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STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS
Street Art and

Democracy in
Latin America
Olivier Dabène
Studies of the Americas
Series Editor
Maxine Molyneux
Institute of the Americas
University College London
London, UK
The Studies of the Americas Series includes country specific, cross-
disciplinary and comparative research on the United States, Latin America,
the Caribbean, and Canada, particularly in the areas of Politics, Economics,
History, Sociology, Anthropology, Development, Gender, Social Policy
and the Environment. The series publishes monographs, readers on spe-
cific themes and also welcomes proposals for edited collections, that allow
exploration of a topic from several different disciplinary angles. This series
is published in conjunction with University College London’s Institute of
the Americas under the editorship of Professor Maxine Molyneux.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14462
Olivier Dabène
Street Art
and Democracy
in Latin America
Olivier Dabène
Political Observatory of Latin America
and the Caribbean (OPALC)
Center for International Studies (CERI)
Paris Institute of Political Studies
(Sciences Po)
Paris, France
Studies of the Americas

ISBN 978-3-030-26912-8 ISBN 978-3-030-26913-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26913-5
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To Mili
Thirty-five and still so much more
Acknowledgements
This book finds its origin in a two-year stay in São Paulo, Brazil, in
2000–2002. My research interests back then focused on democracy
operating at the local level under very adverse background conditions,
including very high levels of violence and abysmal inequality. As I was
exploring some of the most deprived areas of the city, I soon discovered
they were home to amazing artistic creativity. I started to study the way
disenfranchised groups used the arts to voice their frustration and nur-
ture public debates. Rap music and marginal literature turned out to be
the subject of a book (Dabène 2006), while other fascinating politicized
artistic expressions such as graffiti writing were temporarily put on the
back burner. After a decade exploring other topics, I let my fascination
for urban culture regain preeminence with a new comparative research
study on street art and democracy. There was so much exciting fieldwork
to conduct and so little literature, selecting cases has been puzzling. In
addition to São Paulo, Bogotá was my first pick. Multiple stays in the
Colombian capital city had allowed me to witness a street art explosion
in the 2000s. The way Bogotá’s authorities dialogued with the artists
over the use of public space has been a key source of inspiration for my
project (Dabène 2016). I finally came up with a list of five cities (Bogotá,
Colombia; São Paulo, Brazil; Valparaíso, Chile; Oaxaca, Mexico; and
Havana, Cuba), each of which epitomizes a specific type of interaction
between street art and democracy. They constitute the backbone of this
book.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
During the course of the research, I benefited from the support of

many colleagues and friends in the five countries involved. I thank them
for their very useful comments and guidance. Arturo Alvarado in Mexico
and Luis Campos in Chile have gone the extra mile to help me. I am
indebted to them.
This research has rested on qualitative fieldwork. I conducted a
total of 63 in-depth interviews (see the list in the Annex). I express my
immense gratitude to all the artists who generously shared their thoughts
with me, and to the authorities who received me and kindly answered my
questions.
The research has been funded by two grants (Sciences Po’s SAB
2016–2018 and Sciences Po/Colegio de México research fund 2016–
2018). I thank the committees who selected my project. They have con-
tributed to scholarship on street art’s endless quest for legitimacy (Ross
et al. 2017).
I also thank Josephine Lechartre (Sciences Po) and Frida Crawford
(University of California San Diego) for providing very valuable research
assistance at various stages of the project.
Preliminary results have been presented during the following events/
lectures: Cuban Congress of Political Science (Havana, 8 April 2014),
Institut des Hautes Études d’Amérique latine (Paris, 29 May 2015),
New School for Social Research (New York, 16 March 2016), Chile’s
Catholic University (Santiago, 15 April 2016), Latin American Studies
Association Congress (New York, 27 May 2016), French-Speaking
Congress of Political Science (Montreal, 17 May 2017), University of
Chile’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (Santiago, 12 July 2017),
RedGob meeting (PUC Rio de Janeiro, 30 November 2017), University
of La Habana’s School of Arts (Havana, 20 March 2018), University
of Costa Rica (San José, 30 April 2018), Latin American Studies
Association Congress (Barcelona, 24 May 2018), University of Lyon
(Lyon, 9 November 2018), Oaxaca (Mexico) First Forum on Graffiti
(7 December 2018), University College London’s Institute of the
Americas (London, 30 January 2019), London School of Economics’
Latin American and Caribbean Center (London, 27 February 2019),
Université libre de Bruxelles (12 March 2019), University of Chile’s
Faculty of Social Sciences (Santiago, 14 May 2019).
I have also tested my analytical framework with my Sciences Po Urban
School students. I thank them for tolerating (and sometimes sharing) my
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
obsession with street art. Their pressing questions have allowed me to

better articulate my theoretical tools with my empirical evidence.
I finished writing this book as an OxPo fellow at Nuffield College
(University of Oxford), where I enjoyed perfect working conditions dur-
ing the 2019 Hilary term.
Finally, I thank Miriam Perier (CERI) for her wonderful editing job
and the two anonymous reviewers for their stimulating suggestions.
References
Dabène, Olivier. 2006. Exclusion et politique à São Paulo: Les outsiders de la
démocratie au Brésil. Paris: Karthala.
Dabène, Olivier. 2016. The occupation of public space between appropriation
and deliberation. Democratic graffiti in Bogota, Colombia. Paper presented at
the 50th LASA Congress, New York, 27 May 2016.
Ross, Jeffrey, Peter Bengsten, John Lennon, Susan Phillips, and Jacqueline
Wilson. 2017. In search of academic legitimacy: The current state of scholar-
ship on graffiti and street art. The Social Science Journal 54: 411–419.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Outline of the Book 8
References 10
2 Analytical Framework 13
Street-Level Democracy 13
Deliberative Democracy 15
Street Art’s Three Contributions to Democracy 17
Enhancing Political Expression 17
Empowerment and Urban Citizenship 20
Stretching the Public Sphere 23
Governance of Public Space 26
Interactions Between Street Artists and Authorities 31
References 36
3 Bogotá: Public Space Between Appropriation

and Deliberation 43
Part I: Voicing Concerns and Dissent Over Colombian Politics 44
Historical Background: Graffiti and Street Art Among
Political Turmoil 44
The Present Street Art Scene: Community and Urban
Citizenship 48
xi
xii CONTENTS
Part II: Regulation of Public Space 59

Participatory Policy-Making in Colombia 59
The Mesa Experiment 61
The Partial Resilience of Collaborative Governance 68
Synthesis: Street Art and Democracy in Bogotá 70
Voice 71
Regulation 73
References 74
4 São Paulo: Pixadores’ Public Scream of Hate 75

Part I: Voicing Rage About Socio-Spatial Exclusion 76
Historical Background: Origins and Evolution of Street
Art in São Paulo 76
Two Pioneers: Vallauri and Juneca 78
The Current Street Art Scene: Nuances of Urban Citizenship 81
Scope and Limits of Participatory Practices 96
Interaction Between Artists and Authorities 101
Synthesis: Street Art and Democracy in São Paulo 106
Voice 107
Regulation 108
References 109
5 Valparaíso: A Tale of Murals, Tags and World Heritage 113

Part I: A Tradition of Politicized Art Brutally Interrupted 115
Origins and Evolution of Street Art in Chile 115
The Present Artistic Scene: Actors, Styles and Urban
Citizenship 122
Participatory Democracy in Chile 134
The Politics of Public Space Control: Dealing with Heritage 137
Interaction Between Artists and Authorities: Types
and Evolution 140
Synthesis: Street Art and Democracy in Valparaíso 144
Voice 145
Regulation 146
References 147
CONTENTS xiii
6 Oaxaca: Revolutionary Art and the (Difficult)

Quest for Democracy 149
Part I: Voicing Ideals—Muralism from Propaganda
to Protest 150
Historical Background: The Incommensurable Legacy
of Mexican Muralism 151
The Current Depoliticized Artistic Scene: Oaxaca
as an Exception? 154
Contrasting Participatory Practices 170
Interaction Between Artists and Authorities:
Type and Evolution 173
Synthesis: Street Art and Democracy in Oaxaca 179
Voice 179
Regulation 180
References 181
7 Havana: Going Public, No Matter What 183

Part I: Silencing the Artists’ Voices 184
Historical Background: Culture and Politics in
Revolutionary Cuba 184
The Current Street Art Scene: Main Figures and Styles 189
Part II: A Public Space Monopoly and the Ways to Keep It 200
Governance of Public Space Between Local Democracy
and Centralized Repression 200
Old Havana: The Office of the Historian
and Participatory Urban Planning 203
Interaction Between Artists and Authorities:
Types and Evolution 208
Synthesis: Street Art and Democracy in Havana 212
Voice 213
Regulation 214
References 215
xiv CONTENTS
8 Conclusion: Street Art and Democracy—Lessons Learned 217

Part I: City Cases in Comparative Perspective 217
Bogotá: Anchor Case 217
São Paulo: Most Similar Case 218
Valparaíso: Deviant Case 219
Oaxaca: Most Different Case 219
Havana: Most Unlikely Case 220
Part II: Urban Citizenship and Governance
in Changing Contexts 222
Urban Citizenship(s) 223
Context-Dependent Collaborative Governance-Led
Democratization 228
References 233
Annex: List of the 63 In-Depth Interviews 235
Bibliography 239
Index 255
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 “No one wins” stencil (Artist: DjLu. Photo credit:
Olivier Dabène) 52
Fig. 3.2 Signs for a better world (Artist: DjLu. Photo credit:
Olivier Dabène) 53
Fig. 4.1 Pixação in downtown São Paulo (Artist: Unknown.
Photo credit: Olivier Dabène) 84
Fig. 5.1 Anarchist tag in the lower part of Valparaíso
(It is the amazing hate that pushes to go out)
(Artist: Unknown. Photo credit: Olivier Dabène) 127
Fig. 5.2 Tags in the lower part of Valparaíso (Artist: Unknown.
Photo credit: Olivier Dabène) 128
Fig. 5.3 Mural in the upper part of Valparaíso (Artist: Un Kolor
Distinto [UKD]. Photo credit: Olivier Dabène) 129
Fig. 6.1 “We plant dreams and harvest hope” (Artist: Lapiztola) 166
Fig. 6.2 “Union and strength” (Artist: Lapiztola. Photo credit:
Olivier Dabène) 168
Fig. 7.1 90+ (Artist: Unknown. Photo credit: Olivier Dabène) 198
Fig. 7.2 Tagged 90+ (Artist: Unknown. Photo credit: Olivier Dabène) 199
Fig. 7.3 Self-censored artist (Artist: Unknown. Photo credit:
Olivier Dabène) 200
Fig. 8.1 Imagine San José without window bars (Artist:
Yamil de la Paz García. Photo credit: Olivier Dabène) 224
xv
List of Tables
Table 1.1 City cases selection criteria 5

Table 2.1 Heuristic typology of interactions between artists
and authorities 33
Table 2.2 Synthesis of the analytical framework 35
Table 3.1 Bogotá 2004–2018 73
Table 4.1 São Paulo 2012–2018 109
Table 5.1 Valparaíso 2008–2018 147
Table 6.1 Oaxaca 2006–2018 181
Table 7.1 Havana 2008–2018 214
Table 8.1 Evolution of interactions between artists and authorities
in the five cities 221
Table 8.2 Democratizing democracy: A voice-activated
and governance-driven sequence analysis 232
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Notwithstanding some nuances, the academic community generally

agrees upon an awfully pessimistic diagnosis in the early twenty-first
century: democracy is declining everywhere (Diamond et al. 2016; Foa
and Mounk 2016, 2017; Puddington and Roylance 2017). The number
of democracies reached a peak around 2006. It then steadily declined.
This severe judgment is easily backed by a plethora of empirical evi-
dence showing that populism has spread worldwide, and that represent-
ative democracy seems neither able nor willing to deal with the political
impact of economic inequalities yielded by the “new gilded age” (Bartels
2016). Citizens are growing increasingly frustrated about unequal rep-
resentation and biased government responsiveness. They are deceived by
anti-establishment candidates who end up undermining democracy once
in office. Authoritarian behaviors subvert the very existence of democ-
racy even in a country such as the United States (Levitsky and Ziblatt
2018). Other indications of waning quality of democracy include unfree
and unfair elections (Schedler 2006), failure to preserve the rule of law
(Zacaria 2003), and Linz’s classical argument about excessive presiden-
tialism that has been extensively discussed by the literature (Linz and
Valenzuela 1994).
Often underneath the surface, manifestations of democratic vitality
go unnoticed because nation-states and governments are generally
the sole units of analysis and the electoral processes are the only met-
ric used to gauge democracy. Downscaling to local politics and shifting
from a minimalist to a deliberative account of democracy contribute to
© The Author(s) 2020 1

