Search Amazon using the term street culture, and you’ll find countless books about gangs, graffiti, street art, policing, homelessness, drug markets, skateboarding, street fashion, or urban crime, but relatively few that explicitly examine street culture as an overarching concept.
Why is that?
Part of the reason is that researchers tend to study one aspect of street culture rather than the broader phenomenon.
Another is that street culture has primarily been explored in journal articles rather than book-length studies.
Finally, many authors have produced classic works on street culture without ever using the term itself. Instead, they write about “street life,” “urban subculture,” or, in Britain, “road culture.”
As a result, identifying the most important books on street culture requires looking beyond titles and labels to the substance of the scholarship.
The books below are the ones that do it best
Street Corner Society (1943), byWilliam Foote Whyte
I would begin with Whyte’s Street Corner Society. Although he never used the term street culture, his street ethnography remains one of the foundational studies of urban street life. Based on participant observation in Boston’s Italian-American “Cornerville,” Whyte demonstrated that what outsiders often dismissed as social disorder was actually a highly organized system of informal relationships, leadership, reciprocity, and neighborhood life. By today’s standards, it is difficult not to view this as one of the earliest studies of street culture.
Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (1967), by Elliot Liebow
Liebow’s Tally’s Corner shifted attention to the everyday lives of unemployed Black men in Washington, D.C. Rather than portraying his subjects as pathological or culturally deficient, Liebow showed how street-corner life represented a rational adaptation to unstable employment, poverty, and limited opportunities.
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1995), by Philippe Bourgois
Bourgois’ ethnography of East Harlem is one of the first major books to place the concept of street culture at the center of its analysis. Bourgois argues that street culture emerges among marginalized residents as an adaptive response to exclusion from the mainstream economy and institutions. Rather than romanticizing or condemning the crack economy, he explores how structural inequality shapes identity, work, masculinity, family life, and survival.
Code of the Street (1999), byElijah Anderson
Building on ideas first introduced in his previous book StreetWise (1990), Anderson’s Code of the Street has become one of the most influential theories in urban sociology and criminology/criminal justice. Anderson argues that many disadvantaged neighborhoods develop an informal code governing respect, reputation, and the use of violence. The book transformed the discussion of street culture by identifying the moral rules that regulate social interaction under conditions of concentrated disadvantage.
Sidewalk (1999), by Mitchell Duneier
Duneier’s Sidewalk broadened the study of street culture beyond violence and gangs. Through years of participant observation among book vendors, panhandlers, and scavengers in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Duneier demonstrated that the marginalized people he studied create their own informal social order and often contribute positively to the functioning of public space. His work demonstrates that street culture encompasses far more than crime.
Street Culture in Chengdu (2003), by Di Wang
This book offers a very different perspective by examining street culture historically rather than ethnographically. Drawing on archival and historical sources, Wang demonstrates that street culture is not simply a contemporary phenomenon associated with crime or youth, but a historically connected to urban public life. His work also reminds us that street culture is not exclusively a Western phenomenon.
Street Capital: Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State (2009), by Sveinung Sandberg and Willy Pedersen
This study introduced the influential concept of street capital. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital, the researchers argue that individuals involved in street life accumulate forms of knowledge, reputation, toughness, and social connections that possess value within street settings, even if those same resources have little value in mainstream society. Their work significantly advanced the theoretical understanding of status and identity in street culture.
Understanding Street Culture: Poverty, Crime, Youth and Cool (2015), by Jonathan Ilan
Ilan’s Understanding Street Culture is the first book-length theoretical synthesis devoted specifically to street culture itself rather than to a single neighborhood, city, or group. Ilan draws together scholarship from Britain, North America, and elsewhere to argue that street culture is a global phenomenon shaped by social exclusion, identity, style, consumption, and “cool,” treating cool not as surface style but as a source of status and identity for young people otherwise shut out of mainstream markers of success.
My own edited volume differs from the earlier books because it is not an ethnography of one place or one population. Instead, it is interdisciplinary in the sense that it brings together scholars from criminology, sociology, anthropology, geography, history, architecture, and cultural studies to examine street culture from multiple perspectives. The goal was to define and critique the field more clearly and to demonstrate that street culture extends well beyond crime, gangs, graffiti and street art, and violence to include language, economies, music, fashion, skateboarding, homelessness, policing, and other important aspects of urban life.
