Decapitalizing Public Space

Originally published by Partizaning, a participatory urban re-planning and activist organization based in Russia that promotes the idea of art-based DIY activism aimed at rethinking, restructuring and improving urban environments and communities.

An article written by local artist Nina Montenegro and PSAA’s Tiffany Conklin, about the Free the Billboards project that took place in Portland during the summer 2012 and why it’s important to re-claim and re-imagine Portland’s public spaces.

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Street art is as transient as life itself; it often disappears as quickly as it appears. This ephemeral nature gives the work a freedom, spontaneity, and playfulness seldom reached in other, more lasting forms of art.

With street art, a different kind of reality is offered, one in which our physical urban surroundings are not static, but are mold-able by each of us. It encourages dialogue within society about cultural values and norms. It produces shared narratives between people, ideas, and the built environment.

Artists who place their work in the streets engage in a form of grassroots place-making—they construct and invent new types of spaces and social relations, showing that the value spaces have (or don’t have) and the meanings we attached to spaces, are constantly changing—in an endless cycle of creation and destruction.

(Re)Claiming Public Space

We’re often pushed towards a ‘containerist view’ of public spaces, seeing them as inert vessels which we have little influence or control over. Many of our shared spaces are actually ‘pseudo-public spaces’ that are specifically designed to restrict the possibilities of appropriating them to fulfill our needs. They are heavy monitored spaces; CCTV surveillance, motion, and vibration sensors track many activities. In this system, property rights often trump human rights.

The nature of public spaces in modern cities corresponds to an economic mode of life that we’ve embraced—one of reproducibility and repetition—that consistently reproduces and reinforces hierarchical relationships (Lefebvre & Goonewardena 2008). Since many of the values we hold are mediated through the desire to accumulate capital, the spaces we produce often reflect this preoccupation.

These spaces are not really meant to be used by the public. Homeless people are now basically banned from existing in many US cities. Public spaces are designed to control behaviors, protect investments, and ensure smooth circulation through the mechanics of the city.

Unique places are increasingly smoothed over. Every place begins to look like the next. Through the process of re-ification, an imaginary ‘ideal’ of what cities should be is produced by those in power, regurgitated and presented to the public as real. Take for instance the dramatic transformation of the once gritty New York City Times Square into a Disney-fied Main Street USA. These distorted urban mirages are hollow shells of what cities really are: diverse, dirty, melting pots of people and ideas.

The sense of ‘place-lessness’ often felt in these pseudo-public spaces is a result of them not being grounded or connected to the people who occupy them (Massey 2005). Feelings of alienation and disconnectedness are spurred from our disengagement from public spaces.

Additionally, public spaces have not historically been a guaranteed public right—they have been made public because people take the space, making it public (Cresswell 1996). Public space only remains open if citizens ensure its continued access by occupying it and consistently pushing its boundaries. Having access to public space is vital to a healthy democracy because of the functional necessity of having a physical arena to communicate with others and voice dissent.

One way to counter-act this spectacle is through tactical urban interventions. Artists are re-embracing the revolutionary ideas of the Situationists of the 1950s by creating ‘situations’ that take pedestrians off their predictable paths, outside their habits, and jolt them into a new imaginative awareness of the city where space is in a constant state of becoming.

Free the Billboards

Street artists produce artifacts that sit in direct competition with sanctioned public art and commercial advertisements. On average, we’re exposed to 3,000 to 5,000 ads per day. Being constantly confronted by this onslaught of ads pushes us to be passive consumers rather than contributing citizens.

Advertisements are considered normal and acceptable uses of public space because capital interests regulate them. Visual communication amongst community members (i.e., street art, murals, etc.) is illegal unless permitted and paid for. Advertising conglomerates can easily pay to display marketing in our public space. On the other hand, individual citizens are up against complicated bureaucracies, curators, and fees. Therefore, many artists choose to ‘go rogue’ and express themselves in the streets without permission. A number of cities and states are pushing back. Sao Paulo Brazil, Houston Texas, Maine, Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii have all banned billboards from their public spaces.

