Abstract
The Graffiti Transformation Project was a City of Toronto, Canada sponsored programme funding ‘marginalised youth’ to paint over graffitied walls with public murals. I argue the imperatives driving the project extended beyond the reaches of policy concentrated on youth remediation, to include concerns of urban governance as a spatial and aesthetic problematic. I explore the manner in which practices of graffiti eradication and community mural making generated a set of calculations that were informed by globally mobile aesthetic norms and were, in turn, aesthetically informing. These calculations were used as an epistemological baseline for assessing, at least at the level of appearance, a host of urban problematics including Toronto’s desire to position itself globally as a functioning multicultural city. Turning to Jacques Ranciere’s thoughts about the space of political aesthetics, I draw on an ethnographic example to tease out a moment of aesthetic engagement in which youth artists interrupted the codes and practices associated with creative city entrepreneurialism to render another configuration of politics, another way of being social. Implications for broadening the scope of urban youth policy scholarship to include analysis of an aesthetic turn are considered.
The Graffiti Transformation Project (GTP) was a City of Toronto, Canada sponsored programme spanning a 15-year period from 1996 to 2011. Community organisations were funded to hire emergent youth artists and ‘marginalised youth’ in ‘graffiti prone areas’ (City of Toronto, 2010: 2) of the city to paint over graffitied walls with lively, public murals representing community experiences. At its inception, the intention was to foster the employability of youth deemed ‘at risk’ and the ‘amelioration of neighbourhood deterioration’ (City of Toronto, 2001). Nine years in to its deployment, the programme had begun concentrating funded projects in economically and socially disenfranchised inner-city and inner-suburban areas of Toronto slated for economic renewal. Although a strong social and moralised, safety-oriented directive continued to undergird its mandate, funded graffiti abatement and mural creation initiatives were also understood, in this second phase of operation, as viable civic tools for engendering ‘Toronto civic pride’ (City of Toronto, 2010: 3) through urban beautification. To govern this newly targeted set of spatially directed aesthetic imperatives, the GTP was cross-coordinated through two municipal departments – Transportation Services and Community Development and Recreation, falling under the broader vision of Toronto’s ‘clean and beautiful program’ with its emphasis on neighbourhood aesthetics and its sister initiative, reimaging Toronto as a ‘creative city, a global cultural capital’ (City of Toronto, 2003: 4).
How do we make sense of this youth governance initiative targeting youth in specific geographical areas, and yet extending its scope of investments beyond a focus on youth social remediation to include an economic and aesthetic orientation towards positioning Toronto on the globalised stage? This article suggests that the practices of the GTP with its emphasis on graffiti abatement and neighbourhood beautification through mural production ‘constitute a field of tension’ (Lindner and Meissner, 2015: 8) between a localised management of globally mobile policies of urban governance (McCann and Ward, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010), and modes of political address possibly disruptive to the dictates of neoliberal rationalities of rule. In one analytical register, the GTP can be understood as an aesthetically grounded ‘verification mechanism’ signifying Toronto as a functioning and flourishing multicultural city. I first consider this Toronto based community arts initiative as a technique of governmentality operative, to borrow from Ghertner (2010), at the level of the aesthetic. Part of a locally formulated knowledge apparatus (Foucault, 2001), the GTP was instrumental for visualising and rendering intelligible inner city/suburban, racialised youth and material spaces targeted for transformation.
And yet, there was a potential for murals to disrupt the very aesthetic sensibilities understood to hold problematised youth and (sub)urban community spaces in place. In this second, analytical register, I draw attention to an ethnographic example from my research to illustrate a moment of aesthetic engagement in which youth artists interrupted the codes and practices associated with creative city entrepreneurialism (Leslie and Hunt, 2013) to render another configuration of politics, another way of being social. By drawing on Jacques Ranciere’s thoughts about the space of political aesthetics (Ranciere, 2007; Yusoff, 2010), I argue that the intervention did not merely forward a semiotics of community experience according to the normative regimes of a politics of difference (Hall, 1996) – an economy preconfiguring the representational limits to what can be understood and visualised about targeted populations and spaces deemed other, and thus problematic, to the project of urban transformation (Hall, 1996; Munoz, 1999). Rather, the very mechanisms through which community mural making becomes part of the apparatus of creative city governance were interrogated. In so doing, new possibilities for engendering a community’s relationship with public space were opened up for consideration.
This article is organised into five sections probing how a global policy phenomenon of securitisation, creative city entrepreneurialism and neoliberal citizenship was given material existence (Roy, 2012) in a geographically specific, youth governance initiative, and the types of politics that were shaped in its implementation. In the first section, I draw from the conceptual work of Ranciere and Ghertner to extend a line of inquiry found in an extensive body of literature about community based arts programming’s socio-economic and psychological contributions to urban regeneration. These working points then inform a conceptual baseline for subsequent sections of the paper. I next turn to a discussion of the globally mobile policy domains situating the emergence of the GTP as an aesthetic technique of governance. In the third section, I investigate the aesthetic calculative practices operative in the GTP and the different knowledges distilled to inform lines of political intervention at particular sites. The fourth section draws explicitly from Ranciere’s conceptualisation of a political aesthetics to tease apart the possible tensions arising when an expression of a mobile globalised policy is grounded in place. The concluding section argues for the utility of expanding our analytical sight-lines to assess the workings of, and possibilities for, contemporary urban youth governance and community arts based practices, tethered to the flows and imperatives of globalised capital manifesting in the local. Regrettably, the scope of this paper dictates certain analytical exclusions – principally, a close reading of participating youth’s experiences and understandings of, and political investments in, the GTP. Analyses of these experiences are written elsewhere (Crath, 2012).
