Writing Graffiti in Berlin: Shaping Space and Self in the Postmodern Metropolis, 1990-2017

Abstract

This work explores radical forms of participation in urban design through a case study involving longtime graffiti writers in Berlin, Germany. Working with archival data as well as over a year of on-site field work, including extensive interviews and participant observation, I argue that what we have seen emerge with graffiti in Berlin is a form of “subcultural urbanism,” that is, a vision of urban life not just informed by but actually engendered via subcultural practice. I bring this subcultural urbanism to life through a critical phenomenology of social space. I do this by building on established theories about the production of urban space and linking these to the notion of subcultural counterpublics, whose participation in urban change is important for “producing” the contemporary city in a more democratically legitimate way. Subcultural urbanism is a form of producing social space through the actions of a marginalized population whose marginalization and power are rooted in its members’ interventions in public space. The core of this particular form of subcultural urbanism is reclamation or repurposing of public space for social and physical change and storytelling potential. Among the most important takeaways from this study overall is emergent nature of the “resistance” represented by the subcultural urbanism of graffiti writing. The self and the city are co-constituted through the practice of graffiti writing, and performative though it may be, only rarely does it look like political demonstration in the classic sense. What I illustrate throughout this book are the ways in which the practice of graffiti writing represents incipient, prefigurative, or “fugitive” forms of city making.