Towards an Urban Surfaces Manifesto!
Definitions

Researching and interrogating urban surfaces - what it means to be a surface, the development of a surface, the textures, layers and formation of a surface - brings with it countless benefits to the full range of disciplines that will be enrolled in the network. It tells us about the authorship of the city, it allows us to challenge and dissect this authorship, to question the agency of materials and non-materials alike, to consider how surfaces shape the urban imagination, and to explore how the right to the surface is the right to the city (Andron 2018). Questions of citizenship, belonging, vision, identity, economy, law and justice can all be asked through the lens of the urban surface.

Six Themes of
Urban Surfaces
The study of the social life of walls and surfaces has grown into research on graffiti and street art, murals, law and property, visibility, territoriality, atmosphere and public space, but there have been very few developments to focus specifically on the urban surfaces agenda and further demonstrate its impact. This network sets out to become an international resource of urban surface research and practice, cutting across disciplines to focus on the spatial typology and urban condition of the surfacescape. Six themes have emerged throughout the numerous international workshops which help to conceptualise Urban Surfaces:

 Labour, Economy, Materiality, Communication, Governance, Ecology.

Communication
The multimodal forms of public address and their resulting atmospheres: media, semiotics, language, screens, typology of public images 

Architectural supergraphics

Urban atmospheres 

Billboard desirability

Semiotic texture 

Visual congestion 

“Walls are full.” 

Surfaces are at once textual, haptic, sonic, constitutive of atmospheres and affects. Their legibility is a matter of media. They are read. Heard. Felt. Felt.  

Surfaces are propaganda. (Obey!) 
Surfaces are resistance. (Rebel!) 

Communication as information  

Communication as exclusion 

Communication as disinformation 

Communication as hope in search for understanding 

Communication as propaganda 

Communication on all surfaces: roofs, walls, floors. 


Dominant discourse, censoring, silencing, amplifying. 
SIGN BLINDNESS  

Surfaces police, prescribe and proscribe, they tell us how to behave and tell us what will happen if we don’t. Civility is defined upon the surface. A semiotics of public theatre. On the train, the pavement, the door, the bicycle. Do. Do not. Absence. Presence. Repulsion. Attraction. Permission slips. 


High class = minimal 

Low class = dense 

What does the surface say to you? 

Can you really misread the surface?

Font matters. Colour matters. Materiality matters. Language matters. Symbols matter. If our audience is everyone, we have no audience. Audiences are carefully crafted and recklessly repelled. If there’s a beach under our feet, why don’t we peer behind the brickwork?  

Is it language if you cannot understand it? Dog-whistling exhibits a materiality you know. Secrecy in stone, reticence in resin. 

  •    Surfaces speak.
  •           Surfaces are spoken to.
  •                    Surfaces are spoken about.


Surfacesonography: 
sound <> surface 
tactile/auditory 

Shifting from REMOVAL to REGULATION leads to becoming acceptable 

Communication is CONTEXT DEPENDENT: micro- and macro-geographical contexts, historical and event-related contexts, social and cultural contexts 

How do we make more space for communication with no function to capital? OR no function at all? 

Surfaces invite the decolonisation of semiotic hegemony. Ad-busting, seed bombing, vigilante pothole identification, join us! The billboard as space for protest, the wall as garden, the pavement as dancefloor. There is no degree zero of surface. So who’s scripting the narrative? 

‘Design literacy’ doesn’t have to be white, Western, Eurocentric, Bauhaus style ‘canon’. This ideal of design literacy is often used to design out any semblance of difference in the streetscape.  

Would justice involve acknowledging that not everything on the surface has to be legible to everyone? 

Justice = access to surface communication should not require $$ Free walls!! Are just messages able to be “curated”? 


Tactile and haptic justice: the relationship of pavement studs and raised paving to resting, skateboarding, neurodiverse walking and mobility 

“Is the thing you are conserving the best thing there, or is it just old?” 