The findings presented in this paper are part of a wider study exploring the aesthetic practices of youth governance strategies in Toronto. Between 2010 and 2011, I conducted 12 months of research at two youth serving agencies located in different areas of Toronto slated for urban regeneration and renewal: the inner-suburban neighbourhood of Jane and Finch, and the downtown neighbourhood of Alexander Park. Throughout this period, I relied on ethnographic approaches including intensive participant observation, informal interviews, 20 semi-formal interviews with city councillors and bureaucrats, police officers, youth workers, community members, youth artists and participants implicated in the programme’s design and governance. This included discourse analysis of city generated documents and documents produced by the youth serving agencies, and visual methods of data generation such as photography and video, made by both myself and others. Themes emerging through the different data collection strategies included community arts practices as means of managing racialised difference; multiculturalism as a political practice; youth empowerment and resistance; and globalised political rationalities driving community development and neighbourhood revitalisation. Empirical findings located here are based on my interpretation of printed documents, field notes and key informant interviews.
Theoretical extensions
The theoretical scaffolding for this paper is, in part, informed by Asher Ghertner’s (2010) thoughtful application of Foucault’s methodological intervention for identifying the apparatuses of knowledge production at play in the context of slum dwelling in India. Ghertner investigates a shift from numerically-based calculative means of assembling truth claims about slums, to the state’s reliance on what he refers to as ‘aesthetic techniques’ to render moral and legal judgments about certain urban spaces and subjects’ rightful place in the realisation of globalised city aspirations. This re-theorising of a governmentality approach to urban governance is in conversation with a growing interdisciplinary scholarship (de Kloet, 2014; Lindner and Meissner, 2015) exploring the globalised circulation of aesthetic norms and practices at work to signify a host of prized ‘global city’ signifiers – ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘creativity’. These delimited sensory formulations dictate normative codes for how things, spaces, populations and actions should be experienced sensually, recognised (or not), and targeted for intervention. Importantly for these authors, the aesthetic, as a regulatory means of organising or distributing the sensible realm, has become increasingly operative in the functioning of power and as such, is as much implicated in the playing out of socio-economic politics and subjected to a vigilant policing to ensure its continued propagation as it is contested and disrupted by other sensible mappings.
Jacques Ranciere’s consideration of political aesthetics is a useful extension for thinking through the types of disruptions possibly transpiring to normative ways of doing and seeing social and political life. Ranciere (2010) understands dissensuous acts as the declaration of a ‘way of bringing about’ a redistribution of a space/time, material/object, places/identities configuration such that different modes of the sensible are brought into tension with one another. In this moment of disruption, that which was rendered unsayable, unthinkable, and those who were rendered speechless, invisible are introduced to be heard, to be seen (Ranciere, 2009: 24). Clarifying what he means by ‘political art forms’, Ranciere is careful to make a distinction between his own formulations of political aesthetics and other models positing an easy connection between artistic form and political expression. For Ranciere, it is not principally the semiotic content that art conveys about the current state of world affairs that signifies a politics at work, nor is it the mode of expression as representative of sociological categorisations of identity, tensions, or conflict that work according to a priori constraints dictating how political coherency should function. Rather, ‘art’ can be understood as bearing upon the political because of its very ability to suspend what is hegemonically configured as the common. To quote Ranciere (2007: 63): The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations … political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an awareness of the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensure, at one in the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. In fact, this ideal effect is always the object of negotiation between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all meaning.
Ranciere’s thinking offers a cautionary tale about a tendency to over-read the disruptive possibilities of arts practice (including mural making) while simultaneously suggesting a ‘poetics’ for more critically investigating spaces in which a breach to the sensible might possibly be transpiring. Moreover, this line of inquiry extends Hall and Robertson’s (2001) theoretical critique of public arts initiatives and their place in either accommodating or resisting urban regeneration efforts. According to these authors, advocates of public/community art often fail to interrogate the contested, fragmented and mutable nature of the conceptual claims they make about ‘identity’, ‘place’ and ‘community’, and fall short of accounting for the constraints and investments impinging on the emancipatory or critical capacity of art pieces to move a politics forward in any substantive way.
The three axes of urban regeneration
Creative city politics
The introduction, in the late 1990s, of neighbourhood specific, youth-targeted community based arts initiatives, like the GTP, into Toronto’s social-urban planning policy initiatives was symptomatic of a sedimentation of three interconnected, globally mobilised governance strategies for managing lagging post-industrial economies: creative city urbanism, heightened securitisation and penal governance of spaces and populations deemed threatening to a city’s economic competitiveness, and cultivation of neoliberal consumer citizenship (Crath, 2012; Leslie and Hunt, 2013; Rogers and Darcy, 2014). In accordance with the constraints imposed by a decade’s worth of federally and provincially induced ‘neoliberal’ austerity and monetary policies (McBride and McNutt, 2012), plans were negotiated to facilitate Toronto’s competitive and ‘creative’ advantage on the globalised financial stage (Desfor et al., 2006). The Creative Plan for the Creative City, adopted by Toronto’s city council in 2003, borrowed heavily from the doxa of a globally circulating policy heralding ‘creative city entrepreneurialism’ (Leslie and Hunt, 2013) – a paradigm for urban transformation in which the production and celebration of ‘culture’ is forwarded as an expedient resource for facilitating global economic competitiveness and fuelling economic growth (Lindner and Meissner, 2015; Yudice, 2003). One of the key tools in this policy model was an aggressive marketing campaign aestheticising Toronto’s image as a world class, creative city (Boudreau et al., 2009). Trafficking an aesthetics of a functioning, ethnically diverse and liveable cosmopolitanism as a lure for globalised capital investment required a shifting of policies and practices geared towards reinvigorating and regulating Toronto’s geo-social landscape (cf. Boudreau et al., 2009; Kipfer and Keil, 2002).
