JUCS 7 (2+3) pp. 187–198 Intellect Limited 2020
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies
Volume 7 Numbers 2 & 3
© 2020 Intellect Ltd Special Issue. English language.
https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00025_1
Received 10 March 2020; Accepted 24 July 2020
SPECIAL ISSUE
TIJEN TUNALI
Aarhus University
Street art between business
and resistance
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
Street art, with its subcultural character, has been looked upon for its potential for
social aesthetic and political dissidence. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art’s utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential,
others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and
institutional order of the neo-liberal economy. Street art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in
the city. A dialectical study that investigates both sides of the coin showing art’s
aesthetic, spatial, social and political situation in the changing neo-liberal urban
landscape is needed. Analysing simultaneously the hegemonic restructuring of the
urban environment and the growth of counter-hegemonic resistance on the streets
requires taking into account the plurality and complexity of the links between the
urban environment, society and arts. This thematic journal issue offers a multigeographical and interdisciplinary perspective to analyse how street art, as an
aesthetic dispositive, functions dialectically as both resource and resistance in the
sociopolitical make-up of the urban landscape.
urban aesthetics
neo-liberal urbanism
street art
social resistance
urban social
movements
aesthetics and politics
urban culture
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INTRODUCTION
The urban environment is a physical expression of social relations, movements
and ideologies (Fainstein 2001; Harvey 1989). Therefore, changes to it can
provide some insights into broader political reforms that could produce and
reproduce everyday urban life. Many studies have presented a highly sophisticated and detailed analysis of neo-liberal urbanism and how urban public
space has become an urban policy tool of a pervasive significance (Fainstein
and Gladstone 1997; Low and Smith 2006; Smyth 1994). It is also a concurring discussion that the rapid and intensive urban regeneration thrives on
the organization of sensory experience in the city. In this aesthetic–political
environment of the urban space, on the one side is urban aesthetics of neoliberal capitalism that puts the interests of capital over the interests of ordinary inhabitants and the other side is the aesthetic disposition of the urban
social movements, and artistic activism against the uneven urban development and urban decay. Street art, as an urban cultural phenomenon, stands
in the middle of these two forces that compete for the collective sensorium
of the urban space and has a growing power to negotiate the aesthetic reconfiguration of it.
Some social science scholars have had an interest in cultural and artistic urban politics and the role street art in urban development and gentrification (Deutsche 1996; Ducret 1994; Landry et al. 1996; Ley 2003; Mathews
2010; Cameron and Coaffe 2005; Zukin 1995). Other scholars across humanities disciplines have investigated the relationship between street art and the
sociocultural dynamics in the urban environment (Riggle 2010; Ross 2016;
Bengtsen 2018). The relationship of the politics of urban space and street art
is occasionally studied by historians and art historians, often on the fringes of
studies devoted to urban social movements. However, how art re-appropriates
the urban space as a privileged site of political visibility and political agency
is still an underdeveloped area of study. By bringing together innovative and
original studies that investigate street art in various urban contexts and with
different methodological takes, this issue discusses how street art politics
negotiate between commercial interest and social resistance in the aesthetically and politically contested arena of the urban space.
Street art has a broad scope of interests from inserting a subcultural motif
to the cityscape to taking part in the struggle for civil rights, individual and
collective freedoms, to urban social movements against austerity measures
and authoritative regimes. For the greater public, street art is a blatant form
of vandalism in its claimed authority over public spaces, while others recognize its cultural and political value (MacDowall 2006). Thus, street art’s public
image is situated somewhere between the inappropriate use of public space
and rebellious art. As an art form street art is arguably ‘democratic’ as it is
inclusive, unsanctioned and tries to keep itself away from the racial, colonial
and classist world of the art institutions (Bengtsen and Arvidsson 2014). The
street artists, especially graffiti writers, often regard their work as the occupation of public spaces by the dispossessed (Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi 2017).
This thematic journal section explores the potential theoretical and empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach to street art can bring to the
understanding of both arts and the urban space. It offers a multidimensional
and interdisciplinary perspective to analyse how street art functions as an integral part of the sociopolitical space of the urban landscape both as business
and resistance: How does street art reveal, delimit or question the complexity
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Street art between business and resistance
of neo-liberal urbanization? How can we interpret the aesthetics and politics
of street art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression and the
limits of criminality? What prompts street artists to communicate with urban
dwellers with their marks on the city’s surface? How does street art respond
uniquely to gentrification? How does street art partake in social movements?
