What do you think communities do to prevent graffiti?

[Christine Gooding]

The company I work for is about to do a pro bono project with a not-for-profit organisation to reduce graffiti/tagging in communities...in your opinion, what are effective ways for communities to combat graffiti/tagging? We are looking for projects that we can do online....

Your suggestions would be helpful!

[Amelia Hitchcock]

Is it tagging that's the problem, or graffiti images?
Graffiti itself can be a valid art form (i.e Banksy) and a lot of graffiti artists are very talented people just looking for a place to express themselves. Some graffiti artists make a living off it.. http://www.drypnz.com/live/ Unfortunately they often choose the wrong place and have a negative attitude because they are criminalised for what they do.

If you can work with them, and provide an area that they CAN legally show off their talents, this often helps reduce the number of unwanted images elsewhere, especially if it's an arena where it can become competitive. Tagging is often about status, so if you can facilitate that, ya should be sweet.

[Josie Newman]

Hey, if you contact [e-mail] she has just developed a resource for schools/communities to work with young people on the reduction of tagging.

Jo

[Christine Gooding]

thanks for the referrals! Will look into them! Cheers

[Joshua Vial]

I haven't tried this in practice but this is a case study I heard from a lecturer in criminology 10 years ago. He was talking about the problems the New York subway had with graffiti - to remedy the situation they implemented a system that as soon as a train was spotted with any graffiti on it they would remove it from circulation, clean it and then put it back. Reacting quickly like this was quite costly but very effective at reducing the number of incidences.

The theory was that a vandal gets a hit every time they see their mark in a public place - if it is removed as soon as it is noticed then that pay off isn't there and it is no longer worth the risk of being caught.

Like I said this was from a lecture a long time ago so i'm not sure whether it would work for your community.

cheers,
Joshua

[Ines Seidel]

Like Amelia and Josie I believe that dialogue is the best thing to do. Graffiti artists have a message - would be worthwhile finding out what their message is and give them a space to get their message out in a legal way.

What I like in graffiti is its possibility to get people off their routines, to beautify places that are neglected , and it also reminds us that there is always the opportunity to cross the borders of the conventional.

Cities could use this inspiring side of graffiti by working with graffiti artists.
Graffiti (as I understand it today) is not just sprayed words - we also find knitted and embroidered graffiti, guerilla gardening, all sorts of street art...very interesting to watch!

[Rimu]

I see tagging as a symptom of alienation and a lack of real belonging on the part of the tagger in their community. Any attempt to clean up tagging is just hiding the symptom and not addressing the cause.

Graffiti images are different to tagging and are more of an art form. They exist because inhuman organizations (typically corporations) insist on creating blank spaces which just beg to be filled by human creativity. Graffiti never happens on murals, because the space has already been filled

[Manu Caddie]

We've been running a programme for the last year involving young people who are taggers or friends with taggers. It focuses on decolonisation, class consciousness and identity development with parallel art workshops that help them move beyond drawing bulldogs and fists into expressing their identity through other imagery connected to their whakapapa, etc. It's still in the embrionic stages but we're seeing some positive outcomes already - like a local early childhood education centre fence that got tagged before the service opened - the boys on the programme who live in the same neighbourhood were quite upset about it and have offered to help paint over the tagging and find out who did it. Attached is a project report for the first year of activity...