Looking Back
Taken together, these books illustrate how scholarship on street culture has evolved over the past eighty years. Early ethnographers documented how people organized everyday life on street corners and in neighborhoods. Later researchers explained the norms, identities, and forms of capital that shape street worlds, while more recent work has broadened the concept to include public space, historical development, informal economies, and global comparative perspectives.
Despite this progress, scholarship on street culture remains limited. Early work suffered from a kind of tunnel vision, focusing disproportionately on urban street crime and subcultures rather than the fuller range of everyday street life. The field also sits at the intersection of criminology, sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, and history. This interdisciplinary character is both its greatest strength and possibly one of the reasons it has developed relatively slowly. No single discipline has claimed ownership of the concept.
The limitation holds geographically too. But work on street culture outside North America and Britain is already emerging, and I hope it continues, broadening the study of street culture beyond the Western world and exploring how street cultures emerge, evolve, and differ across cities and societies globally.
Photo Credit:
Photographer: Danny Lyon
Title: Three boys + A Train graffiti, Brooklyn 1974
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2026-08-08-at-7.42.04-AM.png388600Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-08-09 12:00:142026-08-09 12:00:14Street Culture, Book by Book
During the late 1970s, I got my start driving cab for Beck Taxi in Toronto. Their business at the time was disproportionately located in the east end, above and below the Danforth. We got calls from the projects in Regent Park and the low-income housing at Main and Gerrard, but most business came from working-class people.
It was maybe a month into the job. Business was slow; not many radio calls, street pickups had died down. A bunch of cabbies were parked in front of a bar on Queen East, hoping to take someone home who was calling it quits for the night.
I decided to join them.
Around midnight, when I was at the front of the queue, the bar door swung open and out stumbled a guy. He was about my height but maybe weighed 35 pounds more. Visibly drunk. Thick arms. Ruddy complexion. Missing a few teeth. His nose looked like it had been broken at least twice and hadn’t set right either time.
I could tell he was a brawler. The kind who didn’t give a fuck who he picked a fight with or whether he got knocked out cold at the end of it. He’d just get up and do it again the next night.
He might have been from Down East. Probably a Newfie.
He looked at me, swaying slightly, then stumbled toward my cab. I hadn’t yet learned to keep the doors locked until I was sure I wanted the passenger. He climbed into the back seat, closed the door, and slumped against it.
“Where to?”
He mumbled an address I couldn’t quite make out. I asked him to repeat it. He said something that might have been a street name or might have been him telling me to fuck off. Hard to say.
“Look, I need an address or I can’t take you.”
He said nothing. Just sat there, eyes half-closed.
“Hey. You need to give me an address or get out.”
I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He had that flat, mean stare drunks get when they’ve decided you’re the problem.
“Fuck you,” he said clearly.
I turned around in my seat.
“Yo. Get out of the car.”
There was a solitary police cruiser parked maybe twenty feet away, right in front of the bar. I could see the officers inside, drinking coffee, bullshitting with each other.
I got out of the cab and walked over to them. Tapped on the window. One of them rolled it down.
“I got a guy in my back seat who won’t get out. He’s drunk, won’t give me an address, and he’s refusing to leave. Can you help me?”
The cop looked at me.
Then looked past me at my cab. Then looked back at me.
The window rolled back up.
I stood there for a moment, watching them go back to their coffee and chit-chat. Then I walked back to my cab, opened the back door, and stood outside the car with some distance from the would-be passenger. The kind of guy who’d done this a hundred times before and didn’t care how it ended. I figured I’d wait him out. I stood there. Cars passed. Nobody looked twice.
Eventually, he growled something incoherent, crawled out of the cab, and predictably left the door open. When he was a good six feet from the taxi, I rushed into the cab, turned on the ignition, and drove a few car lengths ahead, stopped long enough to close the rear door, and then booked.
I drove. I replayed the cops’ faces. The dismissiveness. The indifference.
The Toronto police viewed cab drivers the same way they viewed the fares we transported. We were part of the ecosystem they patrolled, not separate from it. We weren’t people they felt obliged to help. We were the trash collectors.
Photo By Little Gamma Ray
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Beck-Taxi-2026-07-13-at-4.59.07-PM.png417622Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-07-19 04:58:552026-07-19 13:00:58Trash Collectors
Many academic organizations hold annual conferences where participants present papers to colleagues working in the same field.
