Graffiti and Street Art ─ Reading, Writing and Representing the City

Graffiti and street art have captured a global following in recent years, and the result is a proliferation of tags, paintings, stickers and stencils in slick metropolitan cities as well as unexpected locales in impoverished areas. Part of their appeal is that the forms allow viewers an understanding of the subtext of a city without resorting to mainstream accounts, or official histories. They offer an alternative history; a mapping of social trails or subcultural behaviours - a voyeuristic pleasure at entering the story of the city. In essence, the proliferation of pieces democratises the relationship between art and its audiences as it generates an open gallery, allowing the free enjoyment of skill of practitioners. As such, they provide a counter-narrative to the hyper-capitalist urban aesthetic. This ground-breaking book is the first systematic collection of critical scholarly works that explore issues related to contemporary urban public writing. It offers context-sensitive case studies from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Russia and Brazil, among others, grounded in different social, cultural and urban settings in order to highlight how this global phenomenon is localised and how local practices contribute to the perpetuation of the global scene.

Konstantinos Avramidis is practicing architect in Greece and the UK (TCG/ARB), and PhD Candidate in Architecture by Design at the University of Edinburgh. His designs have been awarded, published and exhibited internationally, while his research has been presented at conferences, and published in journals and books. His research interests include: text in the city; systems of archiving and taxonomy; and architectural design as mode of enquiry.

Myrto Tsilimpounidi is a social researcher and photographer. Her research focuses on the interface between urbanism, culture, and innovative methodologies. She is the author of Sociology of Crisis: Visualising Urban Austerity (Routledge, 2016) and editor of Remapping Crisis: A Guide to Athens (Zero Books, 2014). Myrto is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.