Young people and the spatial politics of graffiti writing

Young people involved in graffiti have become emblematic of the ongoing troubling presence of “youth” in the urban public spaces of the contemporary city. The act of doing graffiti, known among those involved in the practice as “writing,” has been the subject of a good deal of academic theorizing and public policy intervention since its rise to prominence on the subways of New York City in the 1970s. Drawing on the historical development of what has now become a global subculture, this chapter details the way graffiti has been constructed as outside the normal ordering of social space, as out of place in the city. The youth subculture of hip-hop graffiti writing, which developed around themes of fame and respect and the pursuit of style, has been persistently linked to deviance and transgression justifying the criminalization of young people and a succession of wars on graffiti. More recently, processes of commodification along with the appearance of legal graffiti forms and the rise of street art have all worked to unsettle assumptions of graffiti as out of place. The trope of the young urban graffiti writer continues to influence approaches aimed at variously including and excluding young people in public space, informing the contemporary urban spatial politics of young people.