Most of current research studies take ‘graffiti’ and ‘street art’ as different artistic
phenomena although it is difficult to delineate a clear differentiation between
them. The articles in this section individually make claims on the two terms as
cultural and artistic dispositions in their own right and within the context that
they are discussed. On the other hand, for the section’s title, the term ‘street
art’ is chosen to work as an umbrella term to indicate ephemeral and unsanctioned art in the streets that incorporates graffiti as well.
Street art is a highly complex and multifaceted art practice that covers a
wide variety of social and public locations in the city, ranging from the street
to the squares, from the park to the art galleries. Street art practices embrace
multiple mediums, techniques, materials, styles and forms such as graffiti,
murals (wall paintings), yarn bombing, stickers, stencilling, wheat pastes, laser
projections, flash mobbing, urban gardening, street performances and theatrical actions, among others. The factors that play a role in this diversity of forms
and visual languages depend on the character of (sub-)cultures and identities, socio-economic conditions, artistic skills and knowledge, and conviviality
and sociability of the aesthetic form. Yet, all street art works demand active
spectatorship and an engaged perceiver (Whybrow 2011). That engagement,
whether by reading or looking or listening, is an essential contribution to the
total communicative process in the public space (Wilson 1986). As such, it
works as a ‘framing device’ for the community around it and acts as a ‘parallel
voice of the city’ (Lewisohn 2008: 30) that creates visual and sometimes textual
compositions as the intermediary between the public and the urban space.
In the time of neo-liberal urban redesign and restructuring, when commercial interests gain too much influence over public space, the ultimate result is
a destruction of the sense of shared ownership of that space (that it belongs
to the people) and erosion of civic identity. Furthermore, public interaction
becomes carefully planned, mediated and commodified. Street art is thus an
assertion, a competition for visibility; all the while urban public space is always
a place of competition for power by managing the power of visibility. This
creative struggle for visibility, separable from the anonymity of many street
artists, has become an intrinsic part of the social symbolic world and urban
culture (Irvine 2012). Irvine argues that: ‘Street art inserts itself in the material city as an argument about visuality, the social and political structure of
being visible’ (Irvine 2012: 237). The way street art presents itself as a visual
discourse embedded in the streets of a city and the way it reveals the effects
of controlled visibility are important to understand how we can make sense of
the urban visual culture and political significance of street art in increasingly
militarized, policed, surveilled or otherwise controlled urban contexts.
For Irvine, street art stands in the intersection of two regimes, namely,
two ways of distributing visibility: the institutional regime imposed by politics, law and property rights, and the aesthetic regime of the artworld, where
the boundary between art and non-art is established (Irvine 2012: 253). Street
art is arguably an institutional antinomy as it depends on the tensions of
working outside traditional art spaces and the ways in which it engages with
urban public space. This makes it antithetical to the art world (Riggle 2010:
248). In the late 1980s, the notion of the museum as a guardian of the public
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patrimony has given way to the museum as a corporate entity with a highly
marketable inventory. The desire for growth in the art world’s quest to expand
itself has resulted in street art’s entrance to the museum and the art market
at great cost. The growing visibility of street art in the 1980s and its relationship to subculture generated the attention of the art world; however, it took
decades for the street art to be canonized as fine arts and become a commercial phenomenon (Wells 2010). After the millennium, street art’s appearance
in the cyberspace popularized it as a part of the cultural industry and the
leisure market. While street art has been more and more incorporated into
the museum space, computer screens art fairs and festivals, commercial art
and other visual media have been invading the street as a part of the new
aestheticization of the urban space. The examples vary from mass stencilling
by movie production companies to posters, billboards and projected advertisements. Street art has become another instrument for the expansion of the art
market although art on the street as unsanctioned work is made to function in
a different way than art created for the gallery that is sanctioned and curated
(Bengsten 2013: 68).
