As movements spring up across Australia that celebrate underground urban cultures and social systems, the “First Coat” Street Art Festival in Toowoomba features fifteen legal graffiti murals. Reflecting a society willing to integrate and even compromise values. Part of a built environment and social system, graffiti murals are both influenced by communities and, themselves influence communities. Built environments are viewed as reflections of society (Goss, 1988; White, 1992), but also influence the actions and even the health of residents in communities that such artifacts occupy (Leyden, 2003). The resulting graffiti of the First Coat festival, then, should be viewed as a rare agreement between two social systems that happen to comprise a larger and less cohesive social system.
Though the allowance of graffiti in highly controlled conditions, such as in the First Coat festive, should be viewed as compromise and even indicative of societal change, the fact that the graffiti must be created in a tightly controlled environment contradicts the very artistic purpose of many graffiti artists and suggests a lack of flexibility from the greater community. Wenitong, a participant in the festival states, “We come and wash the walls off when they’ve been tagged, and they get tagged the next day. But we have found walls with murals on them never get tagged again. I think it’s a much better alternative” (Gunders, 2014). The First Coat festival should be viewed as one social system being recognized for its artistic achievements by another social system, while the festival’s graffiti, as part of a built environment, reflects this recognition.
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"Built Environment and Toowoomba".
Built Environment as part of a Social System
Goss (1988) argues that buildings are much more than constructions that serve functional purposes. He states, “It is an artifact—an object of material culture produced by a society to fulfill particular functions determined by, and thus embodying or reflection the social relations and level of development of the productive forces of that society” (Goss, 1988: p. 392). This perspective is applicable to virtually any artifact built by communities, from the more obvious murals and statues to the functional sidewalks and bridges. In social theory, built environments, or artifacts in which humans spend time in, on, or at, reflect the community and the greater society that built and use them.
They are “physical expressions of a way of life” (Goss, 1988: p. 392). For built environments, form and style contribute predominantly to the cultural reflection of the artifacts, but spatial patterning and function also serve the culture for which they were built (Goss, 1988). In urban settings, social and physical constructions intertwine to form built environments (White, 1992). For example, the content of graffiti in an urban neighborhood may represent the community, or a section of the community, and its cultural values, while recently covered up graffiti may reflect a more authoritarian or policed community and communal values. Thus, even the social and physical responses to an artifact such as graffiti reflect the cultural and societal values in a given urban environment.
While there is an established connection between built environments and social systems, including societal and cultural values, this connection is not one-sided. Just as built environments reflect their societies and communities, the built environments themselves influence societies and communities. Leyden (2003) found that built environments and other artifacts influence the ways in which individuals behave in such communities. Leyden (2003) states, “the way we design and build our communities and neighborhoods affects social capital and thus physical and mental health” (p. 1550). Leydon’s study found that residents who lived in walkable urban neighborhoods were much more likely than the same demographic of residents in non-walkable urban neighborhoods to come in contact with and know their neighbors, to trust others, and to be more involved socially. Moreover, Leydon (2003) shows that built environments affect the mental and the physical health of residents, with certain characteristics of built environments being associated with better states of health than other characteristics.
The findings of this study suggest that built environments not only reflect social systems but become working parts of social systems. Additionally, research indicates that data on built environments and other important artifacts found in urban areas is being mined to make more informed decisions about public policy and even in architectural and urban design (Salim, 2012). This suggests that, as expected, the influence of built environments as parts of social systems on such systems themselves comes back around to influence future built environments. Meanwhile, Bjornstrom and Ralston (2014) found that the prevalence of heavy traffic, commercial diversity, trees, and sidewalks each are associated with perceived social cohesion. The research on built environments and their relationships with features of social systems suggests, consequently, an apparently much higher integration of even obscure built environments such as graffiti into social systems than what one might expect.
