A City Too Clean Is Hiding Something

I want to say something that tends to make a certain kind of person very uncomfortable.

When I walk through a city that is too clean — where every surface is freshly painted, every wall is legally sanctioned, every corner of public space has been curated into acceptability — I don't feel reassured. I feel unsettled.

A city that looks like no one has ever pushed against it is a city where the pushing is happening somewhere invisible. Where the pressure has found other outlets, or been suppressed entirely, and neither of those is a healthy situation.

Graffiti is evidence of people who feel enough about their city to respond to it. That response is not always welcome. It is not always in sanctioned spaces. It is sometimes destructive and sometimes juvenile and sometimes the most extraordinary art you will ever see in your life, and you won't see it in a gallery.

The fact that it exists at all is not a problem. The fact that it exists is a sign that the city is alive.

I think that when a city looks too clean, it hints at something unhealthy being hidden beneath the surface. Graffiti shows a healthy level of interaction — people expressing themselves. Surely creative expression is better than repression.

What graffiti actually reflects

From an urban anthropological standpoint, graffiti is documentary evidence. I don't say that as an academic — I say it as someone who spent over a decade researching the specific relationship between a city and its walls.

The story of a city's graffiti is the story of its social conditions. When you look at what artists painted, where they painted it, and what drove them to paint during specific periods, you get a picture of what was happening in that city — the levels of civic satisfaction, the availability of services, the relationship between communities and institutions, the particular frustrations and energies of the people who lived there.

Political graffiti is the most explicit version of this. Artists in repressive contexts taking enormous personal risks — legal consequences, physical danger — to put something on a wall that gives hope to people who feel they cannot speak. This is one of the oldest forms of human communication, used when official channels have failed or been closed.

In North America we tend to misread this, partly because our political climate doesn't demand it of us and we have lost the fluency to recognize what it looks like when it does.

The paradox of the sanitized city

There is a particular aesthetic that city governments tend to pursue — clean lines, permitted surfaces, everything in its approved place. The logic is understandable: visible disorder signals neglect, and neglect invites more neglect.

The paradox is that the pursuit of perfect visual order can produce its own kind of disorder — the disorder of a population that has no legitimate outlet for the expression that cities, by their nature, generate. Urban life is dense and complicated and full of friction. The people living it have things to say. When the surfaces that historically absorbed that expression are removed or rigorously policed, the expression doesn't stop. It finds other forms.

Some of those forms are less interesting than graffiti. Some are more destructive. None of them are eliminated by a coat of beige paint applied within 72 hours of someone noticing them.

What the walls give back

I have walked through cities with extraordinary graffiti culture and felt something I cannot quite name but recognize when I feel it — a sense of a place that is inhabited, truly inhabited, by people who are paying attention and responding to what they find there.

The opposite experience is also real. The perfectly maintained city, all permitted murals and corporate advertising and nothing that wasn't approved in advance, has a quality of vacancy underneath its cleanliness. Something has been removed from it. Some conversation has been foreclosed.

Graffiti is that conversation continuing. The city talking back to itself through the people who live in it, in a medium that has no permission structure and no editorial board and no institutional filter. That is why it says things you cannot hear anywhere else.

You do not have to love it. You do not have to find it beautiful. It would be worth your while to find it interesting, because it is — and because what it is telling you about the place you live in is worth hearing.

Go out and look

This is what I always end up saying, because it is what I actually believe and because no amount of reading about graffiti is a substitute for standing in front of it.

Get off the main roads. Walk a different route. Follow the walls rather than ignoring them. Go into the corridors and the underpasses and the parts of the city you usually pass through without stopping, and stop, and look at what is there.

You will find, more often than not, that someone has been there before you and left something behind. Not always something beautiful. Sometimes something that takes work to appreciate. Occasionally something that stops you completely.

A city that contains those moments is a city that is alive. The cleanliness that removes them is not health.

It is just concealment.