The burgeoning theories of aesthetics and politics foreground how the
dialectical relationship between creative spatial practices and social resistance could challenge the use of space as well as communication and culture
foreground how the dialectical relationship between creative spatial practices
and social resistance could challenge the use of space and sense-making by
urban inhabitants. For Jacques Rancière, aesthetics and politics simultaneously define the subjectivities that articulate a sense to the common world.
For Rancière, aesthetics partake in a regime that is a system of a particular
‘partition of the sensible’ that configures habitual ways of seeing, of saying,
of feeling and doing. The participation in that aesthetic regime determines
individuals’ possibilities and abilities for political action in accordance with
their positions within the society (Rancière 2004). Through this theory, urban
aesthetics is to be understood as a knot that ties together a particular sense
of sensibility and a sense of community. In other words, the aesthetics of the
urban space inform and influence how we make sense and how sense maybe
‘sensed’. Thus, according to Rancière, the regime of distribution of the sensible
is what makes aestheticization of politics possible but its re-distribution can
make re-politicization of aesthetics possible. Street art, as an art genre, takes
its political character and its discontents by being situated in both of these
paradigms. Hence, which kinds of street art activities challenge the urban
distribution of the sensible and which ones become a part of this unevenly
distributed urban sensorium?
Street art engages the masses through creativity, originality and beauty
in the urban space and creates a particular sociality. From the perspective of
this sociality, street art is an arena where art, individual and community come
together for a re-composition of the shared sensorium. Street art enters the
culture of the economy as soon as it establishes a relation between art and the
public. Therefore, street art has been a good resource for local governments
to market their respective cities to real-estate investors and global tourism,
to corporate businesses seeking good public relations, and to cultural tourists who contribute to the image of the global city. In the last two decades,
such visual domination (corporate, public and private) have become one of
the main features of the public image and branding of a city that commodifies urban space to produce collective consumption. This is often achieved by
the saturation of life with signs, images and simulations. Such aestheticization
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arguably intensifies the urban experience, empties social meanings, and
spatializes social relations (Frisby 1991: 76). The political projection of this
development is for the hegemony over the sensorium of the urban space, thus
everyday urban life (Markin 2013). In the cities, attractive corporate-sponsored
street art complete the pleasure of freshly brewed latte, the fusion restaurants
and art galleries compete for empty lots. Our senses and sensibilities in our
daily life are more and more determined by neo-liberal actors that privilege
profit over people. Now, from barbershops to restaurants, from hostel owners
to music club proprietors, the citadins (urban dwellers) who take part in the
commercial activities in the city understand that street art is part of the ‘coolness’ that makes the city an attractive tourist destination and a hotspot for
young middle-class professionals.
This Special Section elaborates on the thesis that street art is not merely
art in the urban public space, but art that institutes a public place – a place
of interaction and common action among people. Indeed, street art interacts
with the hidden features of the urban space and highlights the fact that public
space is a territory of antagonism. That is the antagonism between the politics of urbanity that utilizes art as a property in the service of power capital
and politics of subaltern culture that instrumentalizes art to make visible and
audible those who are excluded by this power. Therefore, the social dynamics
of the contemporary urban space are associated not just as ‘war over space’ but
also war over images in that very space, constituting the politics of both occupation and liberation. While the aesthetic reconstruction on the urban space
has an essential role in producing and reinforcing socio-spatial divides, the
anti-hegemonic struggle tries to reconnect the fragmented subjects through
shared aesthetics that reframes the apprehension of for whom the urban
space belongs. Street art practices are in the middle of this contestation for
the aestheticization of the urban space as a tool to both reinforce and resist it.
The social dimension of street art has always been already dialectical. On
the one hand, street art takes part in energizing and beautifying neighbourhoods to raise real-estate values and boost tourism, the other hand, it is a
site and medium of protest for the labour movement, women’s rights, sexual
liberation, racial equality, urban justice, etc. Urban resistance, in which street
art plays a major role, has a broad scope of interests from a clear ‘right to
the city’ aspirations with its ecological, spatial and ideological agenda to the
struggles of civil rights and individual and collective freedoms. ‘The right to
the city’, – a concept for urban struggles coined by Henri Lefebvre at the time
of Parisian uprisings in 1968 (Lefebvre 2009) – has been a popular term to
denote all kinds of struggle for social and spatial justice in the urban space.
