Spot theory

Contemporary graffiti is a distinctly, if not exclusively, urban phenomenon; flowering over the past few decades from the social and cultural complexities of city life, it cannot be understood outside its urban context. Here we offer an interpretation of graffiti as a fluid urban practice, based in large part on our many years of writing graffiti in cities around the USA and beyond. In particular, we attempt to develop a situated spatial analysis of graffiti—to map graffiti’s engagement with the urban environment through an analysis of the spots that writers choose for painting graffiti. This grounded theory of graffiti spots supplements existing understandings of graffiti as a subcultural endeavor and urban phenomenon, and emphasizes the liquidity of urban space and its meaning. It also directly counters the simplistic assumptions about graffiti and the city embedded in the ‘broken windows’ model of crime and crime control.