Urban securitisation
Community policing as a preferred means of security management in Toronto emerged as a parallel mobile urban governance directive to creative city entrepreneurialism (Ericson, 1994; Jackson, 1994). This state-regulated control apparatus, developed in American urban centres in the 1980s, makes use of calculative measures and surveillance oriented policing strategies to manage the perceived threat of low income, mostly racialised neighbourhoods to municipal cohesion and image (Wacquant, 2009). Under a ‘penalisation’ calculus, divisions and exclusions previously enumerated along quantitative lines (the haves/have nots) were racially recoded into qualitative and heavily moralised distinctions (‘depravity’, dependency, incapacity, dangerousness, risk) where certain zones and identities were problematised for their non-compliance to responsible productivity, and targeted for specific reformatory or punitive attention (Fairbanks, 2009; Miller and Rose, 2008; Sharland, 2006). Increased police presence in urban governance was supported legislatively by the Province of Ontario in 1999, with the introduction of punitive, fear induced ‘war on crime’ and ‘safer streets’ strategies targeting young offenders, welfare ‘abusers’ and those ‘at risk’ of offending (Case and Tester, 2000). Further measures were introduced at a municipal, and then at a federal, scale following a spate of youth involved gun related violence in the mid-2000s (Buffam, 2009).
Bundled in this circulating assemblage of techniques for managing urban security was the ‘doxic assumption’ of broken windows (Fairbanks, 2010). First introduced in an essay by Kelling and Wilson (1982), the term was embraced in criminology, and subsequently in North American-wide policing and urban policy practices. Broken windows suggests the indexical traces of urban disorder – property vandalism together with ‘uncivil behaviours’ such as ‘aggressive panhandling’, loitering, and drunkenness – can be used as a metric for assessing the community’s normalisation of everyday ‘incivilities’ (Fairbanks, 2010). Applying the logic of actuarialised risk, these behaviours and material signs of disorder are then read as foreshadowing an increase in more socially egregious, more violent criminal offences (Johnston and Shearing, 2003).
Graffiti became a flashpoint for broken windows and safe streets calculative practices, a policy and media fixation that could only make sense in the context of the 1990s/early 2000s in which Toronto was orienting its planning sensibilities towards urban restructuring and globalised, cosmopolitan aesthetics. Indeed, it was precisely during this period of urban upheaval and regeneration efforts that Toronto witnessed a resurgence in graffiti production in selected gentrifying downtown neighbourhoods and the inner-suburbs (Senses Lost, 2009). A mounting public debate began circling about graffiti’s aesthetic qualities and its legitimacy in a city becoming aware of its financial needs and aspirations (Farkas, 2011). In Toronto’s media, graffiti bore the weight of its by then politicised and commercialised association with racialised inner city life (Dickinson, 2008; Farkas, 2011).
Much has been written about the urban politics of graffiti writing (see e.g. Farkas, 2011; Iveson, 2007; Keith, 2005). Influenced by hip-hop culture and deriving originally from New York’s economically disenfranchised, racialised neighbourhoods (Style Wars, 1983), graffiti as a visual, material and spatialised practice signifies its own distinctive aesthetic forms and sensibilities. A distinction is made in graffiti communities between tagging (as the originary graffiti form) and ‘street art’. Graffiti proper can be productively thought of: as a textual practice involving stylised letter formation speaking to the individualised expression/identity of the artist (and the crew to which the writer belongs) and to the skill required to master its formal qualities and presentation (Lewisohn, 2008); as a ‘decentralized, aesthetic insubordination’ or disruption to the proper and entitled ordering of the modernist city landscape (Farkas, 2011; Iveson, 2013; Keith, 2005); as an emergent technology of communication between, and exclusive to, graffiti writers ‘sharing an intolerance’ (Keith, 2005: 149) to the normativised codes of hegemonic visual regimes; and as an index of a fault-line separating the liberal ideals of universalist inclusion and democratic participation from a social reality of racialised economic exclusion and inequity (Iveson, 2007). ‘Street art’, in contradistinction, is a sub-genre of graffiti that breaks with the tradition of tagging. In aesthetic conversation with traditions of public murals as social and political protest (Lewisohn, 2008), its forms are representational, more accessible to wider publics, and include textual and figurative gestures and references adapted from commoditised and popular culture. Unlike graffiti, which refuses the legal, social and aesthetic conditions of its spatial placement (Iveson, 2013; Lewisohn, 2008), street art’s representational forms are set in a recognisable dialogical relationship with the localised social and political environment.