O. Dabène, Street Art and Democracy in Latin America, Studies
of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26913-5_1
2 O. DABÈNE
unveiling a quite distinct reality. In localities, communities, neighbor-

hoods or streets, grassroots organizations (Abers 2000; Stout 2010),
urban citizens (Cunningham 2011; Holston 2008; Lee 2013) or, quite
simply, neighbors (Rosenblum 2016) can develop democratic practices
that deserve attention. They include a discursive dimension that is closely
scrutinized by deliberative democratic theorists (Dryzek 2000; Goodin
2008). Additionally, many cities are adopting participatory mecha-
nisms, especially in Latin America (Fung 2011; Cameron et al. 2012;
Montambeault 2015), and local authorities are keen to foster urban
collaborative governance (Foster and Iaione 2016).
Subnational politics is often studied to depict authoritarian enclaves
(Gibson 2005) and less attention has been paid to democracy, with the
exception of Gilley (2010). This book offers a contribution to this body
of literature. It focuses on urban politics, examining if, when and how
informal democracy interacts with formal collaborative governance.
I also investigate how this interaction evolves over time and the type of
outcomes it yields. To inform these broad research questions, the book
explores cases of urban public space invasion by street artists in Latin
America. Interventions on city walls, I contend, tell stories about democ-
racy, and Latin America is a fertile ground to study such stories, because
the region is the home of “political experimentalism” and “continual
institutional innovation” with deliberative democracy (Pogrebinschi
2018, p. 830).
The core argument of this book is twofold. First, when artists invade
public space for the sake of voicing rage and disseminating claims or
statements, they raise public awareness, nurture public debate and hold
authorities accountable. They can also interact with neighbors and
thereby contribute to community building. Consequently, so goes my
argument, they behave as urban citizens and foster street-level deliber-
ative democracy, even if they violate the law on a regular basis. Second,
street art reveals how public space is governed. When local authorities try
to contain, regulate and monitor or even repress public space invasions,
they can achieve their goals democratically if, instead of simply criminal-
izing the activity, they hold a dialogue with the artists and try to reach an
understanding inspired by a conception of the city as a commons.
The research and fieldwork that I have carried out for this book reveal
that street-level democracy and urban citizenship were most likely to
prosper when the artists were politically involved (militants, activists) and
when they were associated with social movements. Their type of work
1 INTRODUCTION 3
and the way they convey their message(s) matter as well. A collective of
artists painting a large mural will likely hold dialogues with the neighbors
over the final outcome, hence strengthening grassroots democracy (Stout
2010). It is also the case when an isolated artist disseminates small sten-
cils, providing he or she exposes signifiers that can nourish public debate.
But it is not the case when teenagers aggressively tag private properties
or historical monuments. In that case, it can even be argued that they
undermine democracy with acts of despotism (Rosenblum 2016).
This research has also uncovered that public space governance has
become democratic when recently elected officials have established par-
ticipatory practices. In another scenario, the authorities had to address
pressing issues and/or were challenged by civil society organizations or
artists. They met their demands in a collaborative way. Yet, participatory
decision-making is not always easy to implement. The agency pattern is a
key factor. Different bureaucratic agencies with capacities to enact rules
and enforce them can compete with each other. Depending on the out-
come, the democratic governance of public space can turn out to be hin-
dered or exhilarated.
The diverse cases examined in this book are more or less distant from
the democratic ideal type that rests upon two overlapping and cross-ferti-
lizing components: urban citizen artists strengthening street-level democ-
racy and authorities keen to deliberate over the use of public space and
promote urban collaborative governance. This configuration provides a
favorable environment for collaboration (Foster and Iaione 2016), but it
remains rare and fragile. Other types of interactions have been observed,
whose main features depend on the strength of street-level democracy
and the authorities’ dispositions to open spaces of deliberation. The art-
ists can clash with the authorities, try to strike deals to have access to safe
walls, or the two worlds can live side by side with no interaction at all.
The heuristic typology of these forms of interactions that I have elab-
orated will be presented in Chapter 2. The subsequent chapters will
examine the confrontation of this theoretical approach to empirical evi-
dence collected in the field.
The book is based on a comparison between five cities in Latin
America through in-depth case studies: Bogotá (Colombia), São Paulo
(Brazil), Valparaíso (Chile), Oaxaca (Mexico) and Havana (Cuba). Each
city case has been selected in order to illustrate a particular trajectory,
involving different types of interactions between street-level democracy
and governance.
4 O. DABÈNE
Bogotá is the ground-zero anchor case study that I have used to

shape my hypothesis regarding the conditions for collaboration (Dabène
2016). When the left governed the city, the well-organized community
of street artists negotiated with the administration. Together, they agreed
on a way to regulate public space invasions. Yet, the climate of collab-
oration did not survive a political shift to the right following munici-
pal elections. São Paulo is Bogotá’s most similar case. In many ways, it
resembles Bogotá, but with a weaker street-level democracy and sporadic
attempts by local authorities to talk with the artists. There are additional
differences that ought to be explained. São Paulo has a unique style of
tag (pixação) and the progressive mayors never fully manage—nor even
try—to collaborate with the artists. Valparaíso is a deviant case. Chile is
one of the most democratic countries in Latin America, but unexpect-
edly it never developed a strong street-level democracy, nor did the
authorities try to hold discussions with the artists. This paradox calls
for exploration. Compared to Bogotá and São Paulo, Oaxaca offers the
most different case. Oaxaca qualifies as an authoritarian enclave, with
authorities only sporadically showing a disposition to talk with the artis-
tic community. The street artists, on their side, have long accompanied
social movements and they have built a very strong street-level democ-
racy. Confrontation between the two seems inevitable. It can take many
forms of avoidance, however. Finally, Havana offers an extreme and most
unlikely case. The Cuban authoritarian regime is not supposed to leave
any room for artists to paint walls. There is, however, some leniency and
an incipient artistic community feeds street-level democracy.
Table 1.1 summarizes the case selection design. The types of cases are
loosely influenced by Seawright and Gerring (2008), with two caveats.
First, I do not seek to establish a causal link between street-level democ-
racy and collaborative governance as independent variables and the inter-
action pattern as a dependent variable. As Chapter 2 will show, street-level
democracy and collaborative governance include complex sets of compo-
nents that I try to assess separately. The case selection criteria refer to the
variance of these components, in ways that will be unveiled. The overall
characterization of street-level democracy and collaborative governance
as “weak” or “strong” is hence subject to further precision and nuances.
Second, I use cross-case and within-case comparisons. Bearing in mind
that the pattern of interaction between artists and authorities may vary
abruptly over time, the comparison between cases is rooted in time and
the typification of cases is only indicative.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Table 1.1 City cases selection criteria
City Street-level Collaborative Interaction pattern Type of case

democracy governance
Bogotá Strong Strong Collaboration to Anchor

conflict
São Paulo Moderate Weak Recuperation to Most similar
conflict
Valparaíso Weak Incipient Domination to Deviant
recuperation
Oaxaca Very strong Sporadic Conflict to collabo- Most different
ration and back
Havana Incipient Fake Domination to Most unlikely
conflict
Each city case study includes an interpretation of the signs displayed

on the streets’ walls. Inspired by semiotics, I have tried to capture how
the artists produced signifiers in order to voice some concerns. I have
also been interested in the “creative process of exchange between the
sign and the reader” (Crow 2016, p. 60). I did not, however, study the
way the public received the messages or were affected by the signs, the
way communication scholars would. Nor did I study the possible impact
of the signs on public policies, the way deliberative democrats would
when assessing the importance of discussions prior to decision-making.
Such analysis would have required another research design, with eth-
nographic and experimental approaches. I have opted, instead, for con-
tent and intentions analysis, based on interviews with the artists and a
cautious use of my subjective interpretations. The gap that can always
develop between intentions and receptions, or encoding and decoding,
is not an issue worth considering in my approach. Quite the contrary, as
will be later explained: building on contemporary art’s democratic turn, I
value ambiguity and confusion as contributions to democracy.
Admittedly, the walls of cities offer a complex panorama. Like in
the rest of the world, the streets of large Latin American cities display
at least four categories of interventions that compete with, and some-
times eclipse, commercial billboards: (1) political messages, often writ-
ten by protesters during marches; (2) tags, usually deployed by gangs
(or football clubs’ fans) looking to expand their territories; (3) graffiti
composed of stylized letters; and (4) street art, itself composed of a
6 O. DABÈNE
growing diversity of techniques: murals, stencils, posters, stickers, col-

lage, urban interventions and so on. This book embraces all four catego-
ries, with a special interest in the last one. Street art has been booming
with boundless creativity, often defying interpretation and categoriza-
tion. Any precise delineation proves controversial.
Blanché (2015, p. 33) made an interesting attempt: “Street art con-
sists of self-authorized pictures, characters, and forms created in or
applied to surfaces in the urban space that intentionally seek communi-
cation with a larger circle of people.” And he adds: “Street art is done
in a performative and often site-specific, ephemeral and participatory
way.” Such a precise definition is necessarily restrictive, but the idea
of communicating with a public will be used. In the same vein, refer-
ring to Mexican mural paintings, Folgarait (1998, p. 12) contends that
they operate “as sign vehicles articulating ideas generated by the social
context.”
Riggle (2010, p. 245) has offered another inspiring definition: “An
artwork is a street art if, and only if, its material use of the street is inter-
nal to its meaning.” Yet, the distinctions between the different types of
interventions are not clear-cut and their “meaning” can be obscure. For
this reason, I do not seek to reopen the debate about the definition of
street art. I agree with Jeff Ferrell when he claims in his foreword to the
Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art (2016) that “complexity
and confusion are essential components of contemporary street art and
graffiti.” Accordingly, during my fieldwork I have simply considered
what was out there on the walls, and not on sidewalks (Loukaitou-Sideris
et al. 2011), and I have tried to make sense of it. Hence, I did not pay
much attention to other forms of public space invasion such as rap music
(Baker 2006) or skateboarding. Neither did I consider illegality a defin-
ing criterion (Codex Urbanus 2018).
In this book, thus, I refer to street art as a broad category that
includes all forms of expressions displayed on city walls, including graffiti.
The research rests on a meticulous qualitative assessment of street-level
democracy, derived from 63 extensive semi-structured interviews1 with
artists and authorities as well as direct observations. Much as Stout (2010)
did, I used long conversations to grasp the types of social bonds that
tie the community of artists together. I also looked at the relationships
1 See the Annex.

1 INTRODUCTION 7
between artists and the inhabitants of those areas and neighborhoods in

which street artists intervene. The existence of collectives (or crews2), and
their capacity to organize and get things done in collaboration with neigh-
borhood associations, are indications that what Stout (2010) calls grass-
roots democracy is very much alive.
Regarding the interviews, I assume a deliberate preference for the
most famous artists or the leaders of their communities. Any alternative
methodology has proved unrealistic. Selecting a representative sample
of all the different categories of persons intervening in the streets was
impossible.3 Furthermore, famous artists are influential, and they are
the interlocutors of the authorities whenever they try to reach out to
the community. They also give numerous press interviews and appear in
documentary films, which account for a rich corpus of secondary sources
that I have used extensively.
I also tried to interview women artists as often as possible. As a result,
my sample is deliberately gender biased, for the urban artistic scene is
overwhelmingly masculine. Yet, I considered it important to have
women artists take on their role as urban citizens.
As for the type of public space governance, I have searched for legal
frameworks and traced the decision-making processes using interviews,
press reports and official documents. I have focused on the pieces of leg-
islation that refer to street interventions and tried to figure out if they
had been elaborated in collaboration with artists. When no such regu-
lations existed, I used some indicators of the quality of democracy and
subnational authoritarianism (Gibson 2005; Giraudy 2010). Irrespective
of the regulations, I was also concerned with the authorities’ openness to
engage in dialogue with street artists.
The book makes general statements based upon within- and cross-
case comparisons. It mixes a comparative study of several cities at a given
moment, and a comparative analysis of sequences of change, with a time
span of 10–20 years depending on the cases.
This research belongs to the grounded theory tradition (Glaser and
Strauss 1967). After a phase of inductive exploration of the cases, com-
monalities and differences were interpreted. The theoretical insights were
generated by the qualitative fieldwork. Yet, due to the limited number
2 In the street art community, a group of artists working together and adopting a specific
style constitutes a “crew.”