Street art stands separate (for the most part) from the commercial sphere. If done without permission, by its very nature, street art confronts mainstream ideas of a well-organized and regulated public sphere. Even if street artists don’t intentionally protest against this system, their public work does spark a new type of awareness in the minds of passersby. The possibilities of the space have been opened up, even if slightly.

In the summer of 2012, Nina Montenegro began Free the Billboards, a project to revive community interaction at the street level in Portland, Oregon USA by facilitating a (re)imagination of public visual space. Imagery and ideas were collected from community members via an online public forum. The public submitted pictures of what they would rather see displayed on their neighborhoods billboards, other than advertisements—artwork they loved, poetry, anything they felt strongly about. The community-contributed images were placed into vintage Portland-made View-Masters, which were then put into hand-crafted recycled brass and steel pedestal stations that were strategically positioned in front of billboards around the city.

The collected images were superimposed over the ads. Pedestrians could peer into the View-Master to see the wall before them with art, gardens, or poetry on it instead of an ad.  The powerful visioning tools acted as a gateway into an augmented reality.

Playing with the Streets

The use of View-Masters also invokes a playful nostalgia, as many of us may remember playing with these toys as children. Play is an important but largely neglected aspect of human experience in the city.

As children, we all explore, touch, and manipulate things. This is how we learn about the reality of objects and the structuring of space (Tuan 1974). When adults play in the city, it is often seen as a controversial waste of time and energy (Stevens 2007). Cities are planned to optimize work and other rational objectives, with leisure space serving well-defined functions. Therefore, spontaneous actions like this challenge the rigorous timetable of bureaucratic and capitalist production (Bonnett 1992).

Playing in public spaces, especially those not designed for it, reveals new realms of possibilities and embraces the space’s embedded use-value. This tactical blending of art, play, and life is a lived critique of rational action, because it discovers new needs and develops new forms of social life illustrating the capacities for social action and expression that the urbanization of society has made possible.

Free the Billboards aims to produce counter-spectacles that interrupt everyday experiences and provoke a reorientation—a temporary liberation from established order. The installations produce an imaginative and autonomous world; one that helps people (re)imagine the urban spaces around them.

The project intends to crack open the status quo, to challenge people to think beyond the current reality and imagine a new one, one of their own making. Instead of our public places being produced for us and controlled by distant bodies for profit, citizens must demand the right to the oeuvre, the right to participate in the creation of their own realities.

ALL PHOTOS © ALEX MILAN TRACY

SEA Street and Graffiti Art

The City of Seattle manages graffiti reporting, abatement, and removal primarily through the Graffiti Prevention Program housed within Seattle Public Utilities. Seattle’s Graffiti Nuisance Ordinance was adopted in 1994 and requires property owners to remove graffiti within 10 days of a report, or the property owner will receive a notice of civil violation and directed to appear before the City's Hearing Examiner. The Hearing Examiner can fine the property owner up to $100 per day (with a maximum of $5,000) if the graffiti is not removed. Like many cities, Seattle has a 24-hour Graffiti Report Line and online reporting system. Additionally, the City’s Adopt-a-Street program organizes volunteers to participate in “Paint Outs,” which are periodic community graffiti removal events. In 2009 (the last publicly reported statistic), the City of Seattle spent $1.8 million. Additionally, the King County Metro Transit that spent another $734,000 in 2009 removing graffiti from transit property.

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In 2009, at the request of City Council, the City conducted a research study to examine how the City handles graffiti removal, prosecutes offenders, and educates the public about graffiti. Part of this research was a web survey conducted with 900 Seattle residents, businesses and organizations. Surveys of this type about the public’s perceptions and opinions of graffiti are rare. The survey found that public views on graffiti are mixed, with 49% saying that graffiti was “a medium to very big problem,” 21% saying it was “a small problem,” and 39% saying graffiti was “not a problem” at all.