Surface semiotics is complex, nebulous. But do not underestimate the communicative power of the surface. Surface literacy is universal, though our collective grammar needs work. Sometimes it really is like talking to a brick wall. Or a curbstone.  

Labour

The practices, knowledges, and skills of surface workers: creative, maintenance, artistic// informal economies, sign writing, printing, bill posting, buffing 
Surfaces are produced. They are labour that is, labour that was. 
  Abseil training. Using the harness. Handling chemicals. Knowing reactions. Sketching in the black book. Having an escape plan. Documenting graffiti. Removing graffiti. Peeling the sticker. Re-oiling boots. Lifting the drain cover. 

Surface labour is fighting against what will always return. It is what will always prevail. 

Proximity with what you put on the surface: is it yours? Or on behalf of someone else? YOU PUT UP SOMEBODY ELSE’S WORK BUT DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO PUT UP YOURS 

Surface labour is measured in hours. In what is painted. In what is removed. In repetition. In looking. In skill, compliance, informality, alienation. In both the process and the product. Is the process the product? 

Replication enables a shortened labour time and increased the quantity of posters, stickers, stencils. 


READING THE WALL TO UNDERSTAND HOW LONG THINGS TAKE 

Underpinning every surface is an embodied labour of production: the aches born of stretching; the sore eyes and reddened eyeballs; the numb finger and yet another callus; the vibration of bones; the attunement to disturbance.

Defining the skilled governs the labour of the surface. Whose labour is unskilled? Whose labour do we ignore? Whose labour goes uncompensated? Which labour is valued? HIERARCHY OF LABOUR. 
  • Is it wage labour? What is valued as socially reproductive labour? 
  • Class, gender, race questions. Who is represented? It becomes a matter of JUSTICE 
  • Is it a question of intensity or complexity? 


Painting on walls has a hierarchy of perceived skill and respect. Sign writing is respected and graffiti is perceived as unskilled. But graffiti writing is skilled labour. How are these skills learnt, passed down, developed? 

LABOUR/ PLAY; PAID/ UNPAID; WORK/ DELIGHT. 
Street artists, skateboarders, subculturalists don’t necessarily view their practices as labour. It’s a one-sided argument for authorities where labour is calculated as cost. The labour of putting up unauthorised work. 

JUSTICE – MAINTENANCE – VISIBILITY – SAFETY – LEGALITY  

If your work is invisible and you are invisible, that signals injustice. 

And what of the changing geographies of labour? Deindustrialised landscapes and absence of productive labour breeds creative, artistic cultures of labour that with time attract new reproductive labours. The ghost sign becomes the tag becomes ‘please show some respect for our neighbours when leaving the premises’. Can you paint with smashed avocado? With hosepipes? Our cities are defined by, animated by, a constant cycle of surface labour. 


CARE: whose interest is it in? What forms of care are just? Who positions their interests as universal? 

The question is WHAT DO YOU CARE ABOUT?, not ‘What do you think?’ 

Labour is necessary for transformation: creative labour, cleaning labour. Will robots tarmac your road? Can machines paint a mural? Can plants and materials do labour? That weed that cracked your wall, that tree that turned the pavement into a mountain range. Who did that? 

Surface labour is futile.
Governance
The management and regulation of surfaces and public images: policy, design standards, law, surveillance, property, heritage, planning

Surface governance takes place from below as much as it does from above. The strategy is no match for the tactic. The power to govern the surface is always in your hands. 

The complexity of surface governance is limitless and asymmetrical. Disagreement is a necessity.

“If I can reach it, it’s public”


Surfaces are governed through complex aesthetic hierarchies. What does surface governance look like? You probably already know. But what does it feel like, smell like, sound like? The appearance of the surface comes at a price, measurable in volume, in odour, in texture. Who governs governance? 

