My doctoral research is concerned with the geographies of post-graffiti in London today. The idea stems from recent conferences at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, and a series of art publications, which claim to identify ‘new directions in graffiti art’. These sources use a number of terms – ‘street art’, ‘urban art’, ‘guerrilla art’ - to describe forms of urban inscription that are defined through the ways they relate to, but differ from, the familiar hip-hop model of graffiti ‘writing’ as developed in New York City and Philadelphia between c.1969 and 1984.  These differences include: an opening up of aesthetic styles, materials and techniques beyond the spray can; an interest in engaging with wider publics and audiences; artists becoming increasingly professional, media savvy and ‘visually literate’; and changes in the conduct of graffiti practices, particularly through increased interaction across urban and virtual spaces. As such, this thesis extends the earlier use of ‘post-graffiti’, which described the displacement of spraycan graffiti from the spaces of the ‘street’ and subway to Manhattan galleries during the mid 1980s, towards a broader conception of new forms of writing the city.

This involves:

• A theoretical review discussing the implications of a ‘post-graffiti’ model for re-thinking the broader relationships between art worlds, the cultural economy and the city. It outlines research by geographers and others on the subject of graffiti: territoriality and gang graffiti, the geographies of transgression, identity politics and more recent conceptual approaches to reading, writing and knowing the city. I argue that many of these accounts, while useful, are limited to an analysis of a specific kind of urban inscription, graffiti ‘writing’, and by viewing such forms predominantly in terms of representation not practice. These ideas are used to inform two broad thematic fields of academic focus pertinent to examining an emergent ‘post-graffiti’ aesthetic practice in my own research.

• PART 1: ‘Street art, place and the city’ attends to the place of art in the contemporary city, and how these new directions in graffiti art might comment on them. This section investigates how contemporary street artists compare with traditional graffiti writers in their engagement with ‘the street’, ‘the gallery’ and the spaces in-between. This is used to develop an analysis of post-graffiti aesthetics informed by geographical theories of place, politics and practice; conceptions of ‘art work’ in the sociology of art; recent thinking on ‘site specific’ art; and the interventionist strategies of a range of activist and urban avant garde movements.

• PART 2: ‘Post-graffiti as cultural industry’ considers the growing popularity of street art in light of contemporary work on the cultural economy of cities, asking how and in what ways we might understand this emerging scene in terms of cultural industry. This section centres on an exploration into how increasingly professionalized, media savvy and visually literate groups of street artists operate within new and existing networks of creative industry, social and cultural capital at the intersection of global-local flows in a world city such as London.