ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses graffiti as the work of urban social groups, particularly in terms of its perceived connection to crime and street culture practiced at the scale of the neighborhood. In the United States, dominant narratives around graffiti have been negatively associated with juvenile delinquency, gangs, and violent crime mirroring common scholarly and policy-oriented constructs of a strong relationship between street culture and crime. Despite dominant narratives that link graffiti with gang activity and violent crime, new narratives that treat graffiti as a tacitly tolerated if not outright accepted form of street culture have emerged in recent years. While the link between graffiti and crime is pervasive, so too is the link between graffiti and the presence of street culture productive of the urban imaginary. The widely adopted correlation between graffiti and street crime associated with the broken windows theory, broader street culture literature has narrowed our understanding through the forced conflation of disparate forms of practice with civic preoccupation.
