Broken Windows
Territoriality & Battles
Kelling & Wilson
1982 Broken Windows
• Biography…
People are made up of
“regulars” and “strangers”
What kind of policing and
surveillance does this justify?
Kelling & Wilson
1982 Broken Windows
Comparison between
Bronx & Palo Alto?
• Stanford University
• ‘While the city contains homes
that now cost anywhere from
$800,000 to well in excess of $40
million, much of Palo Alto's
housing stock is in the style of
California mid-century middleclass suburbia…’
Kelling & Wilson
“Should police activity on the
street be shaped […] by the
standards of the neighborhood
rather than the rules of the
state?”
Who are “strangers”
Unpacking...
• Bauman
• Harvey
• Brighenti ties some
of the issues
– graffiti
Liquid Fears: Symbolic End
• 9/11
• Illusion of security in
territoriality
• Vague strangers
• Even procedural
rationality will not be
enough to regulate all
social groups...
• Neoliberal strategies...
Bauman, Z (2002).Reconnaissance Wars of the Planetary Frontier. Culture &
Society. 14(4):8190.
New Military
Urbanism
• Justifies the
militarization of the
everyday
– People background
noise..
• Industry of
reconnaissance
(Bauman)
Right
to the City
• David Harvey
drawing from
Lefebvre
• Marxist
• Jane Jacobs
• Cities are full of
conflict
– Material conditions
shape social
conditions...
Urbanism:
Surplus Production
• “The city is the
historical site of
creative
destructivism”
•
(Harvey, 2003:939)
Public Space
as a Resource
• Crisis: “Quality of
urban life has
become a
commodity...”
(Harvey, 2008:p.8)
• Byward Market
Brighenti
What is precisely public
in public space?
Walls as strategy...
Governmentality
Defining graffiti....
Problematic
• Interstitial practice
• When interrogated from
each perspective: “yes,
but....”
Common denominator:
materiality
Because...
1. Global context &
“street”
2. Legislation vs.
creativity
3. Tools & techniques of
the body
4. Simplistic/complex
lifestyle
5. Architecture as
affordances (not
things)
Walls as
Artefacts:
Strategy
Why does a
municipality
care about
walls?
Strategy
Governmentality
(Foucault)
• Procedural power
• Historical emergence
of knowleges about
such
powers/populations
• Application of tools
– Administrative state
Walls as Visable Territorial Devices
Graffiti as Tactical
Strategy...
Citizens are ‘imagined’ in
walls
(Official Graffiti, Hermer & Hunt)
Graffiti challenges these
narratives with “at
hand” tools (bricolage)
Public scene
as composition
The “street”: the birth
and target of graffiti
Allison Young’s research:
• Confusion about public
space - target for
‘education’
‘E’ is for Propaganda
Graffiti poses two questions…
1. What is a writer?
2. What is public space?
– Restrictive/Utilitarian
– Permissive/Antiquity
Are you on the transit way
at Slater and Bank?
Look up!
Territory
• “Tags” create territory
• Graffiti IS territory
– It does not end at the
wall
– Community
– All is not resistance...
Walls...
“...are governmental
tools that set limits
and impasses, and
complimentary
allowed paths and
trajectories...”
Writers see walls as
invitations to continue
the conversation
about public space...
Arresting Images…
By not recognizing graffiti as a dialectic, we risk contributing to
the reproduction of inequality for the people who produce,
consume and reproduce these aesthetics of security…
There is no graffiti where there is no grievance” – Marshall McLuhan