Brussels: Public Canvas or Private Gallery?
Graffiti, Street Art, and the City.
On a narrow side street in the center of Brussels, Belgium, just off Boulevard Anspach, you’ll find a fresco of a scene from the comic series Ric Hochet. For years the mural’s base was covered in graffiti. Today, however, the graffiti is gone, the white-haired man and his white-haired dog returned to full view. To most onlookers, this change seems natural, if not desirable: the scribbled tags were ugly, some will say. It was dirty; now it is clean. The dog had been lost; now he is found.
But this “rehabilitation” reflects a wider institutional decision in Brussels regarding what can or should be sprayed, painted, and etched onto urban surfaces.
In this article I will unpack the state-sanctioned domination of street art over graffiti in Brussels. I will begin by surveying the origins of the city’s fight against graffiti, which lie in New York City and the Broken Windows theory. Then I will examine the Belgian capital’s anti-graffiti policies before turning to street art, which authorities have used to market notions of place and authenticity. I will finish with some thoughts about how street art facilitates and disguises the displacement of people and whitewashing of culture. Overall, it should become clear how erasing graffiti for the sake of street art in Brussels is part of a deliberate, neoliberal, and entrepreneurial strategy.
Reviving the cartoon dog, it turns out, is not so innocent.
NOTE: I will employ Rafael Schacter’s (2014) distinction between graffiti, which centers on language, text, and other “typographical experimentation,” and street art, and favors images, artwork, and aesthetics. The former is a crude, black tag on a bus stop; the latter is an elaborate, rainbow-colored mural on the side of a building. The line between the two, of course, can be blurred, but that’s for a different article.
In the late 1970s, scholars in New York City drew explicit connections between graffiti and crime.
Nathan Glazer (1979) argued that graffiti “assaulted” subway riders with the “inescapable knowledge” that their environment was “uncontrolled and uncontrollable,” and therefore dangerous. Graffiti artists contributed to perceptions of crime, he wrote, but also to crime itself. By dissuading people from taking the subway altogether, the thinking went, graffiti made it easier for criminals to rob the few remaining riders.
Glazer (1979) believed that graffitists were like “the criminals who occasionally rob, rape, assault, and murder passengers… all are part of one world of uncontrollable predators.”
A few years later, George Kelling and James Wilson cited Glazer in their attempt to find a causality between signs of crime — vandalism, public drunkenness, and the like — and future crimes, even serious ones. The authors also recalled an experiment by psychologist Philip Zimbardo in which a car in Palo Alto was ransacked only after Zimbardo broke one of its windows. Kelling and Wilson (1982) extrapolated from this result, arguing that vandalism, however benign, leads to “the breakdown of community controls,” the alienation of residents from their neighborhood, and, eventually, “muggings.” A broken window signals that “no one cares,” bringing cities down a slippery slope to violent crime (Kelling & Wilson, 1982).
As Kelling and Wilson’s theory gained popularity, the eradication of graffiti became a central concern for policymakers in New York. Kelling (1991) described the elimination of subway car graffiti as “The First Skirmish” with disorder. Some, like Glazer (1979), advocated wielding legal and extralegal tactics in this “skirmish”: increased fines, arrests, “guard dogs… being beaten up by a truck driver or facing a burst of buckshot.”
For Kelling and New York City Transit Authority President David Gunn, though, the city’s winning battle strategy lay in the more mundane removal of graffitied subway cars. By mandating that any car be taken off the tracks within two hours of its being tagged, Gunn’s Clean Car Program “guaranteed that the first ‘broken window’ would not lay untended and lead to the next” (Kelling, 1991).
Graffiti had become intertwined with crime in the urban policy realm. Kelling and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton (1998) credited the erasure of subway graffiti as a significant factor in the mid-1990s decline in crime. In a 1998 speech, Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that while “murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes… they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.” Glazer’s 1979 association of graffitists with murderers had sticking power.
Despite its popularity, the broken windows theory did not hold up to academic scrutiny. Bernard Harcourt showed how empirical data failed to support the narrative posed by Kelling and Wilson. During the 1990s, crime rates dropped in many American cities, such as Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, DC, which did not employ the “order-maintenance crackdowns and misdemeanor sweeps” seen in New York (Harcourt, 2001). Even Jack Maple, who had been Commissioner Bratton’s partner in New York City’s “war on crime,” rejected the idea of a link between small crimes and serious violence, writing in 1999,
“Rapists and killers don’t head for another town when they see that graffiti disappearing from the subway” (quoted in Wacquant, 2006).
