Cameron McAuliffe

Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the Moral Geographies of the Creative City

ABSTRACT: In cities such as Sydney, a succession of wars on graffiti has produced a moral geography of artistic practice. At the same time, the rise to prominence of creative cities discourses and the subsequent revaluation of creativity as a postindustrial salve unsettles the dominance of the normative criminalization of graffiti. The profusion of cultural plans and public art policies, along with metropolitan initiatives promoting the creative city, provide opportunities to resignify graffiti as productive creative practice. Set in a discursive world of murals, street art, and “legal graffiti,” some graffiti writers are grasping these opportunities, deploying multiple subjectivities in order to negotiate the moral geographies of the creative city. This article looks at contemporary state responses to graffiti in Sydney and the ways graffiti writers and street artists work within and beyond the various attempts to capture, enclose, and engage graffiti and graffiti writers.

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

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.