Has Your City Become Cleaner or Dirtier in Recent Years?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Via Chicago

so you are maintaining BA is a wasteland and people are scared to live there because of all the graffiti?

no, i'm saying nothing of the sort.

i'm just saying that a city being aggressive in graffiti removal does not automatically make it a suburban country club.

chicago needs to remove graffiti because it's so closely tied to the city's cancerous gang culture. it has nothing to do with being an uptight suburban country club.

[Via Chicago]

is this something that needs to be removed, or is it considered street art? what if i told you the building owner sanctioned it for kids in an after school program, would you view it differently? is it blight or is it enlivening whats otherwise an alley that backs up against a dumpster?



chicago is even launching a street art registry. seems to me like an acknowledgment that at least in some form, street art holds cultural value.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/n...8%3d&i10c.dv=9

the question is who gets to make that determination? if an unsanctioned piece of "art" becomes culturally valuable (for the sake of argument, lets take this to the extreme and say its something Banksy painted), does it deserve protection? what do you do when the art itself is political (certainly, plenty of the murals in Pilsen and Little Village qualify) and is revered by the community even if it isnt done to a high technical level?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Via Chicago

is this something that needs to be removed, or is it considered street art?

that's a question for the property owner to answer.

if they don't want it on their building, one quick phone call and it'll be blasted this afternoon.

but in general, yes, i'm glad this stuff is mostly relegated to alleys in chicago. it's allows the 1st level public realm to maintain some dignity.

[Via Chicago]

right. but youre completely missing my point (and the point of this thread), which focuses on the notion of cleanliness. the side of the building is not any more clean or less clean due to the presence of paint, but the term has been appropriated to suggest that is the case. its a subtle way that the conversation is shaped and stereotypes are formed and perpetrated. i remember when a mural went up in a near western suburb in the late 90s. it was by a famous chicago street art and sanctioned by the business that put it up. its still there actually.



but you would not believe the pushback it got at the time, with people saying it was "too urban" (again, a subtle coded message for a deeper prejudice), and an effort to try to differentiate themselves from an area of the city just over the border they saw themselves as above. hell, paint your house the wrong shade of yellow or blue and you'll get almost the same level of blowback in many communities.

the irony is in the intervening years, the city has significantly expanded their mural initiative (and the battle long ago was lost in preventing the town from becoming "too urban" aka brown)

Today there's more appreciation for street art but the entire genre has it's roots as an unsanctioned form of expression, and people really seem to struggle with that

[Steely Dan]

^ i've got no issues with murals. if a property owner wants to paint their building, more power to 'em.

i don't lump that stuff into the graffiti category. there's a very blurry line here of course, but when i think "graffiti", this is what immediately comes to my mind:

Originally Posted by Via Chicago

and i'm glad that chicago's public realm generally isn't littered with that kind of visual garbage, even in the city's poor/working class neighborhoods.

[Via Chicago]

its also worth understanding where BA's citizens tolerance of grafitti comes from, and that not all cultures connotate taggings with vandalism.

Vandalism, even tagging, is rarely prosecuted in Buenos Aires, and street artists paint out in the open. Home and business owners regularly allow their buildings to be covered in murals and street art, an openness that goes back to the time of economic and political downturn in the early 2000s, a time where just two weeks saw five different presidents. Street artists tried to add some life and happiness to the city with their work, and many in the city embraced it as the return of their free speech.

in many ways, graffiti is the art of the oppressed and often rooted in activism. its also often the only creative outlet for kids who would otherwise be into something far worse. and many of them are just starting out, hence the poor form. but when they get to this:



or this



you can appreciate how far theyve come, even if theyre just random names you see over the course of years living in the city.

[the urban politician]

There's a difference between some of that nice street art you posted above and that pic from Buenos Aires.

Just to spray paint "DEB #8" or "Doug loves Keisha" just doesn't quite put me in that "wow, that's art!" frame of mind.

[mousquet]

We French are fussy (or downright annoying as hell) in some respects, so we find the city of Paris has been dirtier since the local Social Democratic party has been running the city.
I'm one of those fussy about cleanliness.
I mean, just see my profile pic, she's a maid cleaning up the mess you left behind you, that's no accident. And I just can't stand people with their dogs (oh, their enslaved creatures) shitting our sidewalks.
Those filthy people are disrespectful to our community.

The Social Democrats just often like experiencing urban things that would feel innovative to them, such as generous affordable housing, which is useful in a number of cases locally indeed, to some extent. I'll admit and encourage them when necessary.
But then they often forget to clean up their crap, which is unacceptable to me.

Graffitis are no dirt at all. They are either street art or stubborn vandalism (often related to political ideologies such as anarchism), depending on situations.