By the mid-1990s, both practices of graffiti had become a globalised, youth-based creative/political practice popularised and commoditised through hip-hop music videos and related commercial products like album covers, video games, magazines, and film. Graffiti or ‘street art’ as an emergent nomenclature, had also firmly established itself as a normativised style/sensibility understood to define urban youth identity. In fact, because of its assumed visual appeal to youth, most of Toronto’s youth agencies in priority neighbourhoods frequently relied on images of ‘graffiti writing’ to promote social programmes, and to decorate drop-in spaces (O. Segin, social development project coordinator, 2011, personal communication).
Urban spatial politics and the rise of neoliberal citizenship
In line with these two globally mobile paradigms tethering the indexes of a ‘strong city’ to neighbourhood revitalisation and investment, ‘safe streets’, with its attendant penalisation platform, and a thriving economy (Leslie and Hunt, 2013), Toronto City Council turned its attention to the regeneration of targeted inner-suburban geographical zones. Despite the presence of mostly racialised poverty in several inner-city neighbourhoods, only a very limited number of these communities made it onto a prioritised list for urban renewal (Boudreau et al., 2009). These zones were experiments in urban modernist design, home to many of the city’s immigrant populations, urban aboriginal households, and the working and marginally poor. They were understood to be plagued by the socio-economic conditions rife for social disruption and violence: concentrated poverty, crime, an excess of public housing, and too much un-integrated, concentrated racial difference (Rigakos et al., 2004).
In 2003, The Strong Neighbourhood Task Force, comprised of community groups, business, municipal and provincial state representatives, and the United Way of Toronto forged a strategy to address trends of increasing, insular concentrations of neighbourhood poverty, ‘inadequate community infrastructure’ and risk for violent crimes (Wilson and Keil, 2008). In a move signalling managerial efficiency, 13 identified zones of disenfranchisement were bundled into localised ‘priority neighbourhoods’ and targeted for ‘immediate investment’ (Boudreau et al., 2009; Bradford, 2006). The doxa of this investment politics was twofold: First, poverty and social exclusion, together with their perceived impact on the ‘health, wellbeing, and prosperity’ of ‘the entire city’, were understood not as indicators of systemic failure, but calculated as symptomatic of place-specific pathologies (Wilson and Keil, 2008). Second, in keeping with a neoliberal rationality and the strategies of creative city entrepreneurialism, it was argued that an infusion of joint public-private expenditure in neighbourhood regeneration would generate globalised opportunities for fiscal and capital investments (Boudreau et al., 2009).
While the three levels of the state were called upon to redirect energies towards social and infrastructural renewal, the onus to redress patterns of uneven development and socio-economic exclusion was placed squarely on ‘local partners’ – an amalgamation of residents, social service and health care agencies, criminal justice, business, and neighbourhood associations (United Way, 2004). A host of authors (Boudreau et al., 2009; United Way of Toronto, 2011) have argued that in its push to normalise global city entrepreneurialism practices, Toronto has repositioned the rights and responsibilities of citizens away from a Marshallian notion of welfare citizenship (Rogers and Darcy, 2014), with its attendant focus on social spatial justice, democratic involvement and rights entitlement based on membership. In its place are a series of market-oriented, regulatory and disciplinary policies and practices (Brown, 2006) geared towards cultivating and rewarding resident subjects who performatively display their compliance as self responsivised, global city participants and collaborators in realising creative city aspirations (Crath, 2012; Leslie and Hunt, 2013; Rogers and Darcy, 2014). Indeed, as Iveson (2007) suggests, part of the impetus of a creative city entrepreneurialism with a ‘safe streets’ securitisation platform, was an understanding that residents newly engendered with sensibilities of community ownership and pride would engage in self-directed surveillance and social regulation of public space.
Practices of youth community and civic engagement fit neatly within this logic. According to an emergent scholarship (cf. Kennelly, 2011; Torres et al., 2013), discourses of ‘active citizenship’ function as control strategies by discouraging youth’s participation in a politics threatening to normative values and practices, while simultaneously shoring-up a pacified political sensibility restricted to practices of own self-care, non-state dependency and understandings of community as a localised mechanism for securitisation and productivity (Iveson, 2007; Rose and Miller, 2010).
The Graffiti Transformation Project
Taken as a policy assemblage, these three directives for stimulating economic growth generated a reorientation of community social programming, including community arts initiatives targeting ‘at risk’ youth. As Leslie and Hunt (2013) demonstrate, advocacy for community based arts programming in prioritised neighbourhoods was mentioned explicitly in numerous municipal policy documents: The Cultural Plan for the Creative City (2003); Creative City Planning Framework (2008), the Mayor’s Agenda for Prosperity (City of Toronto, 2008), Imagine a Toronto (2006), and the Creative Capital Gains Report (2011). In these reports, arts programming was understood as an expedient resource for economic and socio-political amelioration with its attendant focus on community development and the enhancement of social cohesion across difference. Youth as prioritised subjects of investment were targeted across these documents.
