LAUSR

G raffiti art is 50 years old. The aestheticized urban wall-writing practice that came to public attention in the late 1960s—known simply as writing among its original New York City practitioners—is very much alive. Its east coast heart is still beating strong, but it joins heartbeats in cities all over the planet. Forty years ago, graffiti art began to spread across the US and later the globe, incorporating and challenging other urban wall-writing traditions, typologies, and cultural image-banks along the way. At roughly the same time (late 1970s and early 1980s), urban sociology began to take graffiti art and artists seriously, although a substantial portion of the early scholarship condemned the writing on the walls as a sign of urban youths’ incivility and criminality. In the decades around the turn of the twenty-first century, longsuggested associations between graffiti art, other well-established urban public art forms (e.g. murals) and the ‘galleried’ arts of painting and sculpture crystalized under a variety of terms—‘post-graffiti,’ ‘street art’, ‘lowbrow art’. Further, a burst of academic publications in the late 1990s and early 2000s made significant connections between graffiti art and other contemporary urban political and social issues: youthful autonomy and masculine identities; social marginality, democracy and the right to the city; new and existing urban visual practices and urban aesthetics; territoriality, property, and political theory; neoliberalism, social control, and ‘broken windows’ policing; urban armed conflict and war. Taken together with several other developments in the agitated streets of the twenty-first century, what began as the study of graffiti art in New York City has expanded into a much broader, interdisciplinary, global subfield within urban studies all its own. The new subfield’s appearance was announced most clearly by its first summations in Anna Waclawek’s Graffiti and Street Art (2011) published in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series and in The Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art edited by Jeffrey Ross in 2016. As these two summaries have thoroughly covered where the scholarship on graffiti and street art have been, the edited collection under consideration in this review, Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City (2017), edited and introduced by Konstantinos Avramidis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi, opens new gateways for where the subfield might go from here/now. Through a series of case studies, Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi’s volume points in some unexpected directions, suggests new family resemblances, and reclaims older wallwriting traditions, while continuing to entangle graffiti and street art in the multidimensional social spaces of contemporary cities, as well as The City writ large. The volume includes work by well-known scholars of graffiti and street art (Jeff Ferrell, Alison Young, Lachlan MacDowall, Kurt Iveson,