[Gresto]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

There's a difference between some of that nice street art you posted above and that pic from Buenos Aires.

Just to spray paint "DEB #8" or "Doug loves Keisha" just doesn't quite put me in that "wow, that's art!" frame of mind.

Precisely. One is artwork, and I think should be welcomed enthusiastically on certain walls, while the other is the spray-painted equivalent of litter.

Here's a beautiful, huge (about 500 ft long by 20 ft high) mural that has existed unmolested for about 15 years on the exterior side walls of a raised freeway not far from where I live. This is much preferable to blank concrete, however I would far prefer the plain concrete to a bunch of dismal tagging.

[TSteph9]

Toronto isn't doing so hot when it comes to cleanliness either, and definitely has a rat problem. Been a bunch of articles on it like this https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/05/...s-rat-problem/

My sister used to live in this loft in the Distillery District, which is like a huge tourist spot, but if you went down by the water in the evening you could come across a rat that was like the size of a house-cat.

[Gresto]

^It's not as clean as it used to be, that's for certain. At one time, it was world-renowned for its spotlessness. One of the famous old anecdotes, apart from the Ustinov quote, is when New Yorker Sonny Grosso was in town to direct an episode of the '80s TV show Night Heat. The crew piled an alley full of garbage to make it resemble NYC. Then everyone went to lunch. Upon the crew's return not long after, to the director's chagrin the alley had been tidied up by sanitation workers. I don't think there's much danger of such a quick cleanup these days.

[Sun Belt]

Originally Posted by Via Chicago

is this something that needs to be removed, or is it considered street art? what if i told you the building owner sanctioned it for kids in an after school program, would you view it differently? is it blight or is it enlivening whats otherwise an alley that backs up against a dumpster?

Spray paint scribbled on somebody else's property and public property is not art. It's destruction of property and vandalism that requires somebody else to remove it at cost. Aside from the monetary aspect, it also damages those old/beautiful Chicago bricks that cannot be replicated.

Notice in your picture, the window that is surrounded by graffiti has bars on it -- this is not a work of art -- it is urban blight.

[COtoOC]

I've lived in Denver for 13 years now and it seems about the same. Overall, it's a fairly clean city and not a huge graffiti problem.

[Angalfaria]

I live in Dubai and see it become so clean in recent year.

[Handro]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

no it's not.

there's no place in chicago that looks like those BA pics you posted.

chicago cleans that shit.

here are some typical non-wealthy commercial streets in chicago.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9683...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8181...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7656...7i16384!8i8192

pretty damn free of graffiti.

And it's a shame, because each of those streetscapes would be made significantly more interesting with some of the art in the original Buenos Aires pic!

I love graffiti (beyond an ugly tag here an there). Anything with some color adds to a blank brick street wall.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Handro

And it's a shame, because each of those streetscapes would be made significantly more interesting with some of the art in the original Buenos Aires pic!

i couldn't disagree more more strongly.

the way the storefronts are tagged-up in those BA pictures is just straight-up ugly.

thank pizza god for the graffiti blasters!

[maru2501]

Originally Posted by pdxtex

most of portland is looking pretty good. id even say we reached maximum hobo three years ago and thats improving too. we still have some clusters of tents here and there but the diaspora has spread to further reaches of the city. hobo clusters always end poorly though, that story doesn't change. piss jugs, needles, rats, garbage....by the middle of the summer, hobo camps will be catching fire left and right.

strap in, people. we have reached maximum hobo

[JManc]

Originally Posted by Handro

And it's a shame, because each of those streetscapes would be made significantly more interesting with some of the art in the original Buenos Aires pic!

I love graffiti (beyond an ugly tag here an there). Anything with some color adds to a blank brick street wall.

I could see a blank wall facing an empty lot with sanctioned art on it downplaying the banality of it but graffiti on the street facing portions would look trashy. Most of the buildings are simply ugly and that's just the way it is. Graffiti won't help that.

[Handro]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

i couldn't disagree more more strongly.

the way the storefronts are tagged-up in those BA pictures is just straight-up ugly.

thank pizza god for the graffiti blasters!

Agree to disagree, although I will thank the pizza god if it will appease him/her.

Originally Posted by JManc

I could see a blank wall facing an empty lot with sanctioned art on it downplaying the banality of it but graffiti on the street facing portions would look trashy. Most of the buildings are simply ugly and that's just the way it is. Graffiti won't help that.

Fair enough, and I suppose you may be right. I guess I prefer ugly and interesting vs. ugly and blank/desolate. But yes, ugly is ugly!

[pip]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

i couldn't disagree more more strongly.

the way the storefronts are tagged-up in those BA pictures is just straight-up ugly.

thank pizza god for the graffiti blasters!

Yup