3 According to some evaluations, there are more than 5000 street artists in Bogotá.
8 O. DABÈNE
of cases examined (five), these insights remain “partially generalized

propositions” (Rueschemeyer 2003, p. 333). The overall ambition is not
to offer a grand theory. Rather, in the Weberian tradition, I have tried
to interpret individual behaviors and give them a meaning, in a specific
social context.
Outline of the Book

Following this introduction, Chapter 2 elaborates a framework for the
analysis. Then, the five city case studies are presented, starting with the
one that epitomized for a short while the most successful experiment in
democratic interaction between artists and authorities. The other cases
are ordered from most similar to most different.
Chapter 2 offers a framework that is built upon a series of theoretical
discussions. It presents two dimensions: voice and regulation. In addition
to clarifying such notions as street-level democracy, urban citizenship and
collaborative governance, the chapter offers a reflection on the prereq-
uisites and conditions for a democratic interaction between artists and
authorities to be set in motion. It also includes a typology of the differ-
ent forms of interaction that have been observed and that are not neces-
sarily democratic.
Chapter 3 examines the emblematic case of Bogotá. Street art
boomed in the Colombian capital during the 2000s, but interactions
between artists and authorities were sporadic and contentious. When a
police officer shot to death a young graffiti writer, a policy change was
introduced. Leftist Mayor Gustavo Petro (2012–2015) opened a delib-
erative space to discuss regulation of the artists’ use of public space.
Such an experiment in collaborative governance led to the adoption of
a decree. Yet in 2015, the left lost the municipal elections. For the new
mayor, street art represented nothing but vandalism and the collabora-
tion scheme of governance lost momentum.
In Chapter 4, I turn to São Paulo, Bogotá’s most similar case. São Paulo
has been the Brazilian capital of hip-hop culture—in particular rap music
and graffiti—since the 1990s (Dabène 2006). Many artists first emerged
in the distant and deprived eastern or southern suburbs, where they were
actively engaged in their communities to reduce violence. Street artists then
progressively invaded the city center, taking advantage of the authorities’
relative tolerance. It all suddenly changed when a new mayor took office in
January 2017. He declared war on the pixação, a local and endemic form
1 INTRODUCTION 9
of aggressive tags expressing the rage of disenfranchised young dwell-

ers of São Paulo’s periphery. This case allows a better assessment of the
importance of distinct forms of expression, since pixação is absent from
Colombia.
Compared to Bogotá and São Paulo, Valparaíso epitomizes a reverse
trajectory that I reveal in Chapter 5. The Chilean city was home to a
pioneering experience in the 1970s, when a group of students and pro-
fessors from the Catholic University decided to paint famous artworks
on the walls of the city. This “open-air museum” was abandoned during
the dictatorship (1973–1989). Today, Valparaíso offers a unique concen-
tration of murals, as well as tags. Murals are the product of close collab-
orations between artists and neighborhood associations and are mainly
located up on the hills, while tags tend to invade UNESCO’s declared
world heritage historical center. Local authorities have long tolerated
murals, because they considered these artistic interventions capable of
boosting tourism and offsetting the decline of port activities. Meanwhile,
they criminalized tags and graffiti. The election of a young leftist mayor
in 2016 made reconsidering this policy possible, even if an environment
of distrust casts a shadow on future collaborations.
Chapter 6 on Oaxaca, Mexico, tackles street art in a revolutionary
context. In the Mexican capital of Oaxaca state, street artists were very
active during the 2006 occupation of the city, demanding the resigna-
tion of the state governor. They formed an assembly that survived the
end of the political uprising. Street-level democracy appears surprisingly
resilient. Artists are deeply involved any time the social movements are
reactivated, but there is no interaction with the authorities. Oaxaca
qualifies as an “authoritarian enclave,” where participatory practices are
almost non-existent. Street artists alternate between active involvement
in democracy and indifference as well as dedication to their business.
Finally, with Havana, Cuba, Chapter 7 closes the book’s empirical
exploration. Cuba’s authoritarian regime has used murals for propaganda
purposes and has never tolerated any kind of public space occupation.
Artists are strictly controlled by the regime. Yet lately, in a changing
context following the attempt to “update” the socialist model, some
artists have dared to take to the streets and paint more or less subver-
sive messages. The relative tolerance of the regime regarding some cul-
tural activities, balanced by fierce repression, allows our hypothesis
regarding street-level democracy to be tested in a very adverse political
environment.
10 O. DABÈNE
The main findings for each of the five city case studies are synthesized
in Chapter 8. This concluding chapter also draws some more general les-
sons based upon comparisons between and across cases, and offers two
theoretical contributions to the existing literature on deliberative democ-
racy. One has to do with the variety of urban citizenships that can foster
democracy. The other refers to collaborative governance as context sensi-
tive. Agency and context are somewhat neglected by deliberative demo-
crats. This book partially fills that lacuna.
On a more methodological note, the conclusion reflects on street-
level and everyday democracy as a productive approach that not only illu-
minates street art’s diverse contributions to democracy, but also opens a
path for further promising research on deepening democracy that focuses
on voice-activated and governance-driven democratization.
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CHAPTER 2
Analytical Framework
In this chapter, I engage in a series of theoretical discussions in order

to build a framework for the analysis. My aim is to clarify the notions
that constitute the building blocks of this research and make explicit the
choice of different disciplines and theories I use to reveal and analyze the
forms and contents of democracy involved in the case studies. My model
mainly borrows from the theory of deliberative democracy. It contributes
to its “empirical and policy-oriented turn” (Floridia 2017). I suggest
using a street-level and everyday lens to grasp some understudied dimen-
sions of deliberative systems (Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012).
The chapter is divided in three sections. In the first section, I define
street-level democracy and analyze how street art can strengthen it in
many ways. The second section discusses urban collaborative governance,
and the third typifies different forms of interplay between street-level
democracy and collaborative governance, or the absence thereof.
Street-Level Democracy
As a preliminary disclaimer, I confess that I do not nourish the ambi-
tion to build a new concept, even less a theory. In my view, street-level
democracy is a descriptive notion that allows the capturing of a set of
contributions to democracy that essentially share an urban setting.
Downscaling observation helps disclose some dimensions of democracy
that otherwise would remain unnoticed. It is at the micro-local urban
level, walking down the streets, standing in a cramped bus or driving a
© The Author(s) 2020 13

O. Dabène, Street Art and Democracy in Latin America, Studies
of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26913-5_2
14 O. DABÈNE
car through a deprived neighborhood, that citizens can best perceive the
fragmentation and segregation of the social fabric and imagine ways to
address such issues. The urban environment provides them with many
opportunities to speak out and be heard in the public space if they so
wish. I argue that deliberative democrats ought to supplement their
reflections on mini-publics with some considerations on mass publics
at the street level. I urge them to go out into the streets and be atten-
tive: they are likely to be surrounded by messages possibly nourishing a
deliberative dynamic. As Fung (2004, p. IX) puts it, “if you want to find
democracy’s heroes, look in the streets.”
That said, the local scale is not necessarily very democratic (Purcell
2006), nor it is separated from national or even international politics.
The messages that are sent by street artists are not only directed to local
authorities. Some offer a universalistic narrative that tends to frame the
representation of the public on a given issue, be it local, national or
global.
My fieldwork has revealed three contributions to democracy that
are perceptible in the streets: political expression enhancement, artists’
and viewers’ empowerment, and public sphere stretching. Altogether,
they allow for a confirmation of Ryan’s intuition that street art in Latin
America “has played an important role in fostering a more inclusive and
democratic politics, by bringing new actors into the fold, facilitating
claim-making upon government and enabling forms of expression that
go beyond strategic claim-making” (2017, p. 21). Ryan has chosen not
to elaborate on such a role, but rather has opted for advocating an aes-
thetic turn in social movement theory. Supplementing her approach, my
research specifies each contribution to democracy and documents them
empirically. Furthermore, it also contends that the key actors carrying
out these contributions are the artists who behave as urban citizens.
As evidenced by these contributions and agency, the notion of street-
level democracy connects with research addressing unequal political
voices in democracy (Schlozman et al. 2012) much more than classi-
cal works on the quality of democracy, even reconceptualized to make
room for political equality (Munck 2016). It also parallels the notion of
grassroots democracy as “an evolving collection of practices intended to
perfect the exercise of political responsibility by citizens” (Stout 2010,
p. 13). Finally, since I am concerned with public space regulation and
governance, my research also dialogues with the studies of practitioners
acting as “street level democrats” (Laws and Forester 2015).
2 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK 15
These different inputs have been useful to illuminate some aspects of

my research. Yet, the core theoretical reference of this book is delibera-
tive democracy as it is concerned with “talking politics” (Goodin 2008).
I agree with Dryzek (2000) on the necessity for a “tolerant position”
regarding deliberation. Contrary to liberal scholars who limit delibera-
tion to an exchange of rational and reasonable arguments, he cites “argu-
ment, rhetoric, humor, emotion, testimony or storytelling, and gossip”
(p. 1) as alternative forms of communication that ought to be exam-
ined. Dryzek rapidly evokes rap music as a kind of testimony (p. 66).
My intention in this book is to show that street art uses humor, emo-
tion and storytelling in such ways that citizens’ preferences can change.
In this light, I argue in this book that if “deliberative democracy involves
multiple sorts of communication” (Curato et al. 2017, p. 30), then
street art’s quasi-absence from the literature on deliberative democracy is
hard to justify. This book fills that gap.
In the concluding chapter, I will elaborate more on the theoreti-
cal implications of this street-level approach to deliberative democracy.
However, before detailing these three contributions, I discuss here some
key inputs from the theory of deliberative democracy.
Deliberative Democracy
Theoretical and empirical works on deliberative democracy usually
consider non-coercive discussions as providing legitimacy to a deci-
sion-making process. Such concern has led to a focus on mini-publics
and on the many ways preferences may change during the course of a
deliberation. As a reaction, deliberative democratic theory has paid
insufficient attention to “public opinion formation” (Chambers 2009,
p. 331). I follow Chambers (2009) when she convincingly makes the
case for studying “how citizens form their opinions and come to their
policy preferences” (p. 333). More precisely, she emphasizes “delib-
erative rhetoric” as it “makes people see things in new ways, it c onveys
information and knowledge, and it makes people more reflective”
(p. 335). As I will explain in the next sections, this is exactly how street
art operates. It spreads deliberative rhetoric on the streets so that pas-
sersby can make their own judgment on a particular issue. Some street
art analysts such as Mercado-Percia (2012) have indeed claimed that the
images can produce rhetorical speech.
16 O. DABÈNE
Also looking at opinion formation, Goodin (2003) makes a useful

distinction between “external-collective” and “internal-reflective” delib-
erations. The latter, he contends, consists in “having a conversation with
ourselves” in order to “make sense of others” (p. 179). Goodin men-
tions literature and arts as having an “emotional punch” (p. 181) that
stimulates our imagination and triggers an internal-reflective dialogue.
Street art certainly fits into this category. And the signs displayed on
city walls are not simply notes posted or opinions broadcast for the pub-
lic. Goodin boldly argues that theorists of the public sphere “guarantee
everyone a voice but no one a hearing” (p. 178). That might be true
for some artistic expressions or social media. Street art scholars, how-
ever, have shown that signs can interact with each other (Gándara 2015),
creating an inter-textuality that foments dialogue, or a “dialogue-in-
progress” (Irvine 2012, p. 7). Some of the urban citizens artists men-
tioned in this book did find an array of diverse ways to engage in a dia-
logue with their public. True, the type of contribution to deliberative
democracy we are dealing with when studying street artists’ interactions
with their public will never be equivalent to a face-to-face conversation.
Artists’ contributions are mainly limited to opinion formation, possi-
bly preceding other more classical ways of deliberating. Still, due to the
emotional shock it can trigger, I assume in this book that street art has a
high potential to be influential.
Another typical obsession of deliberative democrats has been a focus
on outputs. The way a decision is made, based on the confrontation of
a diversity of preferences leading to a mutual understanding, or even
a consensus upon a course of action, has attracted much of the schol-
arly attention. Yet, some analysts have questioned this sole focalization
on outcomes, arguing that deliberation begins before the actual for-
mal gathering of participants. Goodin and Niemeyer (2003) assert that
“internal-reflective processes” are what really matters. To their ques-
tion “when does deliberation begin?” I will answer: in the public space
(Parkinson 2012), and in the streets in particular. This is where opinion
formation can occur on a large scale. Even if no decision is ever made,
and even if there is no institutional design, street art still contributes to
shaping judgments in ways that deserve full attention from deliberative
democrats.
Finally, as Chambers (2009, p. 331) puts it, “More and more delib-
erative democratic theory looks at and investigates alternatives or
supplements to mass democracy in the form of innovative small-scale
deliberative experiments, rather than ways of making mass d emocracy

itself more deliberative.” Hence, so her argument goes, there is an
urgent need to look at the “broader democratic context,” otherwise the
ways in which such experiments enrich democracy will never be uncov-
ered. This book argues in the same vein, even pushing the argument a
step further. Street art makes democracy more deliberative even when
the broader context is unfavorable. The cases of Oaxaca (Mexico) and
Havana (Cuba) examined in this book’s empirical chapters will be of
particular interest in that sense.
Jane Mansbridge (2012) and her co-authors also recommend a
“systematic approach to deliberative democracy” that distances itself
from formal political forums. They opt for a “talk-based approach to
political conflict and problem solving through arguing, demonstrating,
expressing and persuading” (p. 5). I fully endorse such a “talk-based
approach,” although my research design did not use a systemic method,
essentially for practical reasons. It proved impossible to assess what street
art did at the system level, as a contribution to a network of discourses
on a given issue.
Rather, its “centerpiece,” “citizen’s everyday talk” (Mansbridge 1999,
p. 228) and street art’s contributions to it, is closely scrutinized. The
physical location of the talking is also considered. Street artists appro-
priate public space, they force their way into the demos and use aesthetic
tools causing “dramatization” (Parkinson 2012) to persuade audiences.
I will come back to these debates in my conclusion. For now, I turn in
the next sections to street art’s three contributions to democracy and the
agency upon which it rests.
Street Art’s Three Contributions to Democracy
Enhancing Political Expression