Maintenance can become a form of governance because maintaining a particular condition means continually reproducing a particular idea of what the space should be. 

Intentional vacant spaces for graffiti. “Let it happen, absorb it.” 

Governance is not the same as government. 

Governance is well equipped to deal with the ‘planned’ but ill equipped to deal with the ‘unplanned’. How are surfaces governed at municipal level? 
  • managing graffiti 
  • regulating advertising 
  • protecting heritage 
  • design standards  

Surface regulation happens 
  • In the name of conservation 
  • In the name of property ownership 
  • In the name of community perceptions/ complaints 
  • In the name of fiscal responsibility 
  • In the name of “the law” 


If we wanted a principled governance strategy, what would this entail? 
  • How do different teams within gov’t coordinate/ educate/ relate 
  • How do a variety of agents/ actors get a seat at the table? Especially when some actors are not ‘organised’ and have no identity/ unity per se 
  • How do you handle endless novel provocations from the city throwing up new challenges (ie unanticipated impacts, responses, tactics, counter-tactics) 
  • How do you engage + educate 
Governance changes according to scale. What might be governed at the scale of the individual surface can become something quite different at the scale of the street, neighbourhood, city or institution. 

FAÇADES ARE VISUALLY PUBLIC
Surface governance calls into being certain publics and subjects. The tourist. The shopper. The criminal. The decorator. The investor. The caretaker. Surface governance is grounded in social relations between these publics and subjects; relations of care, of obedience, of subsumption, of domination. Is governing the subject or are we the subject(s) of governance? Governing bodies is surface governance. Infrastructures of surface governance are as social as they are material.

Surface governance legitimises heritage value. Surface governance denies heritage value.  

What happens when practices that emerge outside formal institutions are incorporated into official systems?

street practices → institutional practices
informal → formal
unauthorised → commissioned
subculture → festival

“You are mural washing your city” 


Surface governance is labour; it is performed, practiced. It is maintenance, it is care, it is resistance, it is light pollution. It is the absence of conversation. It is the instruction to act elsewhere. It is the threat and the promise of democracy.

What is the difference between removing a surface and removing the legitimacy of the person who made it? 

GOVERNANCE JARGON:
 CATEGORISATION, 
DESIGNATION, 
“COMMUNITY” WALL,
 RISK, 
ACCOUNTABILITY, 
STEWARDSHIP,
 OWNERSHIP.
 

How does the VIEW emerge as governable through the hegemonic technocratic rationality of “the grid”?

Would governance of the surface that’s more JUST be less governed by technocratic rationality and MORE governed through prisms of cultural specificity, Indigenous knowledge, scale of street, of surface, of LANDSCAPE? How would this re-structure what is VALUED?

Graffiti tracking and surveillance are related to how public spaces are governed. Surface governance is surveillance. Safety is an excuse for silencing people. The jurisdiction of the surface extends to your very face, to your eyes, to your hands. Proof of innocence is your burden. Jurisdictions of surface governance are of unlimited scale. Law treats the national. Ordnance treats the regional. Policy treats the local. You treat the micro. My wall, my rules. Or is it my wall?



Economy
The increasingly diversified function of surfaces in the production, extraction, and distribution of economic value: construction and renewal, advertising spaces, commodification, assets, branding, vertical rent, informal surface economies 

Surfaces have value. They produce value. They display value. They conceal value. The wall is property, the façade an asset, the billboard a rental surface and a surface a rented billboard. Visibility is quantifiable by the square metre. Who pays to occupy the surface?  

Surface economy is the economy of attention, of access, of rent, of maintenance. Surface economy is also labour, material and circulation. 


VISUAL ECONOMIES – branding, identity, and the semiotics of visual capital 

BRANDING ECONOMIES – using public or private walls for branding or monetary gain 

Economic metrics of value: footfall, surveillance, demographics: databases of high value surfaces. 