Toowoomba and the First Coat Street Art Festival
The social system chosen for this project is Toowoomba and, in particular, the “First Coast” Street Art Festival, as well as its surrounding environments. This festival is a movement to invigorate and, in many ways, revive artistic graffiti. Similar movements have arose across Australia in different forms and with similar, but unique, objectives, such as the movement to revitalize laneways in Brisbane (Carmichael, 2011). These movements serve purposes and are even considered to be highly important for sustainable urban planning (Al Qahtany, Rezgui, & Haijiang, 2013). In fact, this project can be viewed as part of an integration of several different social systems to form a larger social system, though a much less cohesive social system than their individual parts. A social system may be defined as “a mode of organization of action elements relative to the persistence or ordered processes of change of the interaction patterns of a plurality of individual actors” (Parsons, 2013).
In describing the project, Gunders (2014) states, “Toowoomba Youth Service has joined forces with the Council, Graffiti Stop, and a number of art groups for the ambitious project.” Damien Kamholtz, a graffiti artist and participant in the “First Coat”, describes the event as “brilliant”; he states, “Animating public spaces that would otherwise be dreary, drab walls. It’s fantastic that the council is getting behind a project like this. It’s indicative of what’s happening in the city” (Gunders, 2014). The last sentence from Kamholtz is telling. It expresses the belief that the event and the organized and allowed graffiti displays represent the community and its movement towards expression and compromise. He goes on to state, “I think that’s indicative there’s a progressive approach to this sort of work” (Gunders, 2014).
Graffiti, in particular, plays a special role in acting as a cohesive force between social systems. Güneş and Yılmaz (2006) view art as both crime and art. In fact, the scholars view crime as part of the artistic expression. Like other built environments, graffiti and the objects on which it rests “presents itself in different forms, dependent on the social and cultural component of the local community, the distribution of cultural knowledge…and particularly, the presence or lack of an established graffiti hierarchy” (Güneş & Yılmaz, 2006: p. 1), with the latter, of course, being only applicable to graffiti. Crime, thus, is a cultural aspect of graffiti, except in those rare cases, such as in the “First Coat” Street Art Festival in Toowoomba. The placement of graffiti is another aspect of its cultural reflection.
Like other built environments, graffiti is placed functional, with its function being artistic, political, or cultural. Graffiti is typically found on either public property or private property that is in view of nearby public space, to maximize the exposure of the art to the public (Güneş & Yılmaz, 2006). The typically empty space on which graffiti is occupied serves little artistic purpose, though, as has been shown, often is still a reflection of the society for which it was built. Güneş and Yılmaz (2006) argue that graffiti is typically associated with youth and that it is “asserting identity, visibility, and power in a social and ecological context in which these youth were previously ignored” (p. 2). From this perspective, youth and graffiti are intimately linked, though this relationship is not necessarily exclusive of adults. While graffiti first began as a rebellious expression of youth in New York in the 1960s (Güneş & Yılmaz, 2006), it has since, in some communities, become regulated and encouraged in particular forms, in particular places, and at particular times (Government of South Australia, 2014). Many, and probably most, graffiti artists would reject this controlled expression through graffiti. Nevertheless, movements to accept graffiti as an art form by encouraging graffiti even in a controlled environment reflect a societal compromise for a typically rebellious and illicit art form.
The “First Coat” Street Art Festival in Toowoomba features fifteen legal graffiti murals that reflect a society and a city willing to compromise. Typically viewed as rebellious, graffiti art represents a particular social system that some identify with youth (Güneş & Yılmaz, 2006) and others identify as rebellious. As part of a built environment and even a social system, graffiti murals influence communities and are, of course, influenced by communities. As has been shown, built environments are the reflections of society, but also influence the actions and even the health of residents in communities that such artifacts occupy. Thus, the resulting graffiti of the First Coat festival should be viewed as a rare agreement between two social systems that happen to comprise a larger, though much less cohesive, social system. While the allowance of graffiti in controlled conditions is and should be viewed as a compromise and indicative of societal change, its characteristic of being tightly controlled not only contradicts the very artistic purpose of many graffiti artists with crime being an important feature of such art, but also suggests a lack of flexibility from the greater community. In reality, this festival celebrates unique artistry while feigning respect for the social system behind such artistry.