The walls of our cities carry multifaceted modes of political expression.
Let me review two of them.
First, whatever the aesthetic qualities of the marks displayed, they
qualify as signs in the way semiotics defines them. This discipline appre-
hends graffiti as signifiers that challenge the dominant norms. Graffiti
writers disseminate signs on surfaces that are not conceived to receive
them (Gándara 2015). As a result, their works carry a political load
because they disrupt social and legal norms. Critical theorists, along the
18 O. DABÈNE
lines of Jacques Rancière (2013), take this proposition a step further,

arguing that freedom to engage with the political is what defines democ-
racy. As Downey puts it, “if politics is about determining who has the
right to speak, be heard or be seen, then contemporary art of a politi-
cal nature needs to be understood in the context of how through vari-
ous tactics and strategies, it disturbs, disrupts, re-imagines and expands
engagement with the political” (Downey 2014, p. 24).
Second, the signs on the walls convey messages that have an added
value, as compared to traditional writings. According to Gándara (2015,
p. 91), street art possesses a “semiotic potential” that derives from the
combination of images and letters. Graffiti is not only an instrument to
disseminate opinions that could otherwise be written or voiced. It deliv-
ers a richer message through the use of signs. In the same vein, citing
the example of a famous stencil called “Disney War,”1 Mercado-Percia
(2012) contends that an image can make a point quite convincingly.
Yet, this example is interesting because the “meaning” of the sten-
cil is ambiguous. As Ryan (2017, p. 132) wonders: “‘war’ – but which
one? Iraq? Afghanistan? ‘Disney’ – a proxy of US imperialism perhaps?
Or are the Mickey Mouse ears an inference about the competence/
intelligence of the ‘world’s most powerful man’?” And she rightly adds:
“redeployment of the Bush/Mouse icon in new contexts across the
globe reassigned it with multiple and overlapping meanings.” I will argue
further that ambiguity is a key component of street art’s democratic
contribution, as it has the audience self-reflect and contributes to inner
deliberation.
Like some other contemporary artworks, graffiti can be the product
of a “small gesture.” Hannula (2006, p. 7) defines it as a “political act
that is either visible or embedded in works of art” and that can make a
difference. Outside the art sphere, in socialist Poland, Goldfarb (2006)
described those “small things” that can give “power to the powerless.”
He referred to some micro-subversive behaviors that the actors presented
as normal. Graffiti and more generally street art, as the empirical chapters
will show, have similar potential.
Because of these contributions to political expression and claim-mak-
ing, many scholars have assimilated street art to a social movement. They
1 Produced in 2010 in Buenos Aires by BsAs Stencil to lament the war in Afghanistan,
it shows George W. Bush with Mickey Mouse ears. https://buenosairesstreetart.com/

2011/07/06/george-bush-graffiti/.
typically consider street art as an illegal repertoire of contention used for

subversive purposes. Hence, they tend to focus on the proliferation of
politicized messages accompanying major disruptive events, such as Latin
American twentieth-century revolutions (Craven 2002) or more recently
the Arab Spring (Lennon 2014; Hamdy et al. 2013) and the 2011
revolution in Yemen (Alviso-Marino 2015). In Latin America, these
artistic expressions have been studied as social movements in Mexico
(McCaughan 2012), Argentina (Longoni 2008), Chile (Adams 2002)
and Puerto Rico (Everhart 2012).
These works assume that representative democracy is a huge disap-
pointment for younger generations in Latin America. They portray them
as feeling disenfranchised and marginalized and hence rejecting poli-
ticians who embody the political “system” that seems to ignore them.
When voting is no longer an option, street art is apprehended as an
alternative way to voice concerns and convey public messages (Chaffee
1993). For some, this interpellation of the public is what allows for the
characterization of street art as a social movement. Following Charles
Tilly (2016), street art is apprehended as a “contentious performance”
(Ryan 2017) or a protest event, or even a repertoire composed of a series
of performances. In the same vein, street art is often considered sub-
versive by definition: “as an attempt to reclaim a stretch of the urban
landscape for self-expression, works of street art question habitual uses of
public space” (Baldini 2016, p. 190).
Building on Jaspers (1997), my empirical inquiry will show that street
art can be assimilated to a moral protest. Some artworks can provoke
moral shocks and, as Jaspers contends, artists, much like activists, can
put “into concrete form new ways of seeing and judging the world, new
ways of feeling and thinking about it” (Jaspers 1997, p. 369). As with
music (Traini 2008), the emotional charge of some pieces is what makes
the audience react.
This art-as-mobilization account is certainly helpful. Its obvious short-
coming, however, resides in two simple observations. Some paintings
on the walls do not seem to convey a message, even when contextual-
ized, and they are not always associated with a social movement. If it
were only a repertoire of contention, then how and why would street art
survive during “normal” times? Alison Young (2014) is right to stress
that often the artists are motivated by simple generosity: “the artist seeks
to make a gift of the artwork to the spectator, the neighborhood and
the city itself” (p. 27). My framework intends to grasp the democratic
20 O. DABÈNE
contribution of street art even in the absence of explicit political engage-

ment and/or participation in social movements.
As the next sections show, one way of doing this is to consider the art-
ists as urban citizens.
Empowerment and Urban Citizenship

As Barthes (1964) pointed out, all images are polysemic, especially when
they are connoted, which is the case for many street artworks. That can
generate some confusion when the artists try to deliver precise messages.
It is up to the viewer to build their own interpretation out of a diver-
sity of signs. As Manco (2002) puts it, “an artwork can be interpreted
in multiple ways by its audience” (p. 35). Barthes (1967) considered the
“death of the author”2 a democratic revolution. Analyzing minimal art,
he claimed that “the ascetic gesture of the artists underlines their quest
for abstraction: the author relinquishes freedom of interpretation to the
viewer and reciprocally calls for a tenser implication in front of the art-
work… this is not only a radical change of perspective, it is a political
disruption with a democratic intention” (Nachtergael 2015, p. 78). The
“death of the author” typically epitomizes the philosophy of some street
artists. Having equal access to public space to freely voice their opinions,
they can build a semiotic democracy, “a world where audiences freely
and widely engage in the use of cultural symbols in response to the force
of the media” (John Fiske in Katyal 2006, p. 489).
In some of the empirical examples presented in this book, the artists
performed in public and made a point of inviting the audience to par-
ticipate. Coco Fusco (2015) in Cuba and Ruben Yepes Muñoz (2012)
in Colombia both emphasize the subversive potential of performances.
Their work can nourish reflective deliberation (Goodin 2003).
Street art not only empowers the audience; it also empowers the
artists, a dimension that has been widely commented upon. Lyman
Chaffee (1993) pioneered a tradition of scholarly works arguing that
street art was a mass medium used by disenfranchised young suburban
dwellers. This particularly holds true for women artists (Cassandra and
2 In his 1967 essay, Roland Barthes claims that literary criticism should no longer center
on the author. A text, so goes his argument, “consists of multiple writings” and the reader,
not the author, is the “space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations
a writing consists of.”
Gucik 2015), who not only express themselves in public, but also claim
equality within the male-dominated artistic community. The stories told
in the empirical chapters will show how some women artists have earned
respect by painting in the streets and running the risk of being chased
and sometimes beaten by the police. In Colombia, Lady Cristal incar-
nates the feminist struggle for equality when intervening on a wall.
Street art is an inclusive form of expression. Anyone is free to create a
signifier and propagate it. Despite its being illegal, potential graffiti writ-
ers can feel encouraged to go out and paint, because their interventions
can be anonymous, the authorities sometimes seem to tolerate them, and
they can even sometimes make a living out of it.
For male and female artists alike, their empowerment strengthens
their feeling of belonging to a community of artists and/or activists.
They are also part of the demos that can influence the way people in the
street conceive a given issue. They feel legitimate in voicing their opin-
ion, making public claims, acting as watchdogs or holding the authorities
accountable. In that sense, street art strengthens what Dryzek (2000,
p. 57) calls “Difference democracy,” favoring the “historically-oppressed
segments of the population.”
Many scholars have used the notion of “urban citizenship” to describe
this type of political awareness and engagement, in countries as distant as
Indonesia (Lee 2013) and Brazil (Holston 2008). Cunningham (2011),
for instance, portrays “robust citizens” interested in public affairs and
engaged in local activities, as described by Aristotle. Holston studies the
surge of new kinds of citizenship in the peripheries of São Paulo (Brazil).
He shows that “residents generated new kinds of public participation,
conceptions of rights, and uses of law to redress the inequities of their
residential conditions” (p. 23). That leads him to consider four condi-
tions for the local population to constitute an urban citizenship: “when
urban residence is the basis of mobilization, right claims addressing
urban experience compose their agenda, the city is the primary political
community of reference for these developments, and residents legitimate
this agenda of rights and participatory practices on the basis of their con-
tributions to the city itself” (p. 23).
In the cases examined in this book, street artists do not have a lim-
ited agenda, nor do they exclusively deliver claims to the municipal
authorities to secure better living conditions. I contend that they act
as urban citizens as long as they use the city walls to voice opinions
regarding issues of collective concern. This simple yet functional defini-
tion is compatible with the artists’ interventions being legal or illegal.
22 O. DABÈNE
Urban citizenship the way I conceive it can also be “insurgent” (Holston

2008) or “transgressive” (Earle 2012), depending upon the cause the
artists are defending and the rights they are claiming.
Much like the cultural productions Scorer (2016) studied in Buenos
Aires, street art can be an “act of commoning that thinks, imagines, and
questions urban communities” (p. 28). Street artists act as urban citi-
zens when they feed public debates, contribute to opinion formation and
raise critical awareness.3 They can also contribute to community building
when they interact with neighbor associations. In that case, some artists
adopt a “deliberative stance” that Owen and Smith (2015, p. 228) define
as a “relation to others as equals engaged in the mutual exchange of rea-
sons oriented as if to reaching a shared practical judgment.” Some would
even argue that they contribute to an urban design process (Burnham
2010).
All these roles can be performed in “ordinary” contexts (Carrel
and Neveu 2014) and not only in times of social protest. My research
is interested in the role played by street artists in everyday discussions
(Mansbridge 1999).
This approach to urban citizenship “from below” (Miraftab 2012) is
compatible with the literature influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s right to
the city. Although the right to the city is mostly a “working slogan” and
a “political ideal” (Harvey 2008), it has drawn attention to the engage-
ment of grassroots actors who keenly imagine other, more democratic
forms of urbanization. Many of the street artists interviewed for this
book definitively claim a right to the city that encompasses freedom of
expression in appropriated public space, even in adverse conditions such
as in Cuba. Still, not all of them qualify as urban citizens.
Indeed, many street artists claim to be totally depoliticized with no
interest in the city as a commons. Some just want to embellish the walls
and get paid for it, without considering a dialogue with the public. They
view it as a personal challenge to generously offer a distraction to the
people walking the streets. Admittedly, in cities where the built envi-
ronment offers nothing but visual and aural contamination, entertain-
ment is rare, and artists accomplish a valuable mission just by putting a
smile on a passerby’s face. They have this “ability to create an impres-
sion during the brief moment of an unexpected aesthetic encounter”
3 Known in Latin America as concientización (in Spanish) or conscientização (in Portuguese).

