Walls of Crisis: Street Art and Urban Fabric in Central Athens, 2000–2012

Street art, an offspring of the global metropolis and a product of its socio-urban fabric, has inevitably grown on, and been sustained by, urban architecture. Individual taggers and graffiti crews have proliferated in European cities since the 1980s. In the beginning, they mirrored their North American counterparts’ socio-political preoccupations that were a product of deteriorating socio-economic and socio-urban conditions in depressed sectors of metropolitan areas. In the early 1990s, however, with economic development and the beginnings of urban regeneration processes came the first large-scale mutation of tagging into ‘graffiti art’. With larger and more recognizable works, and visual rather than textual content, by the late 1990s graffiti was accepted by increasingly broader sections of urban population as ‘street art’. A new form of public art, street art could claim a legitimate part in the forming and transforming of urban identities in both their visual and their spatial iterations