The design of the GTP together with the planning and criminal justice apparatus supporting it, was grounded in precedents firmly established by the mural/anti-graffiti network programme in Philadelphia, and similar graffiti abatement/community based strategies in New York and Chicago. Assuming that ‘the issue of unwanted graffiti negatively impacts neighbourhoods across the city’ (City of Toronto, 2010: 3), the programme adopted by Toronto Council was geared towards supporting and highlighting youth at risk’s civic participation in the dual acts of criminal remediation – the erasure of an illicit aesthetic intrusion – and neighbourhood beautification. With a budget of approximately $350,000, the social development office, in conjunction with transportation, solicited proposals from community arts organisations and non-profit social service agencies servicing ‘marginalized youth facing multiple barriers to employment’ (City of Toronto, 2010: 5), engaging them to run summer graffiti eradication and mural creation programmes. Proposals were assessed on the applicant’s experience working with ‘marginalised’ youth and their record in working with neighbourhood beautification/enhancement initiatives. The anticipated ‘impact of the project across the city’ (2010: 4) also weighed in the decision for funding.
With the turn towards a focus on aesthetic enhancement of targeted areas of the city (2006–2011), community based service agencies hosting the GTP were required to involve local neighbourhood associations, other community agencies, and business improvement associations in the design and implementation of the murals. As Toronto’s last annual report on the programme proclaimed, since its inception, the Graffiti Transformation Program was responsible for removing ‘25,000 individual tags’ and ‘cleaning 350 sites of the illegal presence of graffiti’. In their place, 720 murals were created and approximately 2128 youth had received some form of financial remuneration together with skills acquisition (City of Toronto, 2011). Participants tended to be between the ages of 14 and 24, and identified along different racial and ethnic lines depending on the location and ‘vibe’ of the agency hosting the GTP.
In theory, successfully funded projects (approximately 20 per year) needed to accomplish the following goals: (i) employment of neighbourhood youth – through wage or honorarium; (ii) education about the impact of graffiti on built form (i.e. its illegality, its aesthetic blight); (iii) targeted graffiti and tag removal; (iv) skills training –‘customer service’, ‘technical aspects of graffiti removal and outdoor art installation’, life skills, cultivation of ‘strong work habits’, pro-social skills; (v) establishing partnerships with local police precincts, business associations, neighbourhood associations and local business owners to secure space for community murals; (vi) negotiation with community members about the content of murals; and (vii) the employment of a community artist to work with the youth team (O. Segin, social development project coordinator, 2011, personal communication; City of Toronto, 2010).
Evident in these policy guidelines for the GTP, and in line with other guidelines for youth focused, arts based programming targeting Toronto’s Priority Neighbourhoods (Leslie and Hunt, 2013), is the marking of youth with a fundamental ambivalence (Crath, 2012; cf. Fleetwood, 2005; Muncie, 2006; Sharland, 2006), On the one hand, youth were being viewed as a valuable resource in terms of their future market value/potential, their nascent entrepreneurial savvy, and their current currency as invested neighbours (Fleetwood, 2005; Sharland, 2006). The GTP, like other community based arts initiatives, identified involvement in the arts as a vehicle for enhancing youth capacity for depoliticised civic engagement, cultivating responsibilisation (i.e. the moral imperative for youth to take responsibility for their own socio-economic futures), and supporting employability and social skills training (Kennelly, 2011; Leslie and Hunt, 2013). These capacity building attributes revealed, in part, arts programming’s operative neo-liberal governmental rationality (Leslie and Hunt, 2013; Muncie, 2006). Conversely, youth were problematised as risky business, and importantly, as Sharland (2006) alerts us, were deemed central to the operationalisation of neighbourhood risk mediation and to the safety of the wider communal and productive social body (cf. Kelly, 2001; Skott-Myhre, 2008).
Read as an expedient urban planning resource (Brandstater et al., 2011), I argue below that the GTP sought to deploy the aesthetic as a calculative procedure in three ‘expedient’ ways: (i) as visualised actuary; (ii) as index of social cohesion and global hip; and (iii) as a technique of regulation/caring.
The GTP as visualised actuary
In one instrumentalist register, graffiti abatement through mural production can be read as Toronto’s attempt to visually coordinate and ‘institutionalise’ risk perception and remediation (Feldman, 2005: 206). Drawing from Allen Feldman’s reading of the spectacle of American securitisation and the use of perceptual grids to visualise and territorialise the perceived threat of the terrorist other, we can think of the GTP’s ability to govern risk aesthetically according to the following modalities. First, relying on a discourse of broken windows, ‘safety’ and ‘social disorder’ become diagnosable objects signifying the material presence of criminality (or its absence), or as an actuarial measure assessing the risk of future criminality. Although now discounted as an empirically verifiable strategy for managing crime (Harcourt and Ludwig, 2006), ‘safety’ and ‘social disorder’ were managed here visually through the anti-graffiti by-law enforcement squad’s tracking of graffiti’s disruptive presence on the visual landscape. According to Schacter’s (2008) examination of the governance economy of London street art, graffiti’s presence in public/privatised space is being read by both detractors and practitioners/enthusiasts alike not only for its aesthetic qualities and for its semiotic content, but as a marker of its ‘corporeal illicitness’. In other words, apart from its communicative qualities, graffiti is understood as a materiality that performs its defiant disregard for hegemonic urban spatial governance, regulated through the flows of capital and sanctioned by the state’s security apparatus. As Schacter (2008) clarifies, the very medium (a wall, a sign, a bridge) as signifier of the limits of a designated normalcy and legality of usage of space is being overwritten by graffiti’s performance of its own impossible ‘subjectivity’ – a social being of sorts produced at an aesthetic and spatial threshold of what is conceivable and allowable. Understood here, graffiti is a transient ‘being’ that incises its illicit, material presence into a dialogue about space from which it has been discounted. Then-mayor Rob Ford’s vociferous 2012 attacks on graffiti as ‘violent’ contaminant and contagious ‘blight’ to city property, and Toronto city documents (2010, 2011) discussing ‘vandalism’ supports Schacter’s claim that it is the medium, its ‘corporeality’, as fused with the design, that demands attention.