(Bengtsen 2013, p. 68). Yet, they can also trigger repulsion. Quoting
Courbet (“I am my own government”), Ardenne (2002, p. 79) recalls
that artists freely decide where they install their artwork without car-
ing much about possible negative reactions. In some cases, artists can
undermine the “democracy of everyday life” (Rosenblum 2016). Their
decisions are imposed on the public and can generate aversion. Some
consider their work as a nuisance (Foster and Iaione 2016) or an act of
despotism in a neighborhood, provoking resistance. Public enthusiasm
toward street art is not a given.
Whether they care about the city as a commons or not, these artists
will always be ambivalent regarding their status as citizens. As Ardenne
(2002) puts it:
the status of a contextual artist, as a member of society, is complex and

sometimes equivocal. The artist is part of demos, a full stakeholder: his
action can aim at rebuilding social bonds or at celebrating the values of
sharing and mutual respect that are inherent to the democratic pact. His
condition of self-claimed artist, however, lies on the expression of a partial
refusal of the society in which he lives. He acknowledges that there are
imperfections and a possibility to make improvements, and he longs for
reforms of which arts can be an efficient vector. (pp. 32–33)
Many artists interviewed for this book displayed and sometimes con-
fessed to such complexity. In their daily routine, they can alternatively act
as citizens in the public realm (Beauregard and Bounds 2000), turn to
some more lucrative and depoliticized activities where civic engagement
is absent, and even hack public space (Azevedo Morais 2011), aggres-
sively tagging walls during the night. Accordingly, this book considers
urban citizenship as a series of roles the actors play, and not as a consol-
idated attribute, a status or a legal entitlement granted to them. These
roles, as tactics deployed in the “practice of everyday life” (De Certeau
1984), are conceived to circumvent an adverse environment.
Stretching the Public Sphere

The last contribution to democracy perceptible at street level lies in an
extension of the public sphere. In this section, I contend that street art
resignifies the use of physical public space, converting it into an arena
24 O. DABÈNE
of claim-making and hence expanding or broadening (Costa et al. 2017)

the public sphere’s boundaries.
Street art stretches the public sphere in three ways. First, new actors
engage in public debates, thanks to the empowerment of artists and
audiences. Second, their use of walls in the streets extends the public
sphere to the built environment. And third, the use of the internet has
resulted in the creation of virtual public arenas. This section reviews this
sociological, spatial and technological extension.
Sociologically, even if anyone is entitled to enter the public sphere
to deliberate about public affairs, the fact that this access has been seg-
regated is no secret. Habermas (1991) has demonstrated that the pub-
lic sphere had long been confiscated by the male-dominated educated
bourgeoisie until the twentieth century. Then mass societies produced
by the welfare state partially destroyed the bourgeois public sphere with
the advent of mass media. However, this “structural transformation of
the public sphere” has hardly ever been perceptible in the global south,
where the great majority of the population remains excluded from par-
ticipating in political debates. Habermas’ conception of a deliberation
leading to a rational consensus does not seem to apply to deeply divided
societies with huge economic and social inequalities.
The empowerment of new categories has opened up the public
sphere, but the dialogue remains limited. If anything, critical theorists
provide a more accurate tool to account for Latin American realities
when they argue that “the public space is the battleground where differ-
ent hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final
reconciliation” (Mouffe 2007, p. 3). Yet, street artists can hardly be sus-
pected of hegemonic ambitions.
The empowerment of new categories accounts for a significant but
fragile democratic contribution. Some artists pursue a lifelong career,
but many of them give up. Despite a lack of empirical studies regarding
individual trajectories, the fieldwork done for this book revealed a great
instability. Some periods in life seem to be more propitious for activities
in the streets. To be sure, this observation is compatible with the litera-
ture on shifting involvements (Hirschman 1982).
Moving on to the physical dimension of public space, urban studies
have long stressed the importance of plazas as forums for public dissent
(Low 2000). Plazas provide space for the type of democratic perfor-
mance Parkinson (2012) has in mind. Streets and walls can be consid-
ered through the same lens. However, a caveat must be introduced
regarding the delimitation of space. Walls often physically separate pri-

vate property from public space, so that when artists appropriate these
walls, they deliberately bridge those two notions and occupy the inter-
face. The street is home to the “complex implications of the line between
protected expression and prohibited destruction, between the absence
of a symbolic terrain that provides a comparable expressive platform and
the presence of property rules that prohibit such transgression” (Katyal
2006, p. 500). Young (2014) coined the notion of “legislated city” to
describe a “city of legible spaces and objects with singular owners, licens-
ing some behaviors and criminalizing others” (p. 43). Using the same
line of argument, Cresswell (1998) evokes a tension between the “street
as a site and sign of domination and order and as a site and sign of
unrest, rebellion and disorder” (p. 269). The street can be both a physi-
cal vector of democratic dissent and a venue for authoritarian repression.
Put in Lefebvre’s words, the street is a spontaneous theater that can turn
oppressive (Lefebvre 2003).
As a result of all these unresolved contradictions, the stretching of
the public sphere is uneven and ephemeral. Frequently limited to some
“spots” in locations that are often kept secret, the appropriation of
walls does not add up to a coherent and homogeneous public sphere.
Moreover, this patchworked or “place-bound” (Goodsell 2003) public
space introduces debates and eventually prolongs them over time, but
only insofar as the artworks are not erased.
This is when technology steps in. Most artists have multiple social
media accounts. Reactions to artworks in the streets are prolonged
through posts or feeds, creating a virtual public space that Marie-Laure
Geoffray refers to as arenas, precisely because there is a dispersion among
“multiple and fragmented spaces of debate and discussion” (Geoffray
2013, p. 3).
Social media in the hands of street artists tend to become civic tech-
nologies and they perform the role of watchdogs. Yet, social media can
also be instruments of commodification. Artists are increasingly painting
in the streets in order to post photos that can attract followers, nour-
ishing the hope that their virtual audience will translate into concrete
business opportunities in galleries. In that logic, street art is just the pre-
liminary stage of an economic cycle.
26 O. DABÈNE
On a more political note, social media prolong the participative arts

that were born out of the 1950s and 1960s in France.4 Art historian Paul
Ardenne (2002) argues that “contextual art” is nowadays a new form
of “multiplying democracy.” However, he also points out that in some
countries the artists have started to collaborate with the authorities and
strengthen what he calls a “culture of compensation.” This book will
provide empirical evidence supporting that claim.
As mentioned in the introduction, this research does not only show
that street art is intimately related to street-level democracy. It is also
very much concerned with the way public space is governed, as I exam-
ine in the next section.
Governance of Public Space

In this section, I argue that public space can be governed democrati-
cally when local authorities are keen to open arenas of deliberation and
have artists express their views. Admittedly, the dominant trend seems
to move in the opposite direction. Inspired by the broken window the-
ory5 (Wilson and Kelling 1982), many elected officials just want to
eradicate graffiti, and need no consultation to do so. Zero-tolerance
policies implemented in an authoritarian way are not always efficient;
some can even be counterproductive. All are inspired by the same street-
art-is-vandalism paradigm. Bogotá and São Paulo, for instance, elected
new mayors in 2015 and 2016, respectively, who were clearly inspired
by the “get-tough” policies adopted by New York city mayor Rudolph
Giuliani in the 1990s. Yet, in some other cities examined in this book, or
in the same ones but under previous administrations, policy-makers have
proven to be surprisingly tolerant and willing to talk.
Holland (2017) provides a stimulating explanation of this strange
inaction when confronting the occupation of public space. Central to her
theoretical framework is the concept of “forbearance,” which she defines
as an “intentional and revocable government leniency toward violations
of the law” (p. 13). In her model, forbearance is a substitute for costly
4 Influenced by the Situationist International, which combatted the “society of the spec-
tacle” (Debord 1967), it promoted “situations” where arts and life were united, like in
happenings.
5 According to which unattended broken windows in a neighborhood are a sign of dis-
order and incivility that triggers subsequent serious crime within that same neighborhood.
redistributive policies as part of an electoral bargain. Although Holland

does not study graffiti, but rather illegal housing and street vendors,
some of her arguments seem to apply to street art. They are, however, of
limited use.
In the five cities under consideration in my research, many local
authorities did not want to engage in conflicts with street artists. They
had different reasons for that, including more urgent priorities to deal
with. Some cities simply lacked proper regulations to enforce, distanc-
ing themselves from some Australian or European cases of “legislated
cities” (Young 2014). In that case, whether street art is illegal remains
unclear, and when it is it can go unsanctioned as a “perceived status”
(Bengtsen 2013).
In the interviews, some elected officials did acknowledge that they
were lenient and sometimes sympathetic. Some even confessed a sense
of impotence and resignation. Understandingly, though, no one admit-
ted an electoral strategy. Analyzing the electoral campaigns, for instance,
I did not find empirical evidence of an attempt to secure the votes of that
segment of the population. They probably considered that street artists
were unlikely to turn out to vote. Consequently, forbearance cannot
be a substitute for redistribution for street artists, who are likely to be
reluctant to engage in clientelistic bargains, if they even consider voting.
And for the authorities, there is no need to look for substitutes simply
because, in contrast to housing, there is no costly redistributive policy at
stake.
There is, nonetheless, an important qualification to this assertion.
When invited, some artists do accept dialogue with the authorities, pro-
vided they can reap some kind of benefit. How and why are they invited?
What are the political settings and the institutional arrangements that
frame the dialogue? I explore some literature that can help address these
questions in the following section.
Opening its empirical exploration with Bogotá, Colombia, this book
evokes a paradigmatic case of dialogue between street artists and local
authorities over the regulation of public space occupation. A classical way
to interpret such an initiative would be to consider it as an instrument of
participatory democracy. The abundant literature in this field does pro-
vide a tool kit that helps draw a broad picture of a political setting. I con-
tend, however, that it has to be supplemented by other notions.
As the editors of the Journal of Civil Society’s special issue on the
“participatory democracy turn” put it, “Not only does participatory
28 O. DABÈNE
democracy as a political project pursues multiple objectives.” They go on

to add, “participatory practices are also present in many types of organi-
zations and are supported by different and sometimes opposing ways of
framing them” (Bherer et al. 2016, p. 228). Accompanying the prolifera-
tion of deliberative initiatives, the concept of participatory democracy has
indeed lost precision (Blondiaux and Sintomer 2002).
Furthermore, if “participatory processes are often associated with the
idea of a top-down mechanism implemented to include citizen input in
the public sector” (Bherer et al. 2016, p. 225), then it is assumed that
the actors develop a narrative of inclusion that is out there for the ana-
lysts to explicit and interpret. This assumption might be unwarranted.
The fieldwork done for this book reveals that there can be participatory
practices without a political project of citizen inclusion or community
building, and conversely there can be a project of inclusion that remains
poorly implemented or that fails to target a specific group.
The insistence on participatory arrangements also points to an insti-
tutionalization that is partially absent in the cases examined in this book.
The initiatives under consideration are inspired by practicalities and
pragmatism. They reflect a will to solve problems, creating issue-specific
forums of deliberation in order to gain legitimacy and efficiency. With
few exceptions, the local authorities under scrutiny did not make use of
classical participatory democracy tools, such as participatory budgeting
or citizen councils. They did not (re)invent local democracy, the way the
Workers’ Party did in some cities in Brazil (Abers 2000).
In order to supplement the literature on participatory democracy, I
have been inspired by the policy-making turn of the theory of deliber-
ative democracy. More precisely, I used collaborative governance stud-
ies to better grasp the way some cities crafted public space regulation in
association with street artists or, in the absence of concrete outcomes,
at least held dialogues with them. Emerson et al. (2012, p. 2) define
collaborative governance “broadly as the processes and structures
of public policy decision making and management that engage peo-
ple constructively across the boundaries of public agencies, levels of
government, and/or the public, private and civic spheres in order to
carry out a public purpose that could not otherwise be accomplished.”
Ansell and Gash (2008, p. 544) add that the decision-making process is
“consensus oriented and deliberative.” As such, it holds a potential for
“governance-driven democratization” (Warren 2009).
In an attempt to clarify the reasons why public agencies opt for such
a mode of governance, Emerson and Nabatchi contend that collabora-
tive governance arises from the necessity to address “wicked problems”
that are “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete or con-
tradictory information, rapidly shifting environments, and complex
interdependencies” (Emerson and Nabatchi 2015, p. 6). Public space
invasion definitively qualifies as a “wicked problem.” There is no accessi-
ble information regarding the number and identity of street artists paint-
ing the walls. Hence, the authorities lack adequate instruments to design
a policy strategy, other than refurbishing the walls on a regular basis.
Repressive policies are doomed to be a drop in the ocean, due to the
sheer size of cities. Subsequently, they are left with few options. They can
either choose to concentrate their efforts on a very small area, such as a
UNESCO world heritage historical center, leaving the rest of the city to
its own fate. Or they can try to reach out to the community of artists and
engage in some kind of “collaborative dynamics.”
This book explores some examples of such collaborative dynamics and
tries to unpack them, building on Emerson et al.’s “integrative frame-
work.” The authors detail three components of the collaborative dynam-
ics: principled engagement, shared motivation and capacity for joint
action. Some dimensions such as trust are also crucial when the author-
ities try to hold a meeting with street artists. Ansell and Gash (2008)
argue that the initial level of trust matters as a “starting condition.” In
the cases examined in this book, there is no doubt that street artists are
generally reluctant to attend a meeting with the same authorities that
repress their activities. This hurdle is not always easily overcome.
Regarding the particular case of public space management, Foster
and Iaione (2016) raise the following question: “What are the possi-
bilities of bringing more collaborative governance tools to decisions
about how city space and common goods are used, who has access to
them, and how they are shared among a diverse urban population?”
(p. 288). Consistent with Ostrom (1990), Foster and Iaione explore a
third way of governing the commons, between public and private man-
agement. They argue that “under certain conditions local communities
can autonomously decide on and enforce the rules for sharing and man-
aging common pool resources, in the process developing and maintain-
ing self-governing institutions” (pp. 324–325). The concept of “local
empowerment,” again borrowed from Ostrom, is central to their model
30 O. DABÈNE
of collaborative governance. It is also an important attribute of urban cit-