Even so, graffiti’s reputation as a harbinger and cause of future crime has not waned. In December 2019, the New York Post published an editorial warning that a recent uptick in subway graffiti could lead to “a return to the ‘bad old days’ of out-of-control crime, chaos and disorder.” The source’s sensationalist nature notwithstanding, it is clear that graffiti and criminality remain connected in many public imaginations.
But how strong is this association in Brussels?
Though law enforcement authorities do not express such explicit links between graffiti and violent crime, the act is not taken lightly. Creating graffiti is against the law, and violators can face fines and jail time. In 2009, the police registered 1055 graffiti-related offenses, and a few years later a man spent 20 days in jail under suspicion of having tagged the Palace of Justice. The city council recently voted to increase the penalty for spraying graffiti from €150 to €500 per square meter.
Furthermore, De Keersmaecker and Debailleul (2016) have mapped the Brussels open-street CCTV network’s expansion over the past 30 years, technology that increases the state’s ability to surveil and prevent graffiti. Police departments have even developed “video content analysis (VCA) applications” that can automatically detect when people or groups are standing around to tag something (De Keersmaecker & Debailleul, 2016).
From an official perspective, graffiti in Brussels is treated as more than just a nuisance. It is a criminal activity to be symbolically and literally wiped out.
This policy reflects, in part, a belief that stopping graffiti will reduce other forms of crime. The broken windows theory has migrated across the Atlantic. Experts at the Institut des Hautes Études de la Sécurité Intérieure, a French agency that advises mayors on crime policy, promoted the broken windows theory and its “spiral of decline” in a 1997 memo (Wacquant, 2006). More recently, KU Leuven criminologist Elke Devroe endorsed the theory, arguing that it is the “smallest signs,” like litter, graffiti, and even dog poop, that increase public insecurities and perceptions of crime.
But graffiti prevention tactics are also central to a broader mission to improve Brussels’ global reputation. The city has raced against places like Paris to expand its CCTV network, eager to attract capital by becoming “safer,” if not in reality then at least in perception (De Keersmaecker & Debailleul, 2016). The fight against graffiti can be seen as an extension of this competition: by reducing the amount of street tags, the city will look cleaner and safer, which will bring in more firms, tourists, and profits.
To this end, Brussels authorities offer a free graffiti removal service for businesses, and encourage storeowners to apply anti-graffiti finishes to their windows. It is technically a fineable offense to fail to remove graffiti from one’s storefront. Though this law is rarely enforced, its existence reveals the city’s desire to put on a shiny, tag-free face. Such an appearance, authorities hope, will help the city climb up rankings of the world’s “safest cities” lists and drown out negative reports published in recent years with clickbait headlines that describe Brussels as, for example, the “Crucible of Terror.”
To use the language of David Harvey (1989), graffiti has become a target of the city’s “entrepreneurial” urban governance regime.
For all the increasing profits and rising rankings, however, eliminating graffiti corrodes an important mechanism for conveying public dissensus. Through her work on graffiti writers in northeast Italy, Andrea Brighenti (2010) has shown how the “multiplication of walls and wall-like artifacts” in the city has both heightened surveillance, privatization, and state power and expanded the amount of tapestries on which civilians could protest against this social control. Graffiti, she explains, is a “productive force… that severs relational territories from predetermined memberships and opens up the public domain” (Brighenti, 2010).
Whether made in haste or with care, with or without color, graffiti drawings are socio-political attempts to take back control of a city that has been made more individual, corporate, and exclusive. In this sense, graffiti is a tool for reclaiming control of the production of urban space. Andrzej Zieleniec (2017) has approached the art through this Lefebvrian lens, arguing that graffiti decouples the city from the hegemonic grip of global capital.
Tagging a store window can be seen as a pushback against the commodification of urban space. By seeking to criminalize and eradicate the act, Brussels authorities therefore silence such expressions of protest.
As they have washed away graffiti, city officials have replaced it with street art.
In 2014, culture alderman Karine Lalieux solicited a €100,000 budget to develop street art across the city. Authorities like Lalieux claimed that this project aimed at bringing culture to the people, to be “mixed with public space.” “Brussels’ street artists,” the website Visit.Brussels reads, “Represent the voice of a constantly evolving capital city.”
In reality, street art has become a mouthpiece for the state. When the government commissions collectives like Urbana, founder Nico Moreel explains, “We are executors… There is no room for interpretation.”
Indeed, street artists often act more like corporate consultants: Urbana even works out of pricey offices near Grand Place. One Urbana mural in particular embodies the state’s mission to use street art as an entrepreneurial tool. Upon exiting Brussels Central Station, passengers look up at dozens of Smurfs running along a cartoon ceiling.