But no learned society that specializes in the scholarly area of graffiti and street art studies, that could hold annual meetings, exists.
Although selected colleges and universities have held one-off conferences on this subject, over the past few decades a handful of independent meetings have occurred where scholars presented papers on graffiti and street art.
Unlike large annual meetings held in hotels or convention centers with multiple simultaneous sessions, these graffiti and street art conferences are typically smaller and last a couple of days.
Thus there are more opportunities for interaction among participants than with the larger conferences. Moreover, these meetings often include joint dinners and one or more graffiti and street art tours organized as part of the program.
Over the past two decades, scholars, including professors and graduate students, have presented papers at these gatherings. Occasionally, graffiti writers and street artists attend and present on their work too.
Four conferences have done so with some regularity. They are reviewed below.
NUART Plus
The NUART Plus scholarly conference grew out of the NUART street art festival in Stavanger, Norway. Founded in 2001 by Martyn Reed, NUART later expanded to Aberdeen, Scotland, where a related festival and NUART Plus program, with the assistance of Susan Hansen, were also developed. The symposium became one of the leading international forums for scholarly and critical discussion of street art, bringing together academics, artists, curators, journalists, and activists. NUART also publishes Nuart Journal, a peer-reviewed publication dedicated to street art research and criticism.
Although the Stavanger archive documents eight NUART Plus symposia between 2012 and 2019, earlier scholarly gatherings may have occurred. Following a pandemic-related interruption, NUART Plus returned to Aberdeen in 2022. As of June 2026, no publicly available information indicates that a future NUART Plus symposium has been scheduled.
TAG
The TAG Conference (“Name Writing in Public Space”) is one of the principal international scholarly gatherings devoted specifically to graffiti writing and tagging. Founded in 2017 by Javier Abarca and an evolving network of collaborators, the conference does not follow a fixed annual schedule. Meetings are organized periodically when a host institution and local organizing team are in place. Past conferences have been held in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Groningen, Hamburg, Linz, New York City, and Vienna, bringing together researchers, artists, writers, and practitioners to discuss the history, theory, and contemporary practice of name writing in public space. The conference has also generated scholarly publications, including edited volumes drawn from conference presentations. Recent sponsored Art & Place conferences also include graffiti and street art papers.
Art and the City
Founded in 2018 by Tijen Tunali, Art and the City is an interdisciplinary conference series exploring the relationships among art, aesthetics, and urban politics. The conference aims to facilitate dialogue and collaboration among scholars working at the intersections of art, culture, and the urban environment, and has served as a platform for broader scholarly projects, including exhibitions, special journal issues, edited books, and grant-funded research. Since its founding, conferences have been held in Aarhus, Amman, Göttingen, Nice, Nicosia, and Tours. More recently, Vittorio Parisi and Konstantinos Avramidis, both graffiti and street art scholars, have co-organized the most recent two editions of Art and the City with Tunali, bringing a stronger graffiti dimension to the program.
Unlike the TAG Conference and NUART Plus, which focus primarily on graffiti, street art, and related forms of urban visual expression, Art and the City takes a broader approach, encompassing urban art, public space, architecture, visual culture, and urban studies.
Urban Creativity
Since 2014, the Urban Creativity conference series has brought together scholars, artists, and practitioners interested in graffiti, street art, urban visual culture, and related subjects. Organized primarily through the efforts of Pedro Soares Neves and affiliated with the University of Lisbon and related institutions, the conference is typically held in Lisbon in late June or early July. Participants come from a range of disciplines and countries, and European scholars have generally been well represented. Presentations are delivered in person and, in some years, online as well.
The conference is part of a broader Urban Creativity research and publishing network overseen by Neves. Participants are often invited to submit revised versions of their papers to associated journals, edited volumes, and other publications devoted to graffiti, street art, and urban culture. Like Art and the City, Urban Creativity takes a wider view than the TAG Conference, encompassing street art, public art, urban interventions, creative cities, and related forms of artistic engagement with urban space.
Scholars wishing to present a paper at these conferences are best advised to periodically check the websites for each of these conferences, as schedules and locations can change. Reaching out directly to the organizers is also worth doing if you want to stay current or explore participation.