$ for R&D – paint/ ink à graff à buff, graffiti-proofing and removal à eco-viability – endless new products and need for improvement 

The advertising industry enables income distribution to property owners and renters of vertical advertising space. Surface commerce is supported materially and semiotically. 

The social capital of graffiti is non-commodifiable and adjacency to graffiti leads to a reduction in value – necessity of property value to Australian economy. Cost of community value. Managing graffiti is a way of managing property value and the property market.



HIERARCHIES of site lines and dwell time  

What are the PRODUCTS of the surface and how are they commodified? 

Who extracts value from surfaces and under which mandates? Advertising is funding infrastructure. $ INFRASTRUCTURAL RENT  

TOURIST ECONOMY from laneways in Melbourne

“It doesn’t feel like a real city” if there is no graffiti

The privilege of being out there and being economically viable vs the precarity of creative professions: a just economy would support anyone to use surfaces. 

Cost of maintenance: the $$ are invisible à lack of transparency about the removal economy 

PRODUCTION OF NEW SURFACE SPACES OF EXTRACTION: billboards on surfaces, panelling existing surfaces, screens on surfaces 

MORE AND MORE MONEY FOR MORE AND MORE PRESENCE: more marketable space 

Surfaces are measured. Footfall. Demographics. Surveillance. Databases of high-value surfaces. Surfaces as assets and economies of attention. 

See artworks for free! Your time is the economy!
  • SOCIAL ECONOMY: youth culture – density, can’t buy youth; subculture and authenticity, and the value of active, visible spaces 
  • EMOTIONAL ECONOMY: emotional truth and personal resonance. Data points constraining your world.  

Time is the only thing you cannot create. You can only labour so hard. Advertising in our spaces extracts value where our labour cannot. Youth culture cannot be reclaimed, only found and advertised to. Subculture takes time to build. Your emotional resonance is yours, until you become a data point. Material economies flatten time when they become commodified.
Materiality
The textural composition of vibrant matter that constitutes the surface: chemicals, non-human and digital agencies, plants, matter/ materials  

Materiality is the history of an imagined reality. Materiality is about absence and presence. Absence is ‘visible’ if you look closely at what is present.  

The city has texture at different scales: megatexture (Venturi and Scott Brown), building and wall thickness and texture, textures of stickers and posters (eggshell stickers, peeling posters, removability). What textures and materials are conducive for creating? 

Knowledge of surface materiality is the key to governing the surface. Which substances will corrode? Which will utilise porosity? Which can be removed in an instant, and which will remain for decades? These are matters of oxidation, of reaction, of photosynthesis. 



  • What comes through the surface cracks? 

Original materials, imported materials, RESILIENCE OF MATERIALS, conserving materials, adding materials to the surface, REGULATING MATERIALS, material affects, REVELATORY MATERIALITY, productivity of the material 

Materiality is not only what a thing is made from, but what that material allows us to experience; and what properties of that material allow systems to thrive or not. Cobblestones make a good impression but people can't walk well on them. Skateboarders experience spatial justice below the knees. 

Materiality is memory. The surface is palimpsest.  

Materiality is memory. The coloniser remains underneath contemporary practice. Indigenous knowledge comes before and after.  

Materiality is memory. The process is at once frozen in time, reduced to an image, yet constantly ongoing, the surface always-becoming.  

Immoral materials contaminate the surface. Immoral to who? What is a materially just surface? Does such a thing exist? Is matter really vibrant? 

“No more surface left to clean” 

What do we lose if the surface is only material? 
Where are the engineers and the chemists? They are key players in shaping surface materiality and its possibilities. Are they mostly following the $$ to make surfaces controllable?  

Surface materiality is in itself surface governance: the prescription of who, of what, can stick, can adhere, can remain, can bond, can vanish. Where you act depends on where you will be received. Ephemerality is both a temporal condition and a state of matter. 