izenship the way I defined it in the preceding section.
According to Foster and Iaione, in an urban collaborative democracy,
“we see networks of empowered members where the inhabitants and
stakeholders are co-creating, co-designing, and co-implementing plan-
ning and other public policy solutions for complex urban environments
together with policymakers and local officials” (p. 339). They mention
the case of the Bologna collaborative city program that includes regu-
lation of street art. The case studies presented in the following chapters
explore the regulation of street art in public spaces, using the model of
collaborative governance as an ideal type.
This type of collaboration, however, remains an unlevel playing field.
As Loukaitou-Sideris et al. (2011, p. 11) put it, “in the debate over
appropriate public space uses that may precede an ordinance, certain
actors are more powerful than others and their voices are heard louder.”
Collaborative governance also remains fragile, precluding the actors
from building an urban regime whose defining elements include a sta-
ble agenda institutionalized in a local policy synthesis, a stable electoral
coalition, a stable governing coalition and the participation of private
or social interests in the governing coalition (Sellers 2002, p. 291). The
key feature of stability is often missing in Latin American urban poli-
tics. Bogotá is an exception, with three leftist mayors in a row, expand-
ing their control of the city over a period of 12 years. They had time to
operate a paradigm shift regarding public space governance. Yet, even in
this most favorable case, we shall see in the next chapter that there were
strains and unmet expectations.
The limited impact and modest outcomes of collaborative governance
schemes might lead some analysts to consider that the deliberation was
not carried out in good faith. The boundary between deliberation and
manipulation is indeed thin. In some cases, forums are only consultative.
They are conceived to socialize the participants and, beyond them, to
inform and educate the public. Thus, it could well be argued that they
constitute instruments of governmentality, the way Foucault defined
them.6
I turn in the next section to the interactions between two dimensions
of deliberative democracy: talking politics and policy-making.
6 Governmentality refers to governments shaping people’s conduct and behavior.

Another random document with
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the only real Canaan of the American bondman, simply as a country
to which the wild goose and the swan repaired at the end of winter to
escape the heat of summer, but not as the home of man. I knew
something of Theology, but nothing of Geography. I really did not
know that there was a state of New York or a state of
Massachusetts. I had heard of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New
Jersey, and all the southern states, but was utterly ignorant of the
free states. New York City was our northern limit, and to go there and
to be forever harassed with the liability of being hunted down and
returned to slavery, with the certainty of being treated ten times
worse than ever before, was a prospect which might well cause
some hesitation. The case sometimes, to our excited visions, stood
thus: At every gate through which we had to pass we saw a
watchman; at every ferry a guard; on every bridge a sentinel, and in
every wood a patrol or slave-hunter. We were hemmed in on every
side. The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in
the balance and weighed against each other. On the one hand stood
slavery, a stern reality glaring frightfully upon us, with the blood of
millions in its polluted skirts, terrible to behold, greedily devouring our
hard earnings and feeding it upon our flesh. This was the evil from
which to escape. On the other hand, far away, back in the hazy
distance, where all forms seemed but shadows under the flickering
light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-capped
mountain, stood a doubtful freedom, half frozen, beckoning us to her
icy domain. This was the good to be sought. The inequality was as
great as that between certainty and uncertainty. This in itself was
enough to stagger us; but when we came to survey the untrodden
road and conjecture the many possible difficulties we were appalled,
and at times, as I have said, were upon the point of giving over the
struggle altogether. The reader can have little idea of the phantoms
which would flit, in such circumstances, before the uneducated mind
of the slave. Upon either side we saw grim death, assuming a variety
of horrid shapes. Now it was starvation, causing us, in a strange and
friendless land, to eat our own flesh. Now we were contending with
the waves and were drowned. Now we were hunted by dogs and
overtaken, and torn to pieces by their merciless fangs. We were
stung by scorpions, chased by wild beasts, bitten by snakes, and
worst of all, after having succeeded in swimming rivers, encountering
wild beasts, sleeping in the woods, suffering hunger, cold, heat, and
nakedness, overtaken by hired kidnappers, who in the name of law
and for the thrice-cursed reward would, perchance, fire upon us, kill
some, wound others, and capture all. This dark picture, drawn by
ignorance and fear, at times greatly shook our determination, and not
unfrequently caused us to
“Rather bear the ills we had,

Than flee to others which we knew not of.”
I am not disposed to magnify this circumstance in my experience,

and yet I think I shall seem to be so disposed to the reader, but no
man can tell the intense agony which was felt by the slave when
wavering on the point of making his escape. All that he has is at
stake, and even that which he has not is at stake also. The life which
he has may be lost, and the liberty which he seeks may not be
gained.
Patrick Henry, to a listening senate which was thrilled by his
magic eloquence and ready to stand by him in his boldest flights,
could say, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and this saying was a
sublime one, even for a freeman; but incomparably more sublime is
the same sentiment when practically asserted by men accustomed
to the lash and chain, men whose sensibilities must have become
more or less deadened by their bondage. With us it was a doubtful
liberty, at best, that we sought, and a certain lingering death in the
rice swamps and sugar fields if we failed. Life is not lightly regarded
by men of sane minds. It is precious both to the pauper and to the
prince, to the slave and to his master; and yet I believe there was not
one among us who would not rather have been shot down than pass
away life in hopeless bondage.
In the progress of our preparations Sandy (the root man)
became troubled. He began to have distressing dreams. One of
these, which happened on a Friday night, was to him of great
significance, and I am quite ready to confess that I felt somewhat
damped by it myself. He said, “I dreamed last night that I was roused
from sleep by strange noises like the noises of a swarm of angry
birds that caused a roar as they passed, and which fell upon my ear
like a coming gale over the tops of the trees. Looking up to see what
it could mean I saw you, Frederick, in the claws of a huge bird,
surrounded by a large number of birds of all colors and sizes. These
were all pecking at you, while you, with your arms, seemed to be
trying to protect your eyes. Passing over me, the birds flew in a
southwesterly direction, and I watched them until they were clean out
of sight. Now I saw this as plainly as I now see you; and furder,
honey, watch de Friday night dream; dare is sumpon in it shose you
born; dare is indeed, honey.” I did not like the dream, but I showed
no concern, attributing it to the general excitement and perturbation
consequent upon our contemplated plan to escape. I could not,
however, shake off its effect at once. I felt that it boded no good.
Sandy was unusually emphatic and oracular, and his manner had
much to do with the impression made upon me.
The plan which I recommended, and to which my comrades
consented, for our escape, was to take a large canoe owned by Mr.
Hamilton, and on the Saturday night previous to the Easter holidays
launch out into the Chesapeake bay and paddle for its head, a
distance of seventy miles, with all our might. On reaching this point
we were to turn the canoe adrift and bend our steps toward the north
star till we reached a free state.
There were several objections to this plan. In rough weather the
waters of the Chesapeake are much agitated, and there would be
danger, in a canoe, of being swamped by the waves. Another
objection was that the canoe would soon be missed, the absent
slaves would at once be suspected of having taken it, and we should
be pursued by some of the fast-sailing craft out of St. Michaels. Then
again, if we reached the head of the bay and turned the canoe adrift,
she might prove a guide to our track and bring the hunters after us.
These and other objections were set aside by the stronger ones,
which could be urged against every other plan that could then be
suggested. On the water we had a chance of being regarded as
fishermen, in the service of a master. On the other hand, by taking
the land route, through the counties adjoining Delaware, we should
be subjected to all manner of interruptions, and many disagreeable
questions, which might give us serious trouble. Any white man, if he
pleased, was authorized to stop a man of color on any road, and
examine and arrest him. By this arrangement many abuses
(considered such even by slaveholders) occurred. Cases have been
known where freemen, being called upon to show their free papers
by a pack of ruffians, and on the presentation of the papers, the
ruffians have torn them up, and seized the victim and sold him to a
life of endless bondage.
The week before our intended start, I wrote a pass for each of
our party, giving them permission to visit Baltimore during the Easter
holidays. The pass ran after this manner:
“This is to certify that I, the undersigned, have given the

bearer, my servant John, full liberty to go to Baltimore to spend
the Easter holidays.
W. H.
Near St. Michaels, Talbot Co., Md.”
Although we were not going to Baltimore, and were intending to

