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February 25, 2007
Instrumental reason sees the city as a place to make money--it's a commodified space. Big business in Adelaide continually says that the city should not become a pleasant place to live. If you want a nice place to live, then you go and live in suburbia. The city is about business--making money.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, from my balcony, 2006
Well, people increasingly live in the city and they are encouraged to do so by the City Council. And we want the city to be people friendly and to embody people values. If urban places respond to market pressures, with public dreams defined by private development projects and public pleasures restricted to private entry.
So we have a battle between commodities/billboards and our dreams as citizens on the one hand, and between surveillance/control and our desires for a city life on the other. Cash rules public discourse.
Business, South Australia says that we in Adelaide need to dump the cloak of conservatism, embrace innovation, make a stand and implement bold changes. So let us have resurgence in public transport based on an extension of the tram lines beyond the tourist run to Glenelg. Why not make Adelaide a green city? That would be an innovative bold change. Why not more public art and street culture?
So why is it that the onslaught of outdoor advertising is more acceptable to the general public than graffiti? Why is graffiti seen as a blight to society, but junk advertising, which covers wall and spaces in our city, is accepted as if its "normal"? Is it because, in the words of Jeremiah McNichols:
graffiti is a protest against everything every successful ad agency stands for: the commodification of public space, the standardization of the built environment, and the permission-based, central control of communication in the form of visual display, which dystopians and state planners the world over agree is the most powerful way to communicate with large groups of strangers who are busy doing something else - the definition of a modern city.
Graffiti is a medium of public expression for people who don't have the money or the proclivity to advertise in public spaces. This mode of expression in public contexts, which involves a contesting space for non-corporate, non-governmental significations, is seen as gang-related, sheer vandalism and defacement. The people who do it are anti-human--wild dogs on drugs.
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