The city’s first impression to arriving visitors is a commercialized fantasyland where everyone looks the same (blue, male, and happy) and there are no negative consequences because, like in most cartoons, nothing really happens. The mural is devoid of the conflict that constitutes urban life. Still, or maybe, as a result, it looks good on Instagram.
Officials in Brussels have sought to cash in on street art’s colorfully uncontroversial aesthetic appeal. Schacter (2014) has observed that as the medium sells itself out, street art also sells “a false notion of place.” Brussels’ Comic Book Route, portraying famous Franco-Belgian cartoons such as Tintin, Spirou, and Asterix, links its occupied walls to some wider, imaginative notion of the city as a space of playfulness and creativity. Another work, the Manneken Peace façade, attempts to evoke place through connections to Belgian hip-hop and the appropriation of the 61cm-tall statue half a block away, perhaps the city’s most successful placemaking icon.
Expanding Sharon Zukin’s (2008) discussion of “alternative consumption,” these productions employ a “back story… to fabricate an aura of authenticity.” Street art’s back stories are typically milquetoast. The Comic Book Route grounds viewers in a cartoon world — blue skies, old fashioned cars, and childish simplicity — while Manneken Peace glosses over hip-hop’s origins of social unrest by portraying a rainbow of squares and a tourist trap.
To sell such a digestibly bland “aura,” city boosters have invested in digital infrastructure, including a smartphone application and email address dedicated solely to Brussels street art.
A Parcours Streetart website provides an interactive map and virtual library cataloging hundreds of works in Brussels. The City of Brussels, which operates the site, has coopted urban image production, providing a curated, polished runway of street art that will hopefully attract clicks, then visits, then profits. As Schacter (2014) writes, this is “art at the service of professional political policy.”
One of the target audiences for such spatial commodification is Richard Florida’s “Creative Class.” Florida (2002) identified a supposedly new class of workers that are “paid to use their minds,” wield the largest economic influence of any socio-economic group, and care primarily about “creativity, individuality, difference, and merit.” To be successful, he argued, cities have to attract these creatives with “‘people climates’… urban environments that are open, diverse, dynamic and cool” (quoted in Peck, 2005).
Trendy coffee shops, boutique art galleries, and neon-lit gay bars will work, but so does street art, which Brussels has used to inject spaces with “a notion of authenticity” (Schacter, 2014). For example, according to a city website, the Comic Book Route helps visitors “discover the small authentic and charming streets of Brussels.”
Defining authenticity is less important than being able to present it for consumption, and doing so in competition with other cities. The Parcours Streetart team seeks to create a “real hub… placing Brussels on the European map of urban art.” Urbana’s Moreel wants his city to “be on the same level” as Paris and Berlin.
As it races Paris to expand CCTV coverage, then, Brussels also races to expand street art coverage. The manipulation of street art is one of what Jamie Peck (2005) called “Creative-city strategies… Repackaging urban cultural artifacts as competitive assets, they value them (literally) not for their own sake, but in terms of their (supposed) economic utility.”
Furthermore, many yuppies seem to have taken the bait. “It feels really authentic here,” a 31-year-old expat painter living in Anderlecht said in a 2019 travel article. In 2015, The New York Times Style Magazine ran the headline, “Why Brussels Is the New Berlin.”
With this ringing validation of the city’s apparently newfound cultural capital, Moreel, Lalieux, city officials, and owners of boutique design shops can rejoice: the creatives are coming.
They bring cash to spend and geographic displacement to fund. The urban regime’s focus on drawing upper-middle class groups into Brussels, through mechanisms like street art, ignores what Peck (2005) identifies as the “swelling contingent economy of underlaborers” that buttress “the creatives’ lust for self-validation, 24/7 engagement, and designer coffee.” Investing in a space to make it feel more welcoming to upper-middle class tourists and locals can make it feel less so to low-paid service workers, poor immigrants, and others not included in Florida’s class.
The neighborhood’s flashy new murals signal the onset of other gentrifying artifacts, perhaps a “bobo” (bourgeois bohemian) café with avocado toast or a high-end barber shop that also sells designer shoes: Barber Shoes (Rue Lesbroussart 57, 1050 Ixelles) sits a few blocks away from “L’Arche,” a fresco from 2013 painted by François Schuiten and Alexandre Obolensky and sponsored by Librarie Brüsel Flagey and various government agencies.
Such developments have the capacity to drive away poor people, either through social exclusion or simple economics: the price of bread, clothes, or rent. The exodus could have an ironic effect of removing “the indigenous artist from those areas they have helped to create and popularise, ultimately producing a more sterile, sanctioned street aesthetic and upmarket ‘community’” (Zieneliec, 2017).