This graffiti report made nine recommendations to the City. Adding “stickering” as a form of graffiti was at the top of that list. In response to this recommendation, the advocacy community group Graffiti Defense Coalition was formed. These activists fought against the adaptation of this new policy and successfully blocked the addition of stickers into the graffiti code. Read more about the community's reaction to this report here. 

Another report recommendation was to hire a dedicated police detective to apprehend and prosecute graffiti offenders as part of a two-year pilot project. This recommendation resulted in the hiring of Christopher Young in 2011, who continues to work as Seattle’s sole graffiti detective in 2016. Interestingly, Detective Young also runs the website Graffipedia.org, which aims to be “a training aid for other graffiti investigators.” On this website, Young reports that in 2012 there were 181 identified graffiti suspects in Seattle, of which 71% were adults, with an average age of 23. Young also reported that only 1% of graffiti in Seattle is gang-related. This statistic suggests that association between graffiti and gangs is a myth, and the fear that they public has that graffiti is a signal of criminal activity in a neighborhood is unfounded. This is also perplexingly quite lower than 12-15% of gang-related graffiti reported in Portland. Seattle is a much larger city, so you would expect that it has more gang activity than Portland. This dramatic difference calls into question the methodology used to track and report graffiti statistics, which is not systematic or disclosed.

The City also conducted a systematic, single-day, physical count of graffiti in four sample areas in two Seattle neighborhoods and documented 556 instances of graffiti including 551 common tags (five of which appeared to be gang-related). It was found that public property was nearly twice as commonly tagged as private property, with traffic/street signs, utility poles, and pay stations as common targets.

Seattle is famous for its free spaces for graffiti and wheatpastes. 

Post Alley, Pike Place Market

The Pike Place Public Market Historic District is a distinctive collection of early twentieth century commercial buildings and public spaces that have evolved and functioned as a vibrant public space since August 1907. For over 100 years, this labyrinthine of angled streets and steep grades has maintained a distinctive physical and cultural character. One of the main points of interest of Pike Place, for both locals and visitors alike is Post Alley, named for the Seattle Post, which used to be located at the alley's southern end. This narrow alley passage is famous for its gum and wheatpaste art wall. The gum tradition began in 1993 by patrons of a nearby theatre. It is unclear how long the wheatpaste art wall has existed (please email PSAA if you have data on this history), but it's past is likely intertwined with the historic tradition of pasted city notices and advertisements, especially considering this is a high-traffic corridor once occupied by a newsprint company. With both the gum and wheatpastes, the Pike Place Market management and the City of Seattle police takes a “hands off” approach to these public interventions, allowing and even somewhat encouraging freedom of speech and expression in these spaces (likely due to the obvious tourist-draw). Over the years, the gum has spread quite a bit. So much so local street artists have attempted to clean the gum off the art side of the alley, even spraying stenciled signs saying to please not to put gum on this side of the wall, but to no avail. Even though the City of Seattle's sanitary department cleans off some of the gum bi-monthly, in 2015, they undertook a multi-day process of completely cleaning off both walls. Within hours of being clean the gum started to re-appear and artists from all over the pacific northwest descended upon the alley to reclaim the art space with their wheatpastes. For the foreseeable future, Post Alley is one of the United States most open and accessible public art spaces.

Since the 2010 report, alot has changed in the Seattle street art graffiti art scenes.

SEATTLE HAS BEEN THE HOME OF AMAZING ARTISTS FOR SOME TIME, BUT UNTIL RECENT YEARS THE SKYLINE HAS LACKED THE TYPE OF LARGE SCALE MURALS THAT LANDMARK OTHER CITIES OF CULTURE AROUND THE WORLD. SEVERAL ORGANIZATIONS AND PROJECTS HAVE WORKED TOGETHER TO CHANGE THAT.