As important texts, such as Rebel Cities by David Harvey (2012); Searching for
the Just City by Peter Marcuse et al. (2009) and Cities for People Not for Profit
by Neil Brenner and Peter Marcuse (2012) demonstrated, urban space as the
site of both political dominance and political resistance. The city has been the
central stage for contesting hegemonic power relations in urbanized societies,
making broad claims for rights and justice, building and mobilizing solidarities among diverse people and groups (Harvey 2012). The city’s parks, streets
and squares have been the central platforms for elevating these struggles in
both the political and aesthetic realm. Notably, art in the rebel streets has been
connected to the political constitutions of local struggles on the one hand,
and the grassroots politics of the social movements, on the other. Street art
had an essential part during the Egyptian and Tunisian revolution (Abaza
2016), Spanish Indignados (Ramírez-Blanco 2018), Greek Aganaktismenoi
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movement (Tsilimpounidi 2015) and the Gezi Uprising (Tunali 2018). It is
even argued that the civil war in Syria is triggered by a graffiti work in Dara’a
(Shapiro 2016). Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement leaves its mark in
the urban space with street murals across the United States.
Street art forms are arguably moments, gestures and acts of fracture in the
urban space. As such, they have the potential to create an opening, a breach
in the ‘grammar of power’ and new zones for resistance. As Chaffee argues:
Street art breaks the conspiracy of silence. Like the press, one role of
street art is to form social consciousness. In authoritarian systems where
outlets for free expression are limited, it is one of the few gauges of
political sentiment. In more open systems, street art enables various
entities to lobby for their interests. Street art, in essence, connotes a
decentralized, democratic form in which there is universal access, and
the real control over messages comes from the social producers. It is
a barometer that registers the spectrum of thinking, especially during
democratic openings.
(Chaffee 1993: 4)
This thematic section aims to situate street art as a form of mass communication, sensory dispositive and a bond of collectivity, and as such, as an
important mode of political activity. In his influential book Urban Revolution
Lefebvre notes,
Revolutionary events generally take place in the street. Doesn’t this
show that the disorder of the street engenders another kind of order?
The urban space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to
the exchange of words and signs as it is to the exchange of things. A
place where speech becomes writing. A place where speech can become
‘savage’ and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe itself on walls.
(Lefebvre [1970] 2003: 19)
This journal section invites the reader to recognize street art as a visually
contentious and controversial art form through its loaded visual vocabulary and contested aesthetics. It aims to explore the potential theoretical and
empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach to street art can bring to
the understanding of both arts and the urban space. The contributors in this
Special Section draw parallels between street art as resistance, theoretically
regarding immediacy and rejection of semblance, and practically through
direct social and aesthetic engagement with the intentions of social change.
Discussions in this issue activate street art as a defining element of urban
culture through creative dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms that enable particular social and cultural processes. This approach aims
to liberate the discourse of ‘art in urban space’ from being a set of formal relations that are subsumed to the neo-liberal organization of the urban space.
The dialogue in-between the articles outlines common concerns related to the
capacity of arts to participate, transform, contest and reveal the way the neoliberal urban landscape is produced. What is commonly questioned in the articles is to what extent arts in the urban space and the world they create can
influence the hegemony on one hand, and how the construction of a common
front for anti-systemic resistance could be possible through the arts in the
streets, on the other.
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Much of street art practice follows the logic of transgressions, appropriations and tactics described in Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday
Life (de Certeau 1988). In this book, de Certeau discusses how ordinary urban
citizens navigate and negotiate their positions in power systems that mark-up
the city space. Breaking up the totalizing notion of those dominated by power
as passive consumers, street art is a creative production that constantly appropriates and reappropriates urban space for artistic dialogue. Street art is an
active engagement with both the city and the citadins. The visual and spatial
approach taken by all these art projects is the one de Certeau calls ‘a tactic’.
Without a place of its own, a tactic operates in isolated actions, takes advantage of opportunities and depends on them, reacting immediately. Tactics are
characterized by mobility, speed and smaller goals. De Certeau likens it to
poaching: ‘It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions
open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. […] It creates surprises in
them. […] In short, a tactic is an art of the weak’ (de Certeau 1988: 35). This
Special Section seeks to discern the various tactics and aesthetic strategies of
street art that serve for intervention, collaboration, dialogic critique, individual
or collective manifesto, expression and self-assertion in the urban décor of
the cities. The contributors discuss the politics of street art not only as a part
of neo-liberal urban transformation but also as a critical response to social,
economic and spatial grievances.
