Street Art – questioning power and control in urban spaces

Space and Culture, 2018

Journal of Urban Cultural Studies , 2020

Street art, with its subcultural character and sociability, has been looked upon for its anti-cultural potential. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art's utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential, others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and institutional order of the neoliberal economy. This special issue aims to contribute to the critical perspectives of cultural geography, urban sociology, art history, visual studies and critical theory through analyses of the urban space and street art. The prolific significance of this issue is in its multi-perspective approach to bring together social, political and aesthetic dimensions in the intersection of art and the changing urban environment. Recently, activist art, social practice and socially engaged art are just a few terms that have been popular for describing art that attempts to attract public attention to the current social and political landscape. This thematic journal issue explores the potential theoretical and empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach of art can bring to the understanding of both arts and the urban space. It offers a multi-geographical, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary perspective to analyze how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions as an integral part in the socio-political space of the urban landscape. Street art contests two main regimes of visibility-legal and governmental on one side, and artworld or social aesthetic on the other-which creates the conditions within which it must compete for visibility. How can we interpret the politics of street art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression, and limits of criminality? Are street artists obliged to be a part of the urban resistance against neoliberalism? How does street art reveal, delimit or question the complexity of neoliberal urbanization? How is street art activism perceived by the authorities, politicians, businesses, and the wider public? What prompts street artists to communicate with urban dwellers with their marks on the city's surface? How does street art partake in social movements? This special issue hopes to continue academics' and artists' conversations on street art's relationship with the urban space and the public as a defining element of urban culture, but also offers a critical look at the spatial and political dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms that generate particular social and cultural processes.

The aim of this paper is to study the importance of urban street art as an integral component of the city image, rather than being just defined or limited to wall graffiti, it has been extended to contain other forms of arts, compositions, sculptures, and various forms of mural arts, that were applied and integrated an applied on building walls, streets, landscape, fences, street furniture, and many other components of the built-in environment, these various forms of urban street arts represents different values of the society, and reflects various waves of development in political, cultural and socio-economic contexts. while urban street art is considered as a direct reflection of many changes that happens to a community, as the people try to express their impressions, views, anger, etc. in different forms, using street art as a documentation for such movements, and dynamics that happens, whether on the walls of buildings, railway/metro fences, underground stations, and other urban forms as mentioned above. Thus leading to a change in the built in environment features, sometimes positively by adding a more living sense & aesthetic value to it, and sometimes negatively by adding some drawings or writings that only express the feel of anger for example with no recognized aesthetic value, and a third extreme possibility of vandalism. This type of art was always relevant to a certain level of democracy, and political systems that can accept such way(s) of expressions, and in a context that creates art, appreciates arts in general, and use it in expression. While the case was different in other countries, where art wasn’t that important value, and where the political systems deprived people from expressing their views even in the most traditional ways, being involved also in an endless cycle of socio-economic complicated problems, especially in the developing countries, and the image was clearer in the under developed countries. in other words, this means that such type of art was developed in already developed countries, where urban contexts, and architecture were already well established, settled, organized, and all the channels of expression are maturely used by the communities. How this type of art represents the peoples’ culture, values, and the country’s political & economic positions are the different questions this paper is targeting to find the suitable answer, in addition to how it was integrated with the built in environment represented in architecture and urban contexts and adding a living sense to them. on the way to answer the questions of this research paper, the research will make a literature review of the various definitions of urban street art, graffiti, and other forms of street arts, in different contexts, exploring the different experiences from many countries all over the world including arab countries, with an analysis for some of these experiences leading to a further understanding in order to conclude the answers to these questions. Street art is the art on the streets, with all the components of these streets, and with all the streets can do in or for the city, accordingly it’s a very true expression and reflection of the city life, culture, economy & policy. Urban art cannot and does not exist in a vacuum, the built fabric of cities and towns provides the canvas on which street artists exhibit their creations, inextricably linking it to its environment.

In this paper, the relations between Art, Urban Space and the City will be discussed. From these, I aim to understand how urban public space can be configured through the ways in which it connects with the city and the artistic field -namely in what concerns art in the public space.