Is street art institutionalizable? Challenges to an alternative urban policy in Lisbon

Abstract

In recent years Lisbon City Council promoted a new policy towards graffiti and street art, on one hand, fighting and actively controlling these practices in some central neighborhoods, and on the other hand facilitating it and institutionalizing it in specific areas of the city. In spite of all the controversy around it, being a multifaceted and quite inorganic set of public actions conducted by different city-council departments, this policy can be considered an alternative urban development policy. It is essentially a bottom-up kind of approach to urban problems, targeted to local community and, more than that, to a specific non-mainstream segment of urban society, and is directed to establish socio-political (and cultural) regulations in order to limit uneven urban development. Naturally, this policy had clear consequences in terms of what are the type, forms and quality of public art developed, as well as in the economic, social and cultural value that it creates in the city, specifically in its center. The aim of this paper is to analyze the implications of this action and the challenges they bring to the design of public policies in this field, seeking to understand the changes related with this process of “institutionalization” of graffiti, their immediate socio-economic and cultural impacts in the city, and their implications in terms of the own form of artistic expression, usually free and independent in its genesis.