land east of North Point, in the direction I had seen the Philadelphia
steamers go, these passes might be useful to us in the lower part of
the bay, while steering towards Baltimore. These were not, however,
to be shown by us, until all other answers failed to satisfy the
inquirer. We were all fully alive to the importance of being calm and
self-possessed when accosted, if accosted we should be; and we
more than once rehearsed to each other how we should behave in
the hour of trial.
Those were long, tedious days and nights. The suspense was
painful in the extreme. To balance probabilities, where life and liberty
hang on the result, requires steady nerves. I panted for action, and
was glad when the day, at the close of which we were to start,
dawned upon us. Sleeping the night before was out of the question. I
probably felt more deeply than any of my companions, because I
was the instigator of the movement. The responsibility of the whole
enterprise rested on my shoulders. The glory of success, and the
shame and confusion of failure, could not be matters of indifference
to me. Our food was prepared, our clothes were packed; we were all
ready to go, and impatient for Saturday morning—considering that
the last of our bondage.
I cannot describe the tempest and tumult of my brain that
morning. The reader will please bear in mind that in a slave State an
unsuccessful runaway was not only subjected to cruel torture, and
sold away to the far South, but he was frequently execrated by the
other slaves. He was charged with making the condition of the other
slaves intolerable by laying them all under the suspicion of their
masters—subjecting them to greater vigilance, and imposing greater
limitations on their privileges. I dreaded murmurs from this quarter. It
was difficult, too, for a slave-master to believe that slaves escaping
had not been aided in their flight by some one of their fellow-slaves.
When, therefore, a slave was missing, every slave on the place was
closely examined as to his knowledge of the undertaking.
Our anxiety grew more and more intense, as the time of our
intended departure drew nigh. It was truly felt to be a matter of life
and death with us, and we fully intended to fight, as well as run, if
necessity should occur for that extremity. But the trial hour had not
yet come. It was easy to resolve, but not so easy to act. I expected
there might be some drawing back at the last; it was natural there
should be; therefore, during the intervening time, I lost no opportunity
to explain away difficulties, remove doubts, dispel fears, and inspire
all with firmness. It was too late to look back, and now was the time
to go forward. I appealed to the pride of my comrades by telling them
that if after having solemnly promised to go, as they had done, they
now failed to make the attempt, they would in effect brand
themselves with cowardice, and might well sit down, fold their arms,
and acknowledge themselves fit only to be slaves. This detestable
character all were unwilling to assume. Every man except Sandy
(he, much to our regret, withdrew) stood firm, and at our last meeting
we pledged ourselves afresh, and in the most solemn manner, that
at the time appointed we would certainly start on our long journey for
a free country. This meeting was in the middle of the week, at the
end of which we were to start.
Early on the appointed morning we went as usual to the field, but
with hearts that beat quickly and anxiously. Any one intimately
acquainted with us might have seen that all was not well with us, and
that some monster lingered in our thoughts. Our work that morning
was the same as it had been for several days past—drawing out and
spreading manure. While thus engaged, I had a sudden
presentiment, which flashed upon me like lightning in a dark night,
revealing to the lonely traveler the gulf before and the enemy behind.
I instantly turned to Sandy Jenkins, who was near me, and said:
“Sandy, we are betrayed! something has just told me so.” I felt as
sure of it as if the officers were in sight. Sandy said: “Man, dat is
strange; but I feel just as you do.” If my mother—then long in her
grave—had appeared before me and told me that we were betrayed,
I could not at that moment have felt more certain of the fact.
In a few minutes after this, the long, low, and distant notes of the
horn summoned us from the field to breakfast. I felt as one may be
supposed to feel before being led forth to be executed for some
great offense. I wanted no breakfast, but I went with the other slaves
toward the house for form’s sake. My feelings were not disturbed as
to the right of running away; on that point I had no misgiving
whatever, but from a sense of the consequences of failure.
In thirty minutes after that vivid impression came the
apprehended crash. On reaching the house, and glancing my eye
toward the lane gate, the worst was at once made known. The lane
gate to Mr. Freeland’s house was nearly half a mile from the door,
and much shaded by the heavy wood which bordered the main road.
I was, however, able to descry four white men and two colored men
approaching. The white men were on horseback, and the colored
men were walking behind, and seemed to be tied. “It is indeed all
over with us; we are surely betrayed,” I thought to myself. I became
composed, or at least comparatively so, and calmly awaited the
result. I watched the ill-omened company entering the gate.
Successful flight was impossible, and I made up my mind to stand
and meet the evil, whatever it might be, for I was not altogether
without a slight hope that things might turn differently from what I had
at first feared. In a few moments in came Mr. William Hamilton, riding
very rapidly and evidently much excited. He was in the habit of riding
very slowly, and was seldom known to gallop his horse. This time his
horse was nearly at full speed, causing the dust to roll thick behind
him. Mr. Hamilton, though one of the most resolute men in the whole
neighborhood, was, nevertheless, a remarkably mild-spoken man,
and, even when greatly excited, his language was cool and
circumspect. He came to the door, and inquired if Mr. Freeland was
in? I told him that Mr. Freeland was at the barn. Off the old
gentleman rode toward the barn, with unwonted speed. In a few
moments Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Freeland came down from the barn
to the house, and just as they made their appearance in the front-
yard three men, who proved to be constables, came dashing into the
lane on horseback, as if summoned by a sign requiring quick work. A
few seconds brought them into the front-yard, where they hastily
dismounted and tied their horses. This done, they joined Mr.
Freeland and Mr. Hamilton, who were standing a short distance from
the kitchen. A few moments were spent as if in consulting how to
proceed, and then the whole party walked up to the kitchen door.
There was now no one in the kitchen but myself and John Harris;
Henry and Sandy were yet in the barn. Mr. Freeland came inside the
kitchen door, and with an agitated voice called me by name, and told
me to come forward, that there were some gentlemen who wished to
see me. I stepped toward them at the door, and asked what they
wanted; when the constables grabbed me, and told me that I had
better not resist; that I had been in a scrape, or was said to have
been in one; that they were merely going to take me where I could
be examined; that they would have me brought before my master at
St. Michaels, and if the evidence against me was not proved true I
should be acquitted. I was now firmly tied, and completely at the
mercy of my captors. Resistance was idle. They were five in number,
armed to the teeth. When they had secured me, they turned to John
Harris, and in a few moments succeeded in tying him as firmly as
they had tied me. They next turned toward Henry Harris, who had
now returned from the barn. “Cross your hands,” said the constable
to Henry. “I won’t,” said Henry, in a voice so firm and clear, and in a
manner so determined, as for a moment to arrest all proceedings.
“Won’t you cross your hands?” said Tom Graham, the constable.
“No, I won’t,” said Henry, with increasing emphasis. Mr. Hamilton, Mr.
Freeland, and the officers now came near to Henry. Two of the
constables drew out their shining pistols, and swore, by the name of
God, that he should cross his hands or they would shoot him down.
Each of these hired ruffians now cocked their pistols, and, with
fingers apparently on the triggers, presented their deadly weapons to
the breast of the unarmed slave, saying, if he did not cross his
hands, they would “blow his d——d heart out of him.” “Shoot me,
shoot me,” said Henry; “you can’t kill me but once. Shoot, shoot, and
be damned! I won’t be tied!” This the brave fellow said in a voice as
defiant and heroic in its tone as was the language itself; and at the
moment of saying this, with the pistols at his very breast, he quickly
raised his arms, and dashed them from the puny hands of his
assassins, the weapons flying in all directions. Now came the
struggle. All hands rushed upon the brave fellow, and after beating
him for some time they succeeded in overpowering and tying him.
Henry put me to shame; he fought, and fought bravely. John and I
had made no resistance. The fact is, I never saw much use of
fighting where there was no reasonable probability of whipping
anybody. Yet there was something almost providential in the
resistance made by Henry. But for that resistance every soul of us
would have been hurried off to the far South. Just a moment
previous to the trouble with Henry, Mr. Hamilton mildly said,—and
this gave me the unmistakable clue to the cause of our arrest,
—“Perhaps we had now better make a search for those protections,
which we understand Frederick has written for himself and the rest.”
Had these passes been found, they would have been point-blank
proof against us, and would have confirmed all the statements of our
betrayer. Thanks to the resistance of Henry, the excitement
produced by the scuffle drew all attention in that direction, and I
succeeded in flinging my pass, unobserved, into the fire. The
confusion attendant on the scuffle, and the apprehension of still
further trouble, perhaps, led our captors to forego, for the time, any
search for “those protections which Frederick was said to have
written for his companions;” so we were not yet convicted of the
purpose to run away, and it was evident that there was some doubt
on the part of all whether we had been guilty of such purpose.
Just as we were all completely tied, and about ready to start
toward St. Michaels, and thence to jail, Mrs. Betsey Freeland
(mother to William, who was much attached, after the Southern
fashion, to Henry and John, they having been reared from childhood
in her house) came to the kitchen door with her hands full of biscuits,
for we had not had our breakfast that morning, and divided them
between Henry and John. This done, the lady made the following
parting address to me, pointing her bony finger at me: “You devil!
you yellow devil! It was you who put it into the heads of Henry and
John to run away. But for you, you long-legged, yellow devil, Henry
and John would never have thought of running away.” I gave the lady
a look which called forth from her a scream of mingled wrath and
terror, as she slammed the kitchen door and went in, leaving me,
with the rest, in hands as harsh as her own broken voice.
Driven to Jail for Running Away.
Could the kind reader have been riding along the main road to or
from Easton that morning, his eye would have met a painful sight. He
would have seen five young men, guilty of no crime save that of
preferring liberty to slavery, drawn along the public highway—firmly
bound together, tramping through dust and heat, bare-footed and
bare-headed—fastened to three strong horses, whose riders were
armed with pistols and daggers, on their way to prison like felons,
and suffering every possible insult from the crowds of idle, vulgar
people, who clustered round, and heartlessly made their failure to
escape the occasion for all manner of ribaldry and sport. As I looked
upon this crowd of vile persons, and saw myself and friends thus
assailed and persecuted, I could not help seeing the fulfilment of
Sandy’s dream. I was in the hands of moral vultures, and held in
their sharp talons, and was being hurried away toward Easton, in a
southeasterly direction, amid the jeers of new birds of the same
feather, through every neighborhood we passed. It seemed to me
that everybody was out, and knew the cause of our arrest, and
awaited our passing in order to feast their vindictive eyes on our
misery.
Some said “I ought to be hanged;” and others, “I ought to be
burned;” others I ought to have the “hide” taken off my back; while no
one gave us a kind word or sympathizing look, except the poor
slaves who were lifting their heavy hoes, and who cautiously glanced
at us through the post-and-rail fences, behind which they were at
work. Our sufferings that morning can be more easily imagined than
described. Our hopes were all blasted at one blow. The cruel
injustice, the victorious crime, and the helplessness of innocence,
led me to ask in my ignorance and weakness: Where is now the God
of justice and mercy? and why have these wicked men the power
thus to trample upon our rights, and to insult our feelings? and yet in
the next moment came the consoling thought, “the day of the
oppressor will come at last.” Of one thing I could be glad: not one of
my dear friends upon whom I had brought this great calamity, either
by word or look, reproached me for having led them into it. We were
a band of brothers, and never dearer to each other than now. The
thought which gave us the most pain was the probable separation
which would now take place in case we were sold off to the far
South, as we were likely to be. While the constables were looking
forward, Henry and I, being fastened together, could occasionally
exchange a word without being observed by the kidnappers who had
us in charge. “What shall I do with my pass?” said Henry. “Eat it with
your biscuit,” said I; “it won’t do to tear it up.” We were now near St.
Michaels. The direction concerning the passes was passed around,
and executed. “Own nothing,” said I. “Own nothing” was passed
round, enjoined, and assented to. Our confidence in each other was
unshaken, and we were quite resolved to succeed or fail together; as
much after the calamity which had befallen us as before.
On reaching St. Michaels we underwent a sort of examination at
my master’s store, and it was evident to my mind that Master
Thomas suspected the truthfulness of the evidence upon which they
had acted in arresting us, and that he only affected, to some extent,
the positiveness with which he asserted our guilt. There was nothing
said by any of our company which could, in any manner, prejudice
our cause, and there was hope yet that we should be able to return
to our homes, if for nothing else, at least to find out the guilty man or
woman who betrayed us.
To this end we all denied that we had been guilty of intended
flight. Master Thomas said that the evidence he had of our intention
to run away was strong, enough to hang us in a case of murder.
“But,” said I, “the cases are not equal; if murder were committed,—
the thing is done! but we have not run away. Where is the evidence
against us? We were quietly at our work.” I talked thus, with unusual
freedom, to bring out the evidence against us, for we all wanted,
above all things, to know who had betrayed us, that we might have
something tangible on which to pour our execrations. From
something which dropped, in the course of the talk, it appeared that
there was but one witness against us, and that that witness could not
be produced. Master Thomas would not tell us who his informant
was, but we suspected, and suspected one person only. Several
circumstances seemed to point Sandy out as our betrayer. His entire
knowledge of our plans, his participation in them, his withdrawal from
us, his dream and his simultaneous presentiment that we were
betrayed, the taking us and the leaving him, were calculated to turn
suspicion toward him, and yet we could not suspect him. We all
loved him too well to think it possible that he could have betrayed us.
So we rolled the guilt on other shoulders.
We were literally dragged, that morning, behind horses, a
distance of fifteen miles, and placed in the Easton jail. We were glad
to reach the end of our journey, for our pathway had been full of
insult and mortification. Such is the power of public opinion that it is
hard, even for the innocent, to feel the happy consolations of
innocence when they fall under the maledictions of this power. How
could we regard ourselves as in the right, when all about us
denounced us as criminals, and had the power and the disposition to
treat us as such.
In jail we were placed under the care of Mr. Joseph Graham, the
sheriff of the county. Henry and John and myself were placed in one
room, and Henry Bailey and Charles Roberts in another by
themselves. This separation was intended to deprive us of the
advantage of concert, and to prevent trouble in jail.
Once shut up, a new set of tormentors came upon us. A swarm
of imps in human shape,—the slave-traders and agents of slave-
traders—who gathered in every country town of the state watching
for chances to buy human flesh (as buzzards watch for carrion),
flocked in upon us to ascertain if our masters had placed us in jail to
be sold. Such a set of debased and villainous creatures I never saw
before and hope never to see again. I felt as if surrounded by a pack
of fiends fresh from perdition. They laughed, leered, and grinned at
us, saying, “Ah, boys, we have got you, haven’t we? So you were
about to make your escape? Where were you going to?” After
taunting us in this way as long as they liked they one by one
subjected us to an examination, with a view to ascertain our value,
feeling our arms and legs and shaking us by the shoulders, to see if
we were sound and healthy, impudently asking us, “how we would
like to have them for masters?” To such questions we were quite
dumb (much to their annoyance). One fellow told me, “if he had me
he would cut the devil out of me pretty quick.”
These negro-buyers were very offensive to the genteel southern
Christian public. They were looked upon in respectable Maryland
society as necessary but detestable characters. As a class, they
were hardened ruffians, made such by nature and by occupation.
Yes, they were the legitimate fruit of slavery, and were second in
villainy only to the slaveholders themselves who made such a class
possible. They were mere hucksters of the slave produce of
Maryland and Virginia—coarse, cruel, and swaggering bullies,
whose very breathing was of blasphemy and blood.
Aside from these slave-buyers who infested the prison from time
to time, our quarters were much more comfortable than we had any
right to expect them to be. Our allowance of food was small and
coarse, but our room was the best in the jail—neat and spacious,
and with nothing about it necessarily reminding us of being in prison
but its heavy locks and bolts and the black iron lattice work at the
windows. We were prisoners of state compared with most slaves
who were put into that Easton jail. But the place was not one of
contentment. Bolts, bars, and grated windows are not acceptable to
freedom-loving people of any color. The suspense, too, was painful.
Every step on the stairway was listened to, in the hope that the
comer would cast a ray of light on our fate. We would have given the
hair of our heads for half a dozen words with one of the waiters in
Sol. Lowe’s hotel. Such waiters were in the way of hearing, at the
table, the probable course of things. We could see them flitting about
in their white jackets in front of this hotel, but could speak to none of
them.
Soon after the holidays were over, contrary to all our
expectations, Messrs. Hamilton and Freeland came up to Easton;
not to make a bargain with the “Georgia traders,” nor to send us up
to Austin Woldfolk, as was usual in the case of runaway-slaves, but
to release Charles, Henry Harris, Henry Bailey, and John Harris from
prison, and this, too, without the infliction of a single blow. I was left
alone in prison. The innocent had been taken and the guilty left. My
friends were separated from me, and apparently forever. This
circumstance caused me more pain than any other incident
connected with our capture and imprisonment. Thirty-nine lashes on
my naked and bleeding back would have been joyfully borne, in
preference to this separation from these, the friends of my youth.
And yet I could not but feel that I was the victim of something like
justice. Why should these young men, who were led into this scheme
by me, suffer as much as the instigator? I felt glad that they were
released from prison, and from the dread prospect of a life (or death
I should rather say) in the rice swamps. It is due to the noble Henry
to say that he was almost as reluctant to leave the prison with me in
it as he had been to be tied and dragged to prison. But he and we all
knew that we should, in all the likelihoods of the case, be separated,
in the event of being sold; and since we were completely in the
hands of our owners they concluded it would be best to go
peaceably home.
Not until this last separation, dear reader, had I touched those
profounder depths of desolation which it is the lot of slaves often to
reach. I was solitary and alone within the walls of a stone prison, left
to a fate of life-long misery. I had hoped and expected much, for
months before, but my hopes and expectations were now withered
and blasted. The ever dreaded slave life in Georgia, Louisiana, and
Alabama,—from which escape was next to impossible—now in my
loneliness stared me in the face. The possibility of ever becoming
anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an
owner, had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever. A life of
living death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field
and the sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom. The fiends who
rushed into the prison when we were first put there continued to visit
me and ply me with questions and tantalizing remarks. I was
insulted, but helpless; keenly alive to the demands of justice and
liberty, but with no means of asserting them. To talk to those imps
about justice or mercy would have been as absurd as to reason with
bears and tigers. Lead and steel were the only arguments that they
were capable of appreciating, as the events of the subsequent years
have proved.
After remaining in this life of misery and despair about a week,
which seemed a month, Master Thomas, very much to my surprise
and greatly to my relief, came to the prison and took me out, for the
purpose, as he said, of sending me to Alabama with a friend of his,
who would emancipate me at the end of eight years. I was glad
enough to get out of prison, but I had no faith in the story that his
friend would emancipate me. Besides, I had never heard of his
having a friend in Alabama, and I took the announcement simply as
an easy and comfortable method of shipping me off to the far south.
There was a little scandal, too, connected with the idea of one
Christian selling another to the Georgia traders, while it was deemed
every way proper for them to sell to others. I thought this friend in
Alabama was an invention to meet this difficulty, for Master Thomas
was quite jealous of his religious reputation, however unconcerned
he might have been about his real Christian character. In these
remarks it is possible I do him injustice. He certainly did not exert his
power over me as he might have done in the case, but acted, upon
the whole, very generously, considering the nature of my offense. He
had the power and the provocation to send me, without reserve, into
the very everglades of Florida, beyond the remotest hope of
emancipation; and his refusal to exercise that power must be set
down to his credit.
After lingering about St. Michaels a few days and no friend from
Alabama appearing, Master Thomas decided to send me back again
to Baltimore, to live with his brother Hugh, with whom he was now at
peace; possibly he became so by his profession of religion at the
camp-meeting in the Bay side. Master Thomas told me he wished
me to go to Baltimore and learn a trade; and that if I behaved myself
properly he would emancipate me at twenty-five. Thanks for this one
beam of hope in the future. The promise had but one fault—it
seemed too good to be true.
CHAPTER XX.
APPRENTICESHIP LIFE.
Nothing lost in my attempt to run away—Comrades at home—Reasons for