Second, one can think of the coordinated spectacle of a crew of racialised youth – as marked bodies of risk – performatively displaying (Butler, 2007) a compliant, productive, multicultural citizen-subjectivity through their public enactment of sanctioned erasing of illicit graffiti. Such a public orchestration can be read as a type of visualised materialisation of the state’s ability to discipline ‘criminality’ and criminalised bodies (as actual or potential, projected futures). Relatedly, we can also think of the sanctioned ‘putting up’ of murals as an exhibitionary flaunting of state vigilance in regulating insecurity and re-territorialising dangerous public space as a zone of propriety and legality (Iveson, 2007). In other words, the mural’s utility as a calculative technique lies in its assumed ability to agentically radiate its licitness. As a visual, material presence, murals are suggestive of a corporeality in place of a ‘subjectivity’ that abides by litigious and securitised codes of behaviour, movement and flows of bodies across the cityscape.
GTP as index of social cohesion and global hip
Mural production was also deployed because it could traffic as a visual trace of local social cohesion across economic and racial/ethnic divides, of a community ‘healing itself’, and of a functioning multiculturalism. According to the social development committee officer responsible for the coordination of the GTP, the programme was designed to afford youth, working in conjunction with community artists, the skills necessary ‘to sell their ideas about what is important to them and to learn how to present them’, graphically, through dialogue with ‘invested partners’ (O. Segin, social development project coordinator, 2011, personal communication). In conjunction with this effort to provide a space for youth to ‘express their creativity, vulnerability, needs, and spirit’ (S. O’Brian, police officer, 2011, personal communication), at the heart of the project was an expectation that marginalised youth would learn the skills of negotiating different understandings of ‘community’ by working collaboratively with local business, city councillors, police, and importantly other community members. Cultural engagement, as a state regulated exercise, was thus understood to create, as one city bureaucrat suggested, ‘an opportunity for citizens, who might never do so to participate in civic dialogue and to contribute to an atmosphere of understanding and respect’ extending beyond the boundaries of their own neighbourhood (O. Segin, social development project coordinator, 2011, personal communication). Murals were also thought of as an indexical trace of ‘the spirit of collaboration’ at work – as negotiation of racial differences – and as a representational accounting of how a ‘healthy functioning diversity of different groups and cultural expressions’ operated in their neighbourhood (Jannice B, project coordinator community health centre, 2011, personal communication). Finally, murals were believed to inspire the ‘strength’ of a community to address and heal from its own social dysfunction (Jannice B, project coordinator community health centre, 2011, personal communication).
I would suggest the GTP’s practice of creating murals in ‘visible, public spaces’ previously stained by ‘disordered social behavior’ (United Way, 2011), adhered to a logic in which the social efficacy or verisimilitude of the murals was thought to lie in their communicative exchange with local and wider publics. Their very ability to visually ‘dramatise’ truths of resilience or functioning multiculturalism, or to address unspeakable truths like the community’s presence of ‘gang related’ or ‘domestic violence’ (Jannice B, project coordinator community health centre, 2011, personal communication), was understood by some administrators as a means to cathect the audiences’ aspirational desires – to hope, to aspire, to heal, to witness. As a mode of cathexis, murals could then function to channel individually or communally manifested actions towards orchestrated ends. Ranciere (2009) notes, in this logic’s fault line, given that anyone who recognises the medium’s message(s) already buys in to its identifications and prescriptions, there is no modification (or redistribution) of how the aesthetic actually transpires. Recognition, in this sense, is the effect of ‘a functionalist affirmation of the status quo of objective givens’ (Ranciere, 2007: 5) prescribing what can be counted as a proper reformulation of community, and what will remain unheard or unrecognisable.
I would argue that recognition of the ‘worth’ of murals is in part a re-articulation of a hierachicalised distinction between murals and graffiti, a genre effect, which is then generative of other hierachicalised orderings of subjects and actions. Read from the ‘outside’ in, murals confer a verification of a hierachicalised social ordering, by re-instantiating certain prescriptive qualities (e.g. pathological, poor, creative, resilient, multicultural, dignified) to selected people and spaces. In this sense, culture becomes a compulsively repetitive, regulated mechanism for prioritised neighbourhoods to publicly visualise their pain and accomplishments of empowerment, and to perform their victimisation and resilience for a ‘general’ (non-pathologised/non-priority neighbourhood) public. It is precisely in this performative mode of difference that the very spatialised and temporal boundaries between normal/empowered and those always in the process of healing/empowering are reinvigorated (Yudice, 2003). This perceived redemptive functioning of cultural expression trucks easily in the domestic spaces of multicultural liberalism (Dhamoon, 2005; Thobani, 2007), as well as in the circuits of globalised capitalism with its voracious appetites for ‘authentic’ or ‘survivor art’, ‘art from the diaspora’, or ‘outsider art’ (Mercer, 1998).
