of youth identity are comingled with adult roles. In the face of attempts to reproduce normative understandings of a discrete youth–adult transition through policy and legislation, some graffiti writers are performing complex and overlapping transitions to adulthood.

As this analysis shows, the age of a graffiti writer can have a strong bearing on the ability to activate legal wall networks. The workings of urban graffiti politics in Sydney are manifest in a dispersed geography of legal walls. As Gough and Franch (2005) note, the socio-spatial mobility of young people can have implications for their experiences of exclusion and inclusion. In this case, the dispersed geography of legal walls restricts the socio-spatial mobility of young graffiti writers working to exclude them from some of the possibilities opening up for older, more experienced writers via the valorisation of ‘street art’.

However, age is not simply a structuring social category that controls young people’s (im)mobilities (Barker et al., 2009, p. 5). Legal walls are sites of agonistic engagement (Amin, 2008), where the wider tension between art and crime play out. Out of this tension, these sites provide a possible stepping-off point for a reconfigured legal graffiti practice. Thus, the presence of networks of legal graffiti sites meshes with the contemporary embrace of creative cities, setting the scene for the revaluing of (illegal) graffiti as (legal) street art by urban managers. The ability to escape the rigidity of criminalisation, through involvement in legal graffiti and street art, reflects the fact that young people have (and express) agency over attempts to impose immobility on their graffiti practice.

Conclusion

Through an engagement with the new mobilities paradigm, this analysis has sought to investigate changing youth–adult roles in graffiti and street art, to understand the differentiated networks of places used by different writers and to interrogate the impact of changing valuations of graffiti and street art. In doing so, this paper has sought to challenge the normative exclusion of young people involved in graffiti, as manifest in the instruments of graffiti management in Sydney. Taking an explicit mobilities perspective helps to uncover the networks and flows that connect people and places together, allowing more fluid conceptualisations of the analytical boxes we use to see the city. The focus here on the various mobilities of young (and not so young) graffiti writers helps us to disentangle the singular assumption that graffiti is always already out of place and that graffiti writers are involved in a monolithic illegal youth sub-culture. Yet more than merely dissecting categories, through a focus on mobilities we can see how individuals move between, occupy simultaneously or contest the categories that policy-makers utilise to manage graffiti in the city. A clearer understanding of the resultant geography of legal walls in Sydney provides insight into the distribution of power and politics and how this differentially impacts the mobile subjectivities of graffiti writers.

In this analysis, legal graffiti emerges as a potential stepping-stone to more formal inclusion, in line with contemporary strategic investments in the creative city by metropolitan governments such as those in Sydney. More than this, legal walls can be seen as sites of validation and recognition. Designating graffiti practice as legal at these sites accords a social and cultural value to graffiti, validating graffiti practice in the present and opening up opportunities to see graffiti practice within a wider framing of urban creative practices that ties into currently popular discourses of creative industries and the creative city.

The presence of legal graffiti walls has been used to highlight some of the complex micro politics of mobility that play out in and through the youth–adult transitions of graffiti writers in Sydney. As materialised sites in networks of legal and illegal practice, these legal walls are the ‘fixings and moorings’ that aid in the conceptualisation of youth (im)mobilities. The intersection of spatial, social and policy mobilities here helps us to understand the processes of socio-spatial exclusion faced by younger graffiti writers and the way that mobility can change as writers shift through age categories, as they gain the freedoms of adulthood and accrue network capital.

Footnotes

Notes

Funding Statement

The Writing Ways project formed a central part of research on Children’s Futures, funded by a University of Western Sydney Post-doctoral Research Fellowship.

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