The social life of street art depends on the function of material locations
with all their previously structured symbolic values. The city location is an
inseparable substrate for the work, and street art is explicitly an engagement
with the neighbourhood. Looked from this perspective, street art is a part
of the urban environment as a semiotic space for a variety of assemblage of
visual production specific to that place. Thus the tension arises between the
studies that approach street art from a ‘crime prevention’ perspective (and thus
views it as socially threatening), and the literature that approaches street art
as a phenomenon reflecting wider issues of power subversion and containment is fierce. The researchers and artists in this issue approach street art from
multiple perspectives to discuss its social and political role in reconstituting
the urban space as one of the defining elements of urban culture. Considering
the multidisciplinary nature of street art, the essays cross several disciplines
including geography, anthropology, sociology, urban planning, philosophy,
architecture and art history.
Ilaria Hoppe’s article engages in the subtle relation of street art and graffiti writing towards the urban fabric of Berlin. By combining theories from
the spatial and the visual turn, Hoppe explores street art and graffiti as visual
markers of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality and counter-cultures that establish a new reality that must be seen and
heard. For Hoppe, space appears to be produced not only by architecture and
social interaction but also via visual communication. With this methodological
approach, Hoppe shows the situatedness and performativity of these ephemeral practices: while street art appeared first as low-threshold, participatory
and neighbourhood focused, graffiti stayed more at the margins. Hoppe’s
analysis shows that, in time, this relation has changed: street art has become
more professional and large-scale, while new graffiti styles have evolved also
in more centred areas of town, trying to stand against processes of gentrification. In showing both the commodification and resistance Hoppe’s article
starts this issue’s discussion that street art, in the neo-liberal urban landscape,
is both a resource and a resistance.
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Sanchita Khurana discusses how contemporary street art in New Delhi is
used for beautification to activate a ‘regeneration’ of space, which is concomitant to the neo-liberal state’s agenda of making a ‘world-class’ city that caters
to a growing consumerist Indian middle-class. Khurana’s article contextualizes
the urban changes triggered by street art within the larger structural transformations happening in cities in India, often driving them towards homogenization and bourgeoisification. In her doctoral research on street art in New
Delhi where the dominance of the visual regime is towards urban beautification, Khurana proposes an understanding of a new kind of ‘gentrification’
highlighting the class and caste bias underlying it. Khurana’s article is significant in showing how the aestheticization of the urban space through street
art allows for the clashes of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interactions
between different discursive and imagery practices and diverse subjectivities.
Urban design and the built environment function not only as utilitarian
arrangements of space but also as designed places of continually contested
perceptions and negotiated cognitive experience in the urban space.
Konstantinos Avramidis’ article draws from his Ph.D. thesis on the graffiti on
the Bank of Greece during the Aganaktismenoi movement against the austerity measures in Greece in 2011, where he innovatively introduces a design
method that allows us to reconceptualize the meaning and function of the
writings in the streets. Avramidis engages in the aesthetics of destruction and
reconstruction on the façades of the Bank of Greece to show us how graffiti could orchestrate complex repositories of meanings for those who occupy
those walls and those who engage with them in an exhibition. He argues that
by de-situating graffiti from its original urban and political context whilst placing it onto the gallery surfaces, the exhibition undermines graffiti’s critical
potency and transforms it into a commodity. For Avramidis, presenting graffiti
as an empty gesture, the exhibition nonetheless raises questions concerning
the situating role of graffiti. Following the constant appearance, removal and
reappearance of the writings, the article maps the hegemonic and counterhegemonic responses to both overwhelming forces of crisis and to the art of
graffiti writing.