sending me away—Return to Baltimore—Tommy changed—Caulking in
Gardiner’s ship yard—Desperate fight—Its causes—Conflict between
white and black labor—Outrage—Testimony—Master Hugh—Slavery in
Baltimore—My condition improves—New associations—Slaveholder’s
right to the slave’s wages—How to make a discontented slave.
WELL, dear reader, I am not, as you have probably inferred, a loser

by the general upstir described in the foregoing chapter. The little
domestic revolution, notwithstanding the sudden snub it got by the
treachery of somebody, did not, after all, end so disastrously as
when in the iron cage at Easton I conceived it would. The prospect
from that point did look about as dark as any that ever cast its gloom
over the vision of the anxious, out-looking human spirit. “All’s well
that ends well!” My affectionate friends, Henry and John Harris, are
still with Mr. Freeland. Charles Roberts and Henry Bailey are safe at
their homes. I have not, therefore, anything to regret on their
account. Their masters have mercifully forgiven them, probably on
the ground suggested in the spirited little speech of Mrs. Freeland
made to me just before leaving for the jail. My friends had nothing to
regret, either: for while they were watched more closely, they were
doubtless treated more kindly than before, and got new assurances
that they should some day be legally emancipated, provided their
behavior from that time forward should make them deserving. Not a
blow was struck any one of them. As for Master Freeland, good soul,
he did not believe we were intending to run away at all. Having given
—as he thought—no occasion to his boys to leave him, he could not
think it probable that they had entertained a design so grievous.
This, however, was not the view taken of the matter by “Mas’ Billy,”
as we used to call the soft-spoken but crafty and resolute Mr. William
Hamilton. He had no doubt that the crime had been meditated, and
regarding me as the instigator of it, he frankly told Master Thomas
that he must remove me from that neighborhood or he would shoot
me. He would not have one so dangerous as “Frederick” tampering
with his slaves. William Hamilton was not a man whose threat might
be safely disregarded. I have no doubt he would have proved as
good as his word, had the warning given been disregarded. He was
furious at the thought of such a piece of high-handed theft as we
were about to perpetrate—the stealing of our own bodies and souls.
The feasibility of the plan, too, could the first steps have been taken,
was marvelously plain. Besides, this was a new idea, this use of the
Bay. Slaves escaping, until now, had taken to the woods; they had
never dreamed of profaning and abusing the waters of the noble
Chesapeake by making them the highway from slavery to freedom.
Here was a broad road leading to the destruction of slavery, which
had hitherto been looked upon as a wall of security by the
slaveholders. But Master Billy could not get Mr. Freeland to see
matters precisely as he did, nor could he get Master Thomas excited
as he was. The latter, I must say it to his credit, showed much
humane feeling, and atoned for much that had been harsh, cruel,
and unreasonable in his former treatment of me and of others. My
“Cousin Tom” told me that while I was in jail Master Thomas was
very unhappy, and that the night before his going up to release me
he had walked the floor nearly all night, evincing great distress; that
very tempting offers had been made to him by the negro-traders, but
he had rejected them all, saying that money could not tempt him to
sell me to the far south. I can easily believe all this, for he seemed
quite reluctant to send me away at all. He told me that he only
consented to do so because of the very strong prejudice against me
in the neighborhood, and that he feared for my safety if I remained
there.
Thus after three years spent in the country, roughing it in the
field, and experiencing all sorts of hardships, I was again permitted
to return to Baltimore, the very place of all others, short of a free
State, where I most desired to live. The three years spent in the
country had made some difference in me, and in the household of
Master Hugh. “Little Tommy” was no longer little Tommy; and I was
not the slender lad who had left the Eastern Shore just three years
before. The loving relations between Master Tommy and myself were
broken up. He was no longer dependent on me for protection, but felt
himself a man, with other and more suitable associates. In childhood
he had considered me scarcely inferior to himself,—certainly quite as
good as any other boy with whom he played—but the time had come
when his friend must be his slave. So we were cold to each other,
and parted. It was a sad thing to me, that loving each other as we
had done, we must now take different roads. To him a thousand
avenues were open. Education had made him acquainted with all the
treasures of the world, and liberty had flung open the gates
thereunto; but I, who had attended him seven years, had watched
over him with the care of a big brother, fighting his battles in the
street, and shielding him from harm to an extent which induced his
mother to say, “Oh, Tommy is always safe when he is with Freddy”—
I must be confined to a single condition. He had grown and become
a man: I, though grown to the stature of manhood, must all my life
remain a minor—a mere boy. Thomas Auld, junior, obtained a
situation on board the brig Tweed, and went to sea. I have since
heard of his death.
There were few persons to whom I was more sincerely attached
than to him.
Very soon after I went to Baltimore to live, Master Hugh
succeeded in getting me hired to Mr. William Gardiner, an extensive
ship-builder on Fell’s Point. I was placed there to learn to calk, a
trade of which I already had some knowledge, gained while in Mr.
Hugh Auld’s ship-yard. Gardiner’s, however, proved a very
unfavorable place for the accomplishment of the desired object. Mr.
Gardiner was that season engaged in building two large man-of-war
vessels, professedly for the Mexican government. These vessels
were to be launched in the month of July of that year, and in failure
thereof Mr. Gardiner would forfeit a very considerable sum of money.
So when I entered the ship-yard, all was hurry and driving. There
were in the yard about one hundred men; of these, seventy or eighty

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Street Art and Democracy in Latin

America 1st ed. 2020 Edition Olivier

Street Art and

More information about this series at

Studies of the Americas

Cover image: © ETrayne04/Alamy Stock Photo

During the course of the research, I benefited from the support of

obsession with street art. Their pressing questions have allowed me to

3 Bogotá: Public Space Between Appropriation

Part II: Regulation of Public Space 59

4 São Paulo: Pixadores’ Public Scream of Hate 75

5 Valparaíso: A Tale of Murals, Tags and World Heritage 113

6 Oaxaca: Revolutionary Art and the (Difficult)

7 Havana: Going Public, No Matter What 183

8 Conclusion: Street Art and Democracy—Lessons Learned 217

Annex: List of the 63 In-Depth Interviews 235

Table 1.1 City cases selection criteria 5

Notwithstanding some nuances, the academic community generally

© The Author(s) 2020 1

unveiling a quite distinct reality. In localities, communities, neighbor-

Bogotá is the ground-zero anchor case study that I have used to

Table 1.1 City cases selection criteria

City Street-level Collaborative Interaction pattern Type of case

Bogotá Strong Strong Collaboration to Anchor

Each city case study includes an interpretation of the signs displayed

growing diversity of techniques: murals, stencils, posters, stickers, col-

1 See the Annex.

between artists and the inhabitants of those areas and neighborhoods in

style constitutes a “crew.”

of cases examined (five), these insights remain “partially generalized

Outline of the Book

of aggressive tags expressing the rage of disenfranchised young dwell-

Diamond, Larry, Marc Plattner, and Christopher Walker (eds.). 2016.

Pogrebinschi, Thamy. 2018. Deliberative democracy in Latin America. In Oxford

In this chapter, I engage in a series of theoretical discussions in order

© The Author(s) 2020 13

These different inputs have been useful to illuminate some aspects of

Also looking at opinion formation, Goodin (2003) makes a useful

deliberative experiments, rather than ways of making mass d ­ emocracy

Street Art’s Three Contributions to Democracy

Enhancing Political Expression

lines of Jacques Rancière (2013), take this proposition a step further,

it shows George W. Bush with Mickey Mouse ears. https://buenosairesstreetart.com/

typically consider street art as an illegal repertoire of contention used for

contribution of street art even in the absence of explicit political engage-

Empowerment and Urban Citizenship

Urban citizenship the way I conceive it can also be “insurgent” (Holston

3 Known in Latin America as concientización (in Spanish) or conscientização (in Portuguese).

the status of a contextual artist, as a member of society, is complex and

Stretching the Public Sphere

of claim-making and hence expanding or broadening (Costa et al. 2017)

regarding the delimitation of space. Walls often physically separate pri-

On a more political note, social media prolong the participative arts

Governance of Public Space

redistributive policies as part of an electoral bargain. Although Holland

democracy as a political project pursues multiple objectives.” They go on

of collaborative governance. It is also an important attribute of urban cit-

6 Governmentality refers to governments shaping people’s conduct and behavior.

“Rather bear the ills we had,

deliberative experiments, rather than ways of making mass d emocracy

Street Art’s Three Contributions to Democracy