Read from the inside out, murals are to be seen by community members as proof of community resilience and spirit; a desire to pastorally contain, through aesthetic dialogue, expressions of social unrest, formations of political excess, and other aesthetic sensibilities. In this sense, murals, articulated as communicative expression from both within and without, are thought to facilitate, albeit in highly prescribed terms, a stitching of bodies and spaces (back) into the fabric of a thriving metropolis. This is an accommodationist politics, as Ranciere (2007) and Yudice (2003) suggest, seeking to mediate difference by ‘controlling’ how, and by what representational criteria a community is included in a multicultural exchange. Foreclosed from the interaction, is a disruption to the networks and flows of power that dictate the terms and limits of sensible distribution in the first instance (and by implication of how ‘empowerment … can be experienced and expressed’) (Ranciere, 1999; Yudice, 2003: 161).
Finally, the GTP can be seen as both visually conferring social support for disenfranchised communities and youth, and more robustly, as a neo-liberal governance strategy to socially regulate an ‘at risk’ population. Despite these appearances of state effectiveness in assuaging welfare sentiment and inculcating youth self-responsivisation, one of the perceived shortcomings was that the programme tended to attract youth who were already invested in its stated goals of employability, skills acquisition and community engagement. The moral and market oriented scaffolding supporting the GTP, and the means by which the programming is implemented, tends to induce a further social disenfranchising of potential youth participants already alienated from normative modes of economic and social productivity (Crath, 2012).
The GTP, together with the more generic practice of throwing up funded murals in neighbourhoods, is not without its detractors. Calling attention to the growing discrepancy between rich and poor, and to the need for more sustained and robust social and economic programming in her neighbourhood, one Jane-Finch activist said this about murals: ‘Rich people get to buy their way out of problems, poor folks get art projects’ (Sorrel P, 2011, personal communication). Moreover, a number of community workers and residents I spoke with argued against mural practice because of its ‘stigmatising qualities’. As one youth resident quipped, ‘we might as well have a neon sign saying ghetto’ (Dwayne G, 2011, personal communication). Complementing this sentiment are the words of one cultural youth worker in the priority neighbourhood of Flemingdon Park, who suggested the need for racialised and economically disenfranchised people to step outside of what Yudice (2003: 156) describes as the ‘double bind of representation’ – the desire by racialised communities to gain control over stereotypical representations of their own experiences and the ‘compulsion to see and put our guts on display’ (Charlie P, 2010, personal communication) for the consumption of the normative public. As the youth worker succinctly argued, ‘as racialised immigrants, as people of colour, we are tired of telling our fucking [sic] stories. We’re here, so get over it.’
Disrupting governance sensibilities of the GTP
As a local expression of a globally circulating set of calculative mechanisms, the GTP was intended to both signal the management of the aesthetisisation of priority neighbourhoods, and to regulate the types of representational economies participating in those spaces according to a priori categories derived from creative and safer streets aesthetics. But I would like to disrupt this limited reading of a youth governance initiative with an example drawn from my research with the Alexander Park public housing community, in which another politics was operative. In one sense, the street-art produced here signalled a desire to participate in the ordering of subjects and spaces (Yusoff, 2010), and yet its very presence – similar to that staged by graffiti – disrupted the codes holding that ordering in place. Six youth of varying ethnicities and races, ranging from ages 18 to 24, together with newly emerging public/community artists, Joshua Barndt and Sean Martindale, created a series of ‘sculptural interventions’ in the social geography of their neighbourhood. Six impermanent interventions and one permanent photo-based mural made use of locally found materials to document weeks of activity making and community interaction with the sculptural forms. Entitled Make your Mark on Paradise (see https://vimeo.com/36098823), these ‘murals’ staged a response to mounting anxieties and discontents surrounding the anticipated ‘revitalisation’ of their community (Jed B, 2011, personal communication).
The one project involved a sculptural intervention graphically emphasising an ‘act of vandalism’ occurring months before to a basketball court at the centre of the complex. The fence had been cut to access the court, which was locked at night to prevent its use for alleged ‘illegal activities’. Taking found pieces of red and blue plastic, the arts crew fashioned two arms with extended hands, one placed on either side of the opening. In one sense, the intervention offered a structural solidity, regardless of how impermanent, to a temporally fragile, unsanctioned (and thus, in its neo-liberal guise, unproductive) act. That the youth’s sculpture marked a disruption to a policed visual field (a literal physical incision into a regulation of borders and spaces), suggested not only a willingness to engage with the resident’s discontentment with social life in the public housing complex, but also suggested, in the register of the aesthetic, a social interaction oriented around principles of access and equality. Remarkable, is the team’s transformation of the fabric of social space such that the very politicised practice of being public, together, was centred around an empty space, recalling both a past foreclosure, its disruption, and a re-inscription as opening towards future, as yet uninscribed social and spatial ‘enunciations’ (Ranciere, 2010).
Paradoxically, the same week in which the team crafted their intervention, city councillor Adam Vaughn had been invited by Barnes to address why the community was in need of revitalisation, and to pacify their fears and concerns over possible dislocation from their homes. Vaughn offered a set of sentiments culled from Toronto’s creative cities planning model, decrying the need for mixed income neighbourhoods and the revitalisation of derelict downtown housing stock, and lauding youth artists/participants as ‘Toronto’s future’. In this rhetoric, youth – as a designated subject category – had a vital role to play in re-imagining their neighbourhood as an engine of Toronto’s globalised economic prospects. Not only was the constituting of a re-imagined ‘social’ aligned with late-capitalist aspirations and a consensual ethics, but the conscription of youth, as Toronto’s future, was also inscribed into this operative logic.
