[Themaintainers] [Paper] Urban maintenance and graffiti removal

[Luiza Wainer]

Whenever I think of graffiti removal my mind immediately goes to this
series by UK-based street artist Mobstr: https://www.mobstr.org/red

Here in São Paulo we distinguish between *pixo (*or *pixação
<https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/06/pixacao-the-story-behind-sao-paulos-angry-alternative-to-graffiti>)*
and *graffiti*, which in very broad terms could be seen as a distinction
between graffiti that degradates or beautifies the public sphere. A 2017
poll from Datafolha
<http://datafolha.folha.uol.com.br/opiniaopublica/2017/02/1858287-maioria-condena-remocao-de-grafites-da-avenida-23-de-maio.shtml>
showed that 97% of paulistanos are against pixação while 85% of them are in
favor of graffiti.

I bring this up because for São Paulo residents, maintenance would be
removing pixo while preserving graffiti. Of course, that's never the case.
Former mayor (now governor) João Doria had a "anti-everything" policy,
which has been carried over to a lesser extent to by current mayor Bruno
Covas (Covas was Doria's vice-mayor, and took over in 2018 after Doria
resigned to run for governor). This, of course, has caused a lot of issues
with both the graffiti and the pixo communities, most notably after
Doria painted
over
<https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/23/sao-paulo-street-art-paint-over-joao-doria-brazil-graffiti>
the 15.000m2 stretch of murals by over 200 street artists at Av. 23 de Maio
(formerly considered to be the largest continuous corridor of graffiti in
Latin America, and, ironically, created in partnership with the city in the
previous mandate), creating what at the time was named the "spray wars".

xx
Luiza



On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 at 06:23, Lachlan Simpson <
lachlan.simpson at digitalfabulists.org> wrote:

> Interesting two way street. Removing graffiti is important for the
> graffiti artists as well. They rarely have the ability or means to clean up
> new spaces, and the art form isn't one that is meant for posterity - it is
> very much informed by it's lack of permanence. The language of the street
> mutates quickly and the removal of the graffiti contributes to that growth
> in artistic language and form. There are definitely artistic - often
> antagonistic - aspects to this form of maintenance.
>
> Cheers
> L.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2020, at 18:55, Jérôme Denis wrote:
>
> Dear Maintainers,
>
> I hope everybody’s safe and that you manage to get through these dark
> times without too much suffering.
>
> Please allow me to do a bit of shameless promotion in the hope that some
> of you may be interested. As some of you may already know, David Pontille
> and I (a pair of French STSish sociologists) have been investigating urban
> maintenance for several years now, exploring a variety of settings and
> practices. Recently, we conducted a quite exciting ethnographic fieldwork
> on graffiti removal in Paris, and we just published a paper in *Social
> Studies of Science* on this subject: Maintenance epistemology and public
> order: Removing graffiti in Paris
> <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/metrics/10.1177/0306312720956720>.
> In this article, we try to show that Graffiti removal enacts a very
> specific kind of maintenance, which deploys a variety of epistemic tools
> and practices about urban order, from the broken window thesis, to the
> official documents that circulate between the municipality’s offices and
> the contractors, and the situated gestures and judgements made by the
> maintenance workers in the streets.
> This is clearly non-heroic, non-romantic maintenance, the aesthetic and
> moral politics it performs is highly debatable, yet we do care for these
> maintainers who daily take care of Paris’s façades, and we wanted to
> somehow shed light on their skills and embodied knowledge, which we think
> can help us to think what urban maintenance is about.
>
> An open access version of the paper will be online as soon as the regular
> issue is published, until then feel free to ask a “pre-print” if you do not
> have access to Sage’s publications.
>
> Comments are more than welcome!
>
> All the best
>
> Jérôme
>
>
> --
>
> *Jérôme Denis*Professor of sociology
>
> *Centre of Sociology of Innovation*i3 — Mines ParisTech
> 60, bd St Michel 75005 Paris, France
> (+33)1 40 51 91 92
> (+33)6 61 52 16 17
>
> publications
>
> <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/index/?qa%5BauthIdHal_s%5D%5B%5D=jeromedenis&sort=producedDate_tdate+desc&docType_s=COUV+OR+ART+OR+DOUV+OR+OUV>
> scriptopolis.fr <http://www.scriptopolis.fr/en>
>
>
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