As a long-time lover of graffiti and street art, I was disappointed when I read about the Kees Keizer Graffiti letterbox experiment. This study showed people were more likely to break rules (steal, trespass, litter) in a graffitied environment. That said, there is good and bad graffiti. Oxford being Oxford, there was at one stage a critic who was attaching stickers by particularly egregious examples saying "This is a sh*t tag". I laughed. Fair. And I'm willing to bet that the graffiti in the experiment was disordered tag-and-run scrawl rather than considered, planned, cared-for items of serious street art. And I think, we could use street art to encourage and enable urban greening. Stay with me.
We do have permissioned street art in our town. Building site barriers designated to local graffiti groups. Brick walls covered with curiously polite psychedelic counterculture mural-meets-graffiti colour. But this little pioneer created without any permission, this tiny red tulip, points the way:
Could we start by drawing in the flowers we want to see? Will the sign lead to the actuality?
The trouble with volunteers (Buddleia, Willowherb, Scrub Willow, Bog Myrtle) is that the larger ones tend to damage the urban enviornment that they've colonised. Kezier didn't use overgrowth in the experiments on urban decay symbols and petty offending, but it seems reasonable to expect similar results. But would this be true of green graffiti? Or would we see an arcadian response, with greater openness, sociability and positive feeling towards others? In a greened environment,would we expect greater compassion? And would it matter if some of the larger bushes and the trees were painted on?
It's a sweet image of our future cities. Blank windows colonised by a combination of painted on and real window boxes. Blank walls covered with instant, delicate and undamaging climbers. Moss graffiti swirls, rising like green smoke from urban angles and flowers drawn along every urban kickboard and street corner. Painted-on flowers acting as guide and permission for the real thing to appear.
What do we need to get from here to there?
We do have permissioned street art in our town. Building site barriers designated to local graffiti groups. Brick walls covered with curiously polite psychedelic counterculture mural-meets-graffiti colour. But this little pioneer created without any permission, this tiny red tulip, points the way:
Could we start by drawing in the flowers we want to see? Will the sign lead to the actuality?
The trouble with volunteers (Buddleia, Willowherb, Scrub Willow, Bog Myrtle) is that the larger ones tend to damage the urban enviornment that they've colonised. Kezier didn't use overgrowth in the experiments on urban decay symbols and petty offending, but it seems reasonable to expect similar results. But would this be true of green graffiti? Or would we see an arcadian response, with greater openness, sociability and positive feeling towards others? In a greened environment,would we expect greater compassion? And would it matter if some of the larger bushes and the trees were painted on?
It's a sweet image of our future cities. Blank windows colonised by a combination of painted on and real window boxes. Blank walls covered with instant, delicate and undamaging climbers. Moss graffiti swirls, rising like green smoke from urban angles and flowers drawn along every urban kickboard and street corner. Painted-on flowers acting as guide and permission for the real thing to appear.
What do we need to get from here to there?
- A nuanced approach to graffiti management
- Hire some artists and give them the challenge
- Better approaches to surface respect and management from the graffiti artists - the tulip above is on unprotected sandstone, which isn't great
- Co-production between artists, town planners and stonemasons to create graffiti tolerant surfaces -- a kind of urban skirting board, if you like
- The political will to fill in blank urban spaces
- Experiments and work to prove this is actually beneficial -- following Kahn's technological nature studies, we need to check that the symbol of nature can be as (or at least partially as) helpful to health as the actual thing
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