Presenting as “authentic,” street art draws culture-seeking capital, which then displaces that culture (and its people) elsewhere.
In this ever-expanding cat and mouse cycle, local artists are often replaced with external hires. In 2015, collectives from Paris and Amsterdam decorated the Brussels Canal with larger-than-life sea creatures, skulls, and sunglass-wearing hipsters. Albeit vibrant and pretty, such content has little connection to neighboring communities like Quartier Brabant and Molenbeek. Instead, the art acts as what Schacter (2014) calls a “colonization” force, “disguising the existence of an indigenous community, the colourful cladding camouflaging all complexity.”
Street art often disguises much more. A few blocks from the canal, the real-estate investment trust Befimmo has enlisted Studio Gondo to paint the fences hiding construction of its Quatuor Brussels high-rise. This commission underlies the explicit connection between street art and gentrification, as well as the medium’s usefulness to capital. Street art will attract rent-raising newcomers, sterilize away any (potentially unsettling) local character, and even shield onlookers from the whole ugly process with a cute fresco of a fox.
It is the disguising nature of street art that makes it so dangerous. On its face, a fresco looks edgy, different, and cultural. It often has a political appearance, if not a political title like “REVLT!,” a piece near De Brouckère. But as one digs beyond this façade, they find that street art is “perfectly non-partisan. It smacks of the new, of the visionary and unconventional, whilst aligning perfectly with the visions and conventions of these creative centres” (Schacter, 2014).
Whereas graffiti protests against the state-sanctioned commodification of space, street art facilitates such commercial appropriation.
“REVLT!” had been part of a 2018 exhibition themed, “Contestation of the city.” That “contestation” was immediately reduced by city officials to a marketable tourist destination as they proudly added it to the Street Art Trail.
True urban conflict — represented in graffiti — has been washed away. In its place, the state has spread the “world dominating gospel of the Creative City” through the bright colors and generic faces of street art (Schacter, 2014). The mural’s creative veneer has facilitated and masked the city’s neoliberal agenda.
Street art is a recent addition to Brussels’ “Creative City” policy arsenal, but it should be taken seriously.
The consequences of criminalizing graffiti and monetizing street art could be severe. Graffiti gives members of disenfranchised communities, as well as anyone fighting spatial privatization, an outlet for expression. Eliminating the art form will end the battle and bring deeper marginalization. Additional research needs to be done regarding where graffiti concentrates in Brussels, where it is targeted by the police for removal, and how, if at all, it influences crime realities and perceptions among citizens and tourists.
At the same time, the ubiquity of street art in Brussels also demands future investigations. Does street art actually draw tourists, “creatives,” and firms? In this article I have barely scratched the surface of street art’s gentrifying effects on the neighborhoods of Brussels and other cities (see Madrid’s Lavapiés, for example), which will experience dramatic demographic shifts in the coming decade.
In general, we must face each new mural with questions: Who commissioned this piece? Why did they put it here? What will happen to the neighborhood as a result? This responsible skepticism will help us understand any ulterior motivations that might lie beneath the city’s growing number of frescos. It will help us prevent the structural violence (displacement, culture-washing, etc.) that capitalism can incite through hijacked projects.
Seeing through the pastels, cute animals, and two-dimensional nostalgia, we will remember that while street art is free to look at, it often comes with hidden costs.
Works Cited
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De Keersmaecker, Pauline and Corentin Debailleul. 2016. “The spatial distribution of open-street CCTV in the Brussels-Capital Region.” Brussels Studies 104.
Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.
Glazer, Nathan. 1979. “On subway graffiti in New York.” National Affairs.
Harcourt, Bernard. 2001. Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David. 1989. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 71:1.
Kelling, George. 1991. “Reclaiming the Subway.” City Journal.
Kelling, George and James Wilson. 1982. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The Atlantic.
Kelling, George and William Bratton. 1998. “Declining Crime Rates: Insiders’ Views of the New York City Story.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88:4.
Peck, Jamie. 2005. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29:4.
Schacter, Rafael. 2014. “The ugly truth: Street Art, Graffiti, and the Creative City.” Art & the Public Sphere 3:2.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2006. “The ‘Scholarly Myths’ of the New Law and Order Doxa.” Socialist Register 42.
Zieneliec, Andrzej. 2017. “The right to write the city: Lefebvre and graffiti.” Environnement Urbain 10.
Zukin, Sharon. 2008. “Consuming Authenticity.” Cultural Studies 22:5.
