Non-American graffitti
Graffiti is an invariable part of the urban landscape, that is clear to me and it cannot be otherwise. The questions are: where, how much and what. Because as the oft-cited study on the impact of broken glass on buildings in certain New York neighborhoods argues, the same should apply to graffiti – left to proliferate indiscriminately, they too create a sense of decadence, impunity, weak organs of the order and incite to a general non-observance of public order (albeit only in the form of a face thrown out of the car window while we meekly wait at the traffic light).
Since the topic ignited me (in my opinion, Sofia is a city terribly affected by graffiti), I casually asked a few of my friends, according to them, “in Sofia, there is rather little or rather a lot of graffiti”. Of course, none of them answered that there were many. But once I focused their attention on the subject, they too began to notice and be impressed.
The truth is that in our daily tours, mostly along the same routes, we no longer notice the graffiti and have developed a kind of “blindness” to it. But they are there, and in huge quantities.
The most seriously affected are the buildings in the center, the roller blinds of most shops, the DCCs and the schools. I don’t claim to have a complete overview of all the schools in Sofia, but most of them are HEAVILY stained with graffiti (here we exclude the project-colored facades of several schools).
It is noticeable that yellow buildings attract paint bottles the most, and Sofia has a disproportionate number of YELLOW buildings (see the article on the subject HERE). I don’t know if it is due to the fact that on a yellow background the graffiti stand out the most or because the yellow buildings remind of another serious target – the school buildings (or the reverse logic). The truth is that if you paint your building yellow and it is in the broad center of Sofia, graffiti is 100% guaranteed!
Of course, there are serious artists among the graffiti youth. They look at each other from afar. But they paint on a project, on a facade or a fence or a substation, where they are allowed with the approval of the relevant institution.
Everything else for me is visual aggression on the urban environment, most often with a rather dubious aesthetic result and with the main result – a contribution to the feeling that Sofia is not a particularly beautiful city.
Yes, there is graffiti in other cities and capitals in Europe and around the world. But not on the facades of the buildings in the historic center, but most often in more peripheral or mainly residential parts of the city.
Yes, there are buildings that deserve it – gray and ugly, neglected by their owners, with crumbling facades, unpainted for decades.
But there are also buildings that are freshly painted, with the obvious intention of looking good, only to dawn the very next day covered in insane graffiti.
Let graffiti remain urban art – made by whoever can, where needed and with appropriate planning, so that they enrich the urban environment rather than endangering and demeaning it.