Urban Artworks

Urban Artworks is a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides opportunities for contemporary artists and local youth to work together to create public works of art. Since 1995, they have collaborated with more than 2,000 youth to bring art to public and private spaces throughout Seattle neighborhoods. They have organized murals by internationally renounded artists such as Insa, Erik Burke, and Devin Liston and local Seattle-based artists such as Mary Iverson, John Sarkis and Kyle Martz. You can find their murals all around the city. They are also well-known for their successful utlity singal box project in along Broadway and in Fremont. 

Seattle Mural Project & Graffiti Defense Coalition

In 2014, the Seattle Mural Project brought murals by NoseGo and Ellen Picken to Seattle to paint as part of this city-sponsored project. This mural project was locally managed by the founders of the Graffiti Defense Coalition, a grassroots organization working for policy that supports street art.

SODO Track

The SODO Track, which runs along the public transit corridor is a unique mural project that asks artists to explore one theme side by side – motion, speed, progression – to reflect the experience of its viewers. Artists from Seattle and around the country, together with international talent are painting large-scale murals to mark the portal to Downtown Seattle as an imaginative raceway of art in motion. The team making this happen includes 4Culture, Gage Hamilton (director of Portland's Forest for the Trees project), SODO BIA, and Urban Artworks.

TUBS [Demolished 2014]

For 7 years, the former 104-year old building known as TUBS sat vacant at the corner of 50th and Roosevelt in the University District, amids a bustling urban neighborhood. In 2009, the building owner thought it's demise was near, so they invited graffiti artists to use the 12,000-square-foot space as a canvas for their art and expression in the meantime. The owner wanting to provide the community an "ephemeral and evolving" piece of curated street art. Over time, the space opened up even more to other artists, and it essentially became a free wall and a hot spot for Seattle graffiti.

A year after the free wall began, the City had receive over 900 graffiti complaints. But the building owner fought back, citing their private property rights and community appreciation for the art. By this point, TUBS had become a tourist destination and like many graffiti meccas, served as an urban backdrop for photographers and filmmakers.

In response to the complaints, the City of Seattle said they're hands were tied and they had no power to force the owner to clean up their building. Seattle City Attorney Ed McKenna said, "Legally, we're in a difficult position. We can't force the owner to remove his graffiti, so we have pretty much have exhausted every remedy." The City of Seattle defines graffiti as "unauthorized markings." The difference with TUBS was that the building owner willingly allowed their building to become a "free wall," so the City of Seattle could not fine or penalize them for graffiti. The free wall at TUBS continued for 6 more years until 2014 when it was finally demolished to make way for a large condo building. 

Like the SoDo Wall before it, the TUBS free wall was an important piece of Seattle's urban art history and unique when it comes to other cities in the U.S. For example, in neighboring Portland, OR a free wall like TUBS could never offically exist. While the City of Portland also defines graffiti as "unauthorized markings," it also requires a mural permit or waiver for any public art. So if a piece of art doesn't have a permit, the City of Portland can deem it as "graffiti" and force property owners to remove it regardless of whether or not the owner consented to the art in the first place. 

Alberta Arts District Murals Buffed

ART BASE COMMUNITY MURAL PROJECT FACES FORCED REMOVAL BY THE CITY

Portland is a city that by all appearances is constantly in flux. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in North Portland, where the Alberta Arts District draws thousands of people each month to its Last Thursday, where collectively-inspired permaculture gardens explode into vibrant natural canvases in lots that dandelion weeds and thistle once overwhelmed, where old bike parts and other rusty recycled metals decorate gates and archways, and where purposeful paint sprawls across intersections, bike lanes, and otherwise crushingly quotidian surfaces.

While Alberta Street has drawn ample attention as being a revitalized center for art, commerce, cuisine and cooperatives, commuters and bikers along N Williams Avenue have noticed a steady increase in the level of commitment from the neighborhood and local artists to create a more community-oriented and visually appealing thoroughfare.