In the studies of the art of the urban social movements, street art is often
been understood as a by-product of the uprising, as an example of a newly
found freedom of expression. Mohamed El-Shewy argues that in the case of
Egypt this discourse has significant orientalist tunes. Instead, he shows that
street art has always been a vital element of politics and political struggle. By
drawing from Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, a term referring to a political
and aesthetic process that creates new modes of perception and novel forms
of political subjectivity, El-Shewy discusses that street art can reproduce public
spaces and thus is political. El-Shewy analyses the post-January 2011 Egyptian
street art – such as the Mohamed Mahmoud Street murals – as a spatial and
aesthetic practice that presents a spontaneous politicity. By merging Rancière’s
theory in aesthetics and politics with a spatial approach, El-Shewy points to
the semiotic and iconographic elements present in the post-uprising works
and challenges the scholarship that establishes street art as a mere form of
freedom of expression, rather than as a site of politics.
Street art highlights the fact that urban space is a territory of antagonism in the everyday life of urban dwellers. The art collective Revue, formed
by feminist artists Sreejata Roy and Mrityunjay Chatterjee, facilitates a street
art project with a group of young women (ages 15-20) from different ethnic
backgrounds in two working-class urban villages, in New Delhi. The project
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Street art between business and resistance
consists of a series of wall paintings of ordinary women doing daily activities
and engaging in work that is traditionally done by men in that locality. Roy
and Chatterjee foreground the ‘relational’ approach and collaborative practice with the trajectory of ‘dialogue’ as a key method. In this socially engaged
art project, the artists delve into the experiences of women in public space to
gauge how they navigate through what is socially and culturally prohibited or
permitted to them and how they create their own particular gendered spaces
of community. The article argues that the intricate murals of young workingclass women open a space in the middle of this giant urban landscape and
inscribe their self-expression. With this article, the artists bring the gender
perspective not only to the discussion of street art and public space but also to
socially engaged art and relational art.
Street art is a cultural dispositive that turns the speech to writing and writing to visual signs and images. It is a unique urban exploration that enables us
to engage with art through the movement and existence of our bodies in the
urban space. With a multidimensional perspective, this Special Section shows
how street art, as an aesthetic activity in the urban space, functions as an integral part in the sociopolitical space of the neo-liberal landscape. With contributions by authors from diverse geographical and disciplinary backgrounds,
the issue aims to push the scholarship on street art to recognize its dialectical and multifaceted relationship with the aestheticization of the urban space,
the internationalization of the city, intensification of urban development, and
the proliferation of urban social movements. In the current condition of the
world connected through increasingly conservative politics that tend to erase
the conditions to make democratic participation and grassroots mobilization
possible, the social and political capacity of street art that becomes a conditioning factor for urban life is fundamental and timely.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have come to know the works of four of the authors in this issue through
the Rebel Streets: Urban Space, Art and Social Movements conference that I
co-organized with my project host Gülçin Erdi at the University of Tours
thanks to MSH Val de Loire project grant. I would like to extend my thanks to
Gülçin Erdi and the rest of the organization committee at the CITERES (CIté,
TERritoires, Environnement et Sociétés) laboratory, Muriel Hourlier, Adeline
Vioux and Ece Arslan for the realization of the conference. Also special thanks
to the director of CITERES Nora Semoud for her valuable support of the
conference and my work. I owe thanks to LE STUDIUM Loire Valley Institute
of Advanced Studies for granting me the fellowship that made my postdoctoral research on urban space and art possible, which this Special Section is
one of the outcomes. I would also like to thank my current institution Aarhus
Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Aarhus for their exceptional
generosity for institutional and financial support. Additionally, I want to thank
the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments and Benjamin
Fraser for his attentive work from the beginning of the submission process
until publication.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Tunali, Tijen (2020), ‘Street art between business and resistance’, Journal of
Urban Cultural Studies, 7:2&3, pp. 187–198, doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/
jucs_00025_1
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Tijen Tunali
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Tijen Tunali is an art historian, artist and curator and currently holding a
postdoctoral research position at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies
at Aarhus University. Her postdoctoral projects in France, Germany and
Denmark examine the aestheticization of the urban space, art in social movements, street art and its politics, and art’s multifaceted relationship to gentrification. Her book Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape
is forthcoming by Routledge. With Prof. Brian Winkenweder she is currently
working on the volume Routledge Companion to Marxist Art History.
Contact: Aarhus Institute of Advances Studies, Aarhus University, HøeghGuldbergs Gade 6B, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark.
E-mail: tijen.tunali@aias.au.dk
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5016-7413
Tijen Tunali has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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