These two aspects of an emerging policy/programme imperative, one aesthetic intervention, and the other an unfolding of consensual mechanisms to disengage potential dissent, hinged on how common experience and the futurity of city space should be re-framed. In the spirit of Ranciere’s philosophical method ‘of practicing another way of considering’, I wish to draw attention to the ‘dissociation’ of one event from another. One element of their disassociation lies in the spatiality of the occurrences. The meeting with Adam Vaughn was contained spatially within a designated community meeting space with its abiding goal of exercising consensual agreement with youth. The other space, where youth regularly go, was marked by a two-fold disruption to the visual field: a first instance, marked by the initial incision in the fence, challenged the effectivity of surveillance techniques to wholly monitor the uses of public space in the community; a second instance disrupted the very ability of the ‘state’ to lay claim to this act of defiance as vandalism (or in aesthetic governance terms – the optics of broken windows) to justify revitalisation. Their act dared to ‘beautify’ in a different way than imagined by creative city aesthetics (Jed B, 2011, personal communication) and make communal the initial, individualised act of incision. Moreover, there was a temporal disjuncture between the two events. In one, a causal line was drawn by Vaughn between practising the art of responsivisation through cultural production and a speculative mapping of how entitlement to civic engagement/leadership might look. In the other, a non-linear temporality was staged that defied this order by short-circuiting a type of conscientising, representational logic narrowing the field of acceptable outcomes of youth arts practice. Finally, one can recount a type of disjunctuous unfolding between different forms of subjectivisation: One was rendered through a neoliberal structuring aligning spaces and youth with individual/community responsivisation, street safety, and city renewal. The other consisted of a set of aesthetic propositions memorialising a tear in the securitisation of public space enacted previously, while gesturing towards a not yet performed set of subjective interactions and placements in an indeterminate social space.
Conclusion
As I have shown through an analysis of the GTP, the imperatives driving the project extended beyond the reaches of policy concentrated on the socio-economic disciplining and empowerment of youth deemed at risk, to include wider concerns of urban governance as a spatial and aesthetic problematic. The project provided the city with an operative knowledge apparatus designed to elicit certain calculations on the social, aesthetic and economic compliance of targeted spaces and subjects, in-line with the normative codes of creative city cosmopolitanism, functioning multiculturalism, and safer streets aesthetics.
This research and analysis points to a reconsideration of current youth governance practices as being implicated in the production of a complex weave of intended effects, including those operating in the register of the aesthetic. On the one hand, my analysis of the GTP supports the work of other urban youth policy scholars in suggesting a contemporary trend towards understanding the problematic of ‘urban at risk youth’ in both spatial and political terms. Youth are doubly marked in this new governance calculation as risky to their own productive futures as individualised subjects – thus the need for interventions designed to cultivate a more responsivised subject – and as a threat to the spatial integrity/safety, investment and productive capacity of a neighbourhood or wider geographical space (Muncie, 2006).
And yet, by introducing Asher Ghertner’s understanding of ‘aesthetic governance’ and taking account of the globalised mobility of urban policy strategies like creative city entrepreneurialism and safer streets securitisation, we might question to what extent other urban youth governance, arts based initiatives are also problematising youth in aesthetic terms, in line with the normative codes of these circulating, regulatory sensibilities. This is a call for research to interrogate how global policies, with their own economic and aesthetic imperatives, are translated into practice in localised ways (Roy, 2012). Relatedly, we might also query whether community arts-oriented youth strategies are drawn upon as a type of calculative shorthand for doing the work of mobile policies (McCann and Ward, 2011), and for grounding their associated aesthetics in a particular place. In other words, to what extent might we consider youth policy as currently operative in shaping the politics of a particular urban environment such as Toronto? In the example of the GTP, I drew attention to at least three different domains of an aesthetic register operative in making material interconnected models of urban planning – as a mediator and regulator of normativised sensibilities, as an aesthetic barometer of subjective/spatial compliance, and as an efficient tool for demonstrating, at least at the level of appearance, a neighbourhood’s capacities for safety, creativity and investment.
If the analytical sightlines of the paper stayed close to a reading of the GTP as a localised negotiation of the apparatus of creative city politics, I also attempted to make an intervention into this rather prescriptive and confining frame. By introducing Ranciere’s poetic reflections on political aesthetics, I attempted to open the space of inquiry to investigate a youth mural-making initiative as an act of dissensus. This re-calling of a moment that occurred in the workings of the GTP illustrates an ability to think through a reimagining of other futures for engagement with urban youth communities. Moreover, this analytical frame encourages a critical attentiveness to the aesthetic dimensions of urban policy government as a terrain in which consensual practices and other regulating strategies reformulate and condense hierachicalised social divisions, and suggests ways in which these very (social) practices might be held in dispute (Ranciere, 2010).
It is subject to debate whether these moments of disruption can serve as touch points for a counter-mobilisation, or as a sustained critique of the deep structural conditions giving rise to disenfranchisement and inequality in the first instance; the very issues that programmes like the GTP seek to address. And yet, what the intervention of blue and red plastic did offer was an invitation for the Alexander Park community (and possibly for wider publics), to spend a moment at the precipice of an opening, to see and feel the scope of its enunciation about what it means to claim a place in and beyond the politics of a specific locality.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received support from the University of Toronto Open Fellowship, and an Ontario Graduate Student Award.