My Thesis
Originally, I did not start out wanting to do a thesis on graffiti. I was simply going to use graffiti in a thesis about spatial behaviour. I decided to track graffiti tags in Surrey, BC and map them as an indication of the spatial behaviour of graffiti taggers. When it came to writing the thesis, though, I first had to explain how tagging graffiti differed from other types of graffiti. Somewhere along the line, the focus of the thesis shifted from spatial behaviour to the world of graffiti.
As the data collection got underway, I was surprised by the quantity of graffiti tags. Instead of tracking several graffiti taggers, I focused in on a single case study. Between January 2001 and August 2001, I documented approximately 350 unique occurrences of the VISION tag in Surrey, BC.
In the picture on the right, you can see two names of VISION's friends, "NINJA" and "AKIRA." They all belong to the graffiti crew, "KSI."
When I mapped the VISION tags, the end result looked like this:
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To those who are familiar with the bus routes in Surrey, you may recognize a tracing of the tags along the #320 bus route between Surrey City Centre and Langley via 104th Ave, 152 Street, and Fraser Highway.
The main cluster of tags appears in the Guildford area, close to the Mall and SilverCity. A damage estimate of the VISION tags came in at approximately $50,000.
Also covered in the thesis are:
- A typology of graffiti;
- A discussion of individual and community level responses to graffiti;
- An academic perspective on historical and philosophical contributions to the modern graffiti tagging phenomenon;
- A description of the City of Surrey, British Columbia, the setting for the VISION tag case study;
- Information on forensic handwriting analysis and its application to graffiti;
- A breakdown of the costs of graffiti as found in the literature;
- A comprehensive list of solutions to the graffiti problem, including the most effective solution, most controversial solutions, counter-productive solutions, and others; and,
- Suggestions for future research.