alt Hacker NewsEh, you're right. It's just a bugbear for me, tagging and social cohesion decline feels like a parallel, but it may be my projection. I'm in Crete right now and it's decaying beauty, no money for streetscape fixes, bad pavements and unending dissatisfaction written all over the marble walls.
I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social conditions which ignore it, maybe are.
Replies
Greece has always had a huge problem with graffiti. I did a semester abroad in Athens, new graffiti popped up all the time, but I never felt unsafe.
In some places, graffiti means "gang activity" as local gangs tag their turf. If you are from such place, then it kinda makes sense to be afraid of graffity.
But where I am from, there are two kinds of graffity:
- Cool elaborate pictures, usually in "legal zones" walls city dedicated to it. They take time to create, hence preference for legal place and are made by artists.
- Less cool stuff created by skinny "edgy" teenagers, who are jerks to the owners, but also completely harmless.
I'm with you. Graffiti is property destruction. It shows lack of respect for property rights. Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.