Book Launch: Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City

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Join us for the London launch of 'Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City' by alumna and former Bartlett lecturer, Sabina Andron.

What do graffiti and street art teach us about our cities? Can we write a spatial theory of urban surfaces? And what does a wall interview look like? The book explores the importance of surfaces, graffiti and public signage in thinking about cities. It proposes that architecture develops a fascinating discourse on its publicly visible walls, and explores the authorship, management and value of this discourse. 

Four respondents will comment on the four chapters of the book, from surface semiotics to the history of graffiti, and from the legal geographies of crime, to the layered walls of London’s Leake Street. Visual backdrop generously sponsored by various cities’ posters, tags, signs and textures. 

This talk will be for one hour followed by a drinks reception. 

Speaker Biographies:

Dr Sabina Andron is a Postdoc Fellow in Cities and Urbanism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities. She works on urban visual culture, graffiti, and signage, to examine the role of public images in urban citizenship and governance. She previously taught at The Bartlett School of Architecture, where she received her Architectural History and Theory PhD in 2018.

Respondents:

Dr Enrico Bonadio is Reader in Intellectual Property (IP) Law at City, University of London. His research interests have recently focused on IP protection of non-conventional forms of creativity. He is the author of 'Copyright in the Street - An Oral History of Creative Processes in the Street Art and Graffiti Subcultures' (CUP 2023).

Dr Susan Hansen is Europe’s most cited street art scholar. She is an interdisciplinary academic with a background in forensic psychology, visual sociology, and art history. She is Editor of Nuart Journal, Co-Editor of Visual Studies and Vice-President of the International Visual Sociology Association.

Dr Rebecca Ross is Director of the Graphic Communications Design Programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She works on outdoor media, urbanism, and the role of images in the built environment. She is co-founder and co-editor of the Urban Pamphleteer, published in collaboration with the UCL Urban Lab.

Dr Rafael Schacter is an anthropologist and curator working on public and global art. He currently heads the world leading Material Culture section in the Department of Anthropology at UCL. He has published three books on graffiti and street art, and has recently completed his fourth book, Monumental Graffiti, which will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

Chair:

Professor Iain Borden is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture. He is the author and co-editor of over a dozen books on architecture and cities, including Skateboarding Space and the City: Architecture and the Body and Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes. He advises on skateboarding culture and skateparks, as well as being an active skateboarder for 40 years.

More information

• Purchase Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City 

Image: Sabina Andron