Combined, these events, like the recently established Routledge book series Advances in Graffiti and Street Art Research, contribute to the maturation of graffiti and street art scholarship.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_1530.jpg622598Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-07-05 11:09:132026-08-08 13:18:49Conferences Shaping Graffiti and Street Art Scholarship
Street Culture, Book by Book
/by Jeffrey Ian RossSearch Amazon using the term street culture, and you’ll find countless books about gangs, graffiti, street art, policing, homelessness, drug markets, skateboarding, street fashion, or urban crime, but relatively few that explicitly examine street culture as an overarching concept.
Why is that?
Part of the reason is that researchers tend to study one aspect of street culture rather than the broader phenomenon.
Another is that street culture has primarily been explored in journal articles rather than book-length studies.
Finally, many authors have produced classic works on street culture without ever using the term itself. Instead, they write about “street life,” “urban subculture,” or, in Britain, “road culture.”
As a result, identifying the most important books on street culture requires looking beyond titles and labels to the substance of the scholarship.
The books below are the ones that do it best
Street Corner Society (1943), byWilliam Foote Whyte
I would begin with Whyte’s Street Corner Society. Although he never used the term street culture, his street ethnography remains one of the foundational studies of urban street life. Based on participant observation in Boston’s Italian-American “Cornerville,” Whyte demonstrated that what outsiders often dismissed as social disorder was actually a highly organized system of informal relationships, leadership, reciprocity, and neighborhood life. By today’s standards, it is difficult not to view this as one of the earliest studies of street culture.
Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (1967), by Elliot Liebow
Liebow’s Tally’s Corner shifted attention to the everyday lives of unemployed Black men in Washington, D.C. Rather than portraying his subjects as pathological or culturally deficient, Liebow showed how street-corner life represented a rational adaptation to unstable employment, poverty, and limited opportunities.
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1995), by Philippe Bourgois
Bourgois’ ethnography of East Harlem is one of the first major books to place the concept of street culture at the center of its analysis. Bourgois argues that street culture emerges among marginalized residents as an adaptive response to exclusion from the mainstream economy and institutions. Rather than romanticizing or condemning the crack economy, he explores how structural inequality shapes identity, work, masculinity, family life, and survival.
Code of the Street (1999), byElijah Anderson
Building on ideas first introduced in his previous book StreetWise (1990), Anderson’s Code of the Street has become one of the most influential theories in urban sociology and criminology/criminal justice. Anderson argues that many disadvantaged neighborhoods develop an informal code governing respect, reputation, and the use of violence. The book transformed the discussion of street culture by identifying the moral rules that regulate social interaction under conditions of concentrated disadvantage.
Sidewalk (1999), by Mitchell Duneier
Duneier’s Sidewalk broadened the study of street culture beyond violence and gangs. Through years of participant observation among book vendors, panhandlers, and scavengers in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Duneier demonstrated that the marginalized people he studied create their own informal social order and often contribute positively to the functioning of public space. His work demonstrates that street culture encompasses far more than crime.
Street Culture in Chengdu (2003), by Di Wang
This book offers a very different perspective by examining street culture historically rather than ethnographically. Drawing on archival and historical sources, Wang demonstrates that street culture is not simply a contemporary phenomenon associated with crime or youth, but a historically connected to urban public life. His work also reminds us that street culture is not exclusively a Western phenomenon.
Street Capital: Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State (2009), by Sveinung Sandberg and Willy Pedersen
This study introduced the influential concept of street capital. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital, the researchers argue that individuals involved in street life accumulate forms of knowledge, reputation, toughness, and social connections that possess value within street settings, even if those same resources have little value in mainstream society. Their work significantly advanced the theoretical understanding of status and identity in street culture.
Understanding Street Culture: Poverty, Crime, Youth and Cool (2015), by Jonathan Ilan
Ilan’s Understanding Street Culture is the first book-length theoretical synthesis devoted specifically to street culture itself rather than to a single neighborhood, city, or group. Ilan draws together scholarship from Britain, North America, and elsewhere to argue that street culture is a global phenomenon shaped by social exclusion, identity, style, consumption, and “cool,” treating cool not as surface style but as a source of status and identity for young people otherwise shut out of mainstream markers of success.
Routledge Handbook of Street Culture (2021), by Jeffrey Ian Ross
My own edited volume differs from the earlier books because it is not an ethnography of one place or one population. Instead, it is interdisciplinary in the sense that it brings together scholars from criminology, sociology, anthropology, geography, history, architecture, and cultural studies to examine street culture from multiple perspectives. The goal was to define and critique the field more clearly and to demonstrate that street culture extends well beyond crime, gangs, graffiti and street art, and violence to include language, economies, music, fashion, skateboarding, homelessness, policing, and other important aspects of urban life.
