Carl Zehr Square renovations

[ac3r]

There is a tagger that hits the Lexington bridge over the highway about once a month, and then someone comes in and paints over it, and three days later the same tag is back again. If you look at the bridge, there are tons of grey rectangles in different shades where it's been painted again and again. I know we don't want graffiti everywhere, but how much have we paid to have one stupid word covered up again and again for 2 years straight? They could've left it, and I bet the person never would have tagged it again. Instead, it's now an ongoing battle that costs us money.

(That said, I appreciate if the taggers have at least an ounce of artistic ability with a spray can).

My preferred approach to a situation like this would be to monitor problem locations rigorously and clean them up promptly. So in the situation you mention, after a couple of instances, I would have somebody drive by daily and paint it over right away if they saw it tagged. Of course a lot of up-front investment might be needed to make this happen.

I understand this is how they fixed the problem in the New York subway: they started cleaning all the cars often (I thought I read at the end of the line, but I don’t see how that’s possible; maybe it was at the end of every day) so that tags disappeared. Once the thrill of seeing ones tag out on the system goes away, so does some of the incentive to deface it in the first place. So at first they had to do a lot of cleaning but after a while it was much more manageable.

It would be quite a task to stay on top of it like NYC did. They don't usually have full subway trains painted these days, but it still happens. I think the main reason it slowed down there was the criminal repercussions of doing it as well as a more consistent police presence. People still paint that city in every colour that exists, but trains are hit a lot less these days because it's just not worth the charges if caught.

One thing with combating graffiti is that when you paint over it, they just come back to do it again as we can all witness. It's a cat-and-mouse game. I used to paint it in my youth and was quite a prolific painter in Toronto and Waterloo Region and obviously knew a lot of other artists and understand "what" graffiti is, means and its purpose is. There is reality within the graffiti art scene where they know their work will get covered up, but that just compels them to go do it more. The moment the city "buffs" it, it's hit again. That's why I think it's such a ridiculous waste of time and tax dollars to constantly be sending people out there to paint grey blotches when, as mentioned, that just acts like a fresh piece of canvas for the painters. They'll be back before the end of the week to do it again.

It's one reason why Berlin doesn't really go out of their way to constantly nip it in the bud. First of all, graffiti has been part of the culture of that city for as long as it has existed. It's as Berlin as Currywurst is. The Berlin Wall became famous not just for its ridiculousness as a physical barrier separating East and West Berlin. But also because of the graffiti on it (mostly on the West side, but it was just as colourful in the East albeit less so with the Stasi and all that). Every imaginable surface in Berlin is painted and people accept that because it is part of the culture and urban fabric of the city. Not everyone likes it, but a good portion of Berliners love it. The streets talk, as they say. There's a famous crew there (but who also paint all over the world, on probably every continent sans Antarctica now) called 1UP that has painted...well, everything. They'll tag rappel down apartment buildings in the middle of the day, they'll sneak into train yards/subway tunnels at night or just straight up jam the doors of a subway train at a station and paint the entire thing while people watch on and it'll circle around the city the entire day like that, get buffed at night, then get painted again. Their Instagram gives a good look at their work and the photographer Martha Cooper (famous for photographing the 1970s and 1980s New York City graffiti scene, who could be described as the loving grandma of the graffiti and street art world) recently shadowed them for about a week to photograph them for a new book.

So yeah. It's a truly futile battle. I mean yeah if some taggers filled up a fire extinguisher (a real fun way to paint FYI) and hit the front of Kitchener city hall I could see spending the tax dollars to clean that up, or the side of our LRT. But ripping out new benches to put in new ones or to perpetually paint the city grey (we're already willingly painting/designing buildings grey, do we really need more?) just to have someone do it again in a couple days is just a dumb waste of time and money.

Ultimately there are two problems here...a surface one...the bridge is getting tagged...and a deeper one...there are people in our community who feel so excluded and disconnected as to be motivated to tag parts of our community.

Also, this misses the point of graffiti entirely. It has nothing to do with feeling "excluded" or "disconnected".