Consider the environmental impacts of acrylic paint, glue, paper, and aerosol: what is the environmental impact of buff? can we make biodegradable paint? how do we mitigate the noise of pressure cleaning? how do chemicals serve governance purposes? 


You need RUPTURE in order to notice something in the city. 

Is it really paper? Is it not plastic? Is it really glass? Is it not plastic? 

What says power: marble or glass? Bitumen or cobble? Herbicide or Poaceae? Screen or board? Smooth or textured? Porous or impermeable? Or is power more than representation at the surface? Who excavated, mined, grew, harvested, contaminated, nurtured the materials upon and within the surface? From where does the material surface originate?  

Materiality and value are traditionally related through heritage. Preserving the culture and process rather than the artifact à preserve the culture of graffiti not individual examples 

Surfaces are also screens: 
  • Solid screens for projection – ephemerality of projections 
  • Programmable screens for coding – rhythms of LED programming 
  • Portable screens – mobile phones are urban screens 

What do objects do for the city? 

Surface materiality tempers the volume of the conversation, hands out the microphone. 

Surface materiality is the megatexture
 of the city. 
Ecology

Surfaces as relational infrastructures connecting flora, fauna, climate, humans, and the elements: thermal performance, habitat, pollution and air quality, biodiversity, water and humidity

  Surfaces are an ecosystem, the neighbourhood an ecotone.  

YOU → human → animal → plant → material. We are all ecology. Ecology is not simply about nature as something outside of us. It is about the relationships between things — human, non-human, material, environmental — and the processes through which they are maintained, transformed and sustained. 



What happens when we look at weeds and tags through the same ecological lens? Both:  
→ inhabit surfaces 
→ emerge / grow / accumulate 
→ can be treated as unwanted 
→ become objects of maintenance 

Tags are weeds. They grow in groups, they invite colonisation. They visibilise our common resources. Our commons, our publics. But they are only one genus, with many species. They compete with the poster, with the LED screen, with the neon pink handwritten while stocks last! behind the window, with the window itself. Not the cobblestones, nor the license plate, though. They occupy different niches. But all species are interdependent. 

BIOPATINA & EPIDERMITECTURE 

Surfaces bring us together. They are places of interaction. 

If surfaces bring us together, then surfaces become social territories — ecosystems of interaction between people, materials, plants, signs, weather, maintenance, decay. 

Species are unruly, yet species are a gift. An ecosystem of signs. 

Conservation is a question of heritage. Biodiversity a semiotic landscape. 

Survival of the fittest? Under what conditions is commodification natural selection?  

Surfaces are an ecosystem, the neighbourhood an ecotone.

Surfaces are a novel ecosystem.  

Buffing weathers. Pioneers grow in the cracks between matter; colonies of moss, of lichen, of fungi claim the surface as theirs. Destroyed in an instant by the toxicity of chemical intervention. Visual governance at what cost? Seeds re-colonise, re-establish, the brick wall gets furrier, softer. Until nature and culture are dichotomised once again. 

Walls are a choreography of shaping what we want. Hierarchies of care (tolerance of decay): 
→ removal of graffiti because of preservation of a visual norm 
→ at the same time: releasing of chemicals 
→ carbon footprint of removal equipment & labour 

The beauty of unproductive as in fact very biologically productive. 

The beauty of nothing there as civilisation. 


—beauty? Are surfaces a gaze, just as landscape is a gaze? Abolish the beauty of the surface. Long live the surface that breathes. It will outlive all of us. 

The abandoned surface is alive, after all. The flowers. The brachen. ‘Abandoned.’ Pioneers. The surface is inhabited. 

The positionality of care to remove plants from surface is structurally good, ecologically bad. BIOMAINTENANCE: not just visual, but also ecological, wasting public resources through surface removal. 

(sub)cultural ecologies 

Multi-species justice is a fight waged upon the surface. Native, invasive, endangered. A biopolitics of biopatina. 

Surfaces are where the future will be written. 



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