Looking Back
Taken together, these books illustrate how scholarship on street culture has evolved over the past eighty years. Early ethnographers documented how people organized everyday life on street corners and in neighborhoods. Later researchers explained the norms, identities, and forms of capital that shape street worlds, while more recent work has broadened the concept to include public space, historical development, informal economies, and global comparative perspectives.
Despite this progress, scholarship on street culture remains limited. Early work suffered from a kind of tunnel vision, focusing disproportionately on urban street crime and subcultures rather than the fuller range of everyday street life. The field also sits at the intersection of criminology, sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, and history. This interdisciplinary character is both its greatest strength and possibly one of the reasons it has developed relatively slowly. No single discipline has claimed ownership of the concept.
The limitation holds geographically too. But work on street culture outside North America and Britain is already emerging, and I hope it continues, broadening the study of street culture beyond the Western world and exploring how street cultures emerge, evolve, and differ across cities and societies globally.
Photo Credit:
Photographer: Danny Lyon
Title: Three boys + A Train graffiti, Brooklyn 1974
Trash Collectors
/by Jeffrey Ian RossDuring the late 1970s, I got my start driving cab for Beck Taxi in Toronto. Their business at the time was disproportionately located in the east end, above and below the Danforth. We got calls from the projects in Regent Park and the low-income housing at Main and Gerrard, but most business came from working-class people.
It was maybe a month into the job. Business was slow; not many radio calls, street pickups had died down. A bunch of cabbies were parked in front of a bar on Queen East, hoping to take someone home who was calling it quits for the night.
I decided to join them.
Around midnight, when I was at the front of the queue, the bar door swung open and out stumbled a guy. He was about my height but maybe weighed 35 pounds more. Visibly drunk. Thick arms. Ruddy complexion. Missing a few teeth. His nose looked like it had been broken at least twice and hadn’t set right either time.
I could tell he was a brawler. The kind who didn’t give a fuck who he picked a fight with or whether he got knocked out cold at the end of it. He’d just get up and do it again the next night.
He might have been from Down East. Probably a Newfie.
He looked at me, swaying slightly, then stumbled toward my cab. I hadn’t yet learned to keep the doors locked until I was sure I wanted the passenger. He climbed into the back seat, closed the door, and slumped against it.
“Where to?”
He mumbled an address I couldn’t quite make out. I asked him to repeat it. He said something that might have been a street name or might have been him telling me to fuck off. Hard to say.
“Look, I need an address or I can’t take you.”
He said nothing. Just sat there, eyes half-closed.
“Hey. You need to give me an address or get out.”
I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He had that flat, mean stare drunks get when they’ve decided you’re the problem.
“Fuck you,” he said clearly.
I turned around in my seat.
“Yo. Get out of the car.”
There was a solitary police cruiser parked maybe twenty feet away, right in front of the bar. I could see the officers inside, drinking coffee, bullshitting with each other.
I got out of the cab and walked over to them. Tapped on the window. One of them rolled it down.
“I got a guy in my back seat who won’t get out. He’s drunk, won’t give me an address, and he’s refusing to leave. Can you help me?”
The cop looked at me.
Then looked past me at my cab. Then looked back at me.
The window rolled back up.
I stood there for a moment, watching them go back to their coffee and chit-chat. Then I walked back to my cab, opened the back door, and stood outside the car with some distance from the would-be passenger. The kind of guy who’d done this a hundred times before and didn’t care how it ended. I figured I’d wait him out. I stood there. Cars passed. Nobody looked twice.
Eventually, he growled something incoherent, crawled out of the cab, and predictably left the door open. When he was a good six feet from the taxi, I rushed into the cab, turned on the ignition, and drove a few car lengths ahead, stopped long enough to close the rear door, and then booked.
I drove. I replayed the cops’ faces. The dismissiveness. The indifference.
The Toronto police viewed cab drivers the same way they viewed the fares we transported. We were part of the ecosystem they patrolled, not separate from it. We weren’t people they felt obliged to help. We were the trash collectors.
Photo By Little Gamma Ray
Conferences Shaping Graffiti and Street Art Scholarship
/by Jeffrey Ian RossMany academic organizations hold annual conferences where participants present papers to colleagues working in the same field.
