Legal Walls and Professional Paths: The Mobilities of Graffiti Writers in Sydney

Abstract

Through an investigation of the workings of the contemporary politics of legal graffiti walls in Sydney, this paper aims to show the ways in which graffiti writers are variously included and excluded in networks of mobility. The analysis considers three lenses on mobility—spatial mobility, social mobility and policy mobilities—in order to interrogate the processes of socio-spatial exclusion faced by young (and not so young) graffiti writers, and the way that mobility can change as writers shift through complex youth–adult transitions. In post-industrial cities like Sydney, engaging the rhetoric of creative cities, the changing landscape of government policy, legislation and funded programmes has implications for the mobility of graffiti writers, with older, more experienced, graffiti writers able to draw on their network capital to facilitate mobile lives, while younger, less experienced, graffiti writers become further fixed in space, less mobile and more prone to the travails of social exclusion.