Formerly dotted with forbidding, unused lots, strewn with the obligatory broken glass, and tagged with a heavy saturation of graffiti, the stretch now boasts several community gardens, Village Building Convergence’s Boise Eliot public market, and several community mural projects that cover small plywood frames or entire two-story building facades.

One such mural lies at the intersection of Williams and NE Wygant. Formerly the site of an upholstery store, and attached to a residential unit, the building was frequently the target of graffiti artists and the city seemed to neither have the willpower or resources to address the situation. Now a colorful panoply of murals on three sides, the city has stepped in to serve a notice that the murals must be effaced.

Flash back to several months ago, when residents of the house began to dialogue with the graffiti artists by creating their own visual expressions on the building. A local painter/muralist noticed the building and approached the residents about opening up the space for a mural project.

The residents pooled their resources together to rent the empty space – which they likened to an “empty, cold, concrete cave” – and turn the exterior into a display of art, with an interior that would be a “warm, inspiring den of community-building and artistic creation.” A sign was raised on the roof that heralded Portland’s new “Arts Base.”

The property owners gave permission to paint over the drab and defaced walls, and the idea was generated that murals would be painted to feature a “rotating showcase of local talent,” according to outreach communications from the project organizers.

People in the surrounding Humboldt neighborhood were contacted and invited to give their feedback and express any concerns about the project. As the tagging began to subside, all that seemed missing was an interest from the City in funding this graffiti abatement project.

The project continued informally, and several months later, people began to take notice. One resident recalls people constantly coming by to photograph the murals and commenting on how beautiful they looked.

A nearby neighbor came to paint her own mural on the walls. A local group with the moniker “Bike Temple” approached the organizers to rent space in the building. Other individuals seeking studio space for larger projects started to take an interest in the space.

Organizers raised money as they could and supplemented the rest with meager teachers’ pay, with the intention that it could some day be a self-sustaining space. “We’re trying to do something that’s benefiting the community,” says one organizer.

Enter the Portland Police Department’s Graffiti Abatement Office. In a public communication prepared by Program Coordinator Marcia Dennis entitled “How to Read Graffiti and What to Do,” she writes, “Graffiti, by legal definition, is vandalism. (See ORS 164.383 or Portland City Code 14B.80) It is the unauthorized application of markings on someone else’s property, i.e.,WITHOUT PERMISSION.”

The same coordinator has determined that the murals at Williams and Wygant have indeed met the definition of vandalism. A notice was served to the landlords to paint over the murals within ten days.

Property owners who had unquestionably given permission for the murals filed an appeal with the city to delay the repainting, but ended up withdrawing their appeal after poring over restrictive city codes. Many neighbors were surprised, confused, or angry that the residents were now being required to paint over the murals.

An organizer of Arts Base expressed their frustration, “It’s too much for them, too colorful, too loud . . . as long as we can keep it inside it would be great, but it’s hard to do a community art space when you have to keep it inside, when you can’t be loud, can’t amplify music, can’t have murals, can’t have a sign.”

Residents now have two weeks to paint over the murals, and the Graffiti Abatement Office Coordinator is rejecting further appeals, claiming that it is no longer in her “jurisdiction.” Organizers hold out hope that a sympathetic coordinator or specialist in whatever other jurisdiction the case is now in will authorize the mural project, or calls to the City Commissioner from community members might stay the date of execution for the artwork.

UPDATE: (Aug 8th, 2011) The City of Portland has allowed the murals to stay, and plans for new murals are underway. However, the City has found Arts Base to be in violation of city zoning statutes, alleging that the residential space is being used for commercial activities. While the organizers of Arts Base have gone in the red on their venture, they plan on complying with their property managers’ demands that they cease community art activities in the space in order to pass the City’s upcoming inspection.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN WATCHDOG INTERNATIONAL POSTED ON JULY 18, 2011 AND ENTITLED: COMMUNITY MURAL PROJECT FACES EFFACEMENT