But no learned society that specializes in the scholarly area of graffiti and street art studies, that could hold annual meetings, exists.
Although selected colleges and universities have held one-off conferences on this subject, over the past few decades a handful of independent meetings have occurred where scholars presented papers on graffiti and street art.
Unlike large annual meetings held in hotels or convention centers with multiple simultaneous sessions, these graffiti and street art conferences are typically smaller and last a couple of days.
Thus there are more opportunities for interaction among participants than with the larger conferences. Moreover, these meetings often include joint dinners and one or more graffiti and street art tours organized as part of the program.
Over the past two decades, scholars, including professors and graduate students, have presented papers at these gatherings. Occasionally, graffiti writers and street artists attend and present on their work too.
Four conferences have done so with some regularity. They are reviewed below.
NUART Plus
The NUART Plus scholarly conference grew out of the NUART street art festival in Stavanger, Norway. Founded in 2001 by Martyn Reed, NUART later expanded to Aberdeen, Scotland, where a related festival and NUART Plus program, with the assistance of Susan Hansen, were also developed. The symposium became one of the leading international forums for scholarly and critical discussion of street art, bringing together academics, artists, curators, journalists, and activists. NUART also publishes Nuart Journal, a peer-reviewed publication dedicated to street art research and criticism.
Although the Stavanger archive documents eight NUART Plus symposia between 2012 and 2019, earlier scholarly gatherings may have occurred. Following a pandemic-related interruption, NUART Plus returned to Aberdeen in 2022. As of June 2026, no publicly available information indicates that a future NUART Plus symposium has been scheduled.
TAG
The TAG Conference (“Name Writing in Public Space”) is one of the principal international scholarly gatherings devoted specifically to graffiti writing and tagging. Founded in 2017 by Javier Abarca and an evolving network of collaborators, the conference does not follow a fixed annual schedule. Meetings are organized periodically when a host institution and local organizing team are in place. Past conferences have been held in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Groningen, Hamburg, Linz, New York City, and Vienna, bringing together researchers, artists, writers, and practitioners to discuss the history, theory, and contemporary practice of name writing in public space. The conference has also generated scholarly publications, including edited volumes drawn from conference presentations. Recent sponsored Art & Place conferences also include graffiti and street art papers.
Art and the City
Founded in 2018 by Tijen Tunali, Art and the City is an interdisciplinary conference series exploring the relationships among art, aesthetics, and urban politics. The conference aims to facilitate dialogue and collaboration among scholars working at the intersections of art, culture, and the urban environment, and has served as a platform for broader scholarly projects, including exhibitions, special journal issues, edited books, and grant-funded research. Since its founding, conferences have been held in Aarhus, Amman, Göttingen, Nice, Nicosia, and Tours. More recently, Vittorio Parisi and Konstantinos Avramidis, both graffiti and street art scholars, have co-organized the most recent two editions of Art and the City with Tunali, bringing a stronger graffiti dimension to the program.
Unlike the TAG Conference and NUART Plus, which focus primarily on graffiti, street art, and related forms of urban visual expression, Art and the City takes a broader approach, encompassing urban art, public space, architecture, visual culture, and urban studies.
Urban Creativity
Since 2014, the Urban Creativity conference series has brought together scholars, artists, and practitioners interested in graffiti, street art, urban visual culture, and related subjects. Organized primarily through the efforts of Pedro Soares Neves and affiliated with the University of Lisbon and related institutions, the conference is typically held in Lisbon in late June or early July. Participants come from a range of disciplines and countries, and European scholars have generally been well represented. Presentations are delivered in person and, in some years, online as well.
The conference is part of a broader Urban Creativity research and publishing network overseen by Neves. Participants are often invited to submit revised versions of their papers to associated journals, edited volumes, and other publications devoted to graffiti, street art, and urban culture. Like Art and the City, Urban Creativity takes a wider view than the TAG Conference, encompassing street art, public art, urban interventions, creative cities, and related forms of artistic engagement with urban space.
Scholars wishing to present a paper at these conferences are best advised to periodically check the websites for each of these conferences, as schedules and locations can change. Reaching out directly to the organizers is also worth doing if you want to stay current or explore participation.
Combined, these events, like the recently established Routledge book series Advances in Graffiti and Street Art Research, contribute to the maturation of graffiti and street art scholarship.