Reclaiming the City: Street Art, Graphic Dissidence and Counter Advertising

More and more, the contemporary city is becoming a privatised, depoliticised city, a permanent shop window for products on sale and commercial messages that hinder interaction in equal conditions, political negotiation and collective representation.

We move around and consume the public space of the neo-liberal city, but we hardly use it. This is a reflection we make during our travels through the space in which we find messages written in dissonant tones. Artistic and counter-advertising interventions in the urban space alerts us against consumerist hypnotism and encourages us to question rules that penalise different ways of thinking, seeing and creating.

Richard Sennett is a sociologist and the author of The fall of public man, Personal Identity And City Life and The Corrosion Of Character, amongst others. Steve Lambert is CEO of the Anti-Advertising Agency in New York. Pierre Humeau is a member of Résistance à l'Agréssion Publicitaire (Resisting Aggressive Advertising), Paris. The Observatori RiSc (Observatori de Resistències i Subcultures - Observatory on Resistances and Subcultures), run by Gemma Galdón and Israel Rodríguez, promotes and reports on urban dissidence.