In cities such as Sydney, a succession of wars on graffiti has produced a moral geography of artistic practice. At the same time, the rise to prominence of creative cities discourses and the subsequent revaluation of creativity as a postindustrial salve unsettles the dominance of the normative criminalization of graffiti. The profusion of cultural plans and public art policies, along with metropolitan initiatives promoting the creative city, provide opportunities to resignify graffiti as productive creative practice. Set in a discursive world of murals, street art, and "legal graffiti," some graffiti writers are grasping these opportunities, deploying multiple subjectivities in order to negotiate the moral geographies of the creative city. This article looks at contemporary state responses to graffiti in Sydney and the ways graffiti writers and street artists work within and beyond the various attempts to capture, enclose, and engage graffiti and graffiti writers.

In this paper, we critically review the literature on graffiti and street art with a view to bridging the divide between the stark extremities of public graffiti discourse. We make the case for moving beyond singular responses to the challenges posed by graffiti – into the complex terrain between visions of a city free from graffiti and one where public art has free rein. To this end, we have chosen a series of interrogations of common dialectical positions in talk of graffiti: is it art or crime; is it public or private expression; is it necessarily ephemeral, or does it seek permanence; is it a purely cultural practice, or is it economic? Our list is by no means exhaustive, but it does go some way to uncovering the complexity of graffiti’s dynamic and contested geographies.

No abstract

In this article, we consider the role of value pluralism in theorising urban development and the politics of participatory planning. Rather than situating analyses of urban development in a monist or universalist ethics, where values are reducible to a single universal (e.g. human rights), or a normative pluralism based on the tension between different bearers of political value (e.g. liberty and equality), we argue for a plural ethics to make sense of the complex empirical reality of our cities. Post-consensus theories of planning treat the presence of conflict as an enduring reality in urban development, with Chantal Mouffe providing one way of conceptualising a productive politics of conflict. We extend Mouffe’s plural politics through an appeal to value pluralism in the form of anthropological theories of value. A better understanding of the plural and incommensurable nature of values not only contributes to our understanding of the operation of agonistic pluralism, it also provides a more robust theoretical account of how different urban actors in the city transition from antagonism to agonism, which Mouffe suggests is necessary for a more inclusive urban politics. The politics of value resides in the struggle for legitimacy of particular regimes of value; not just to determine economic value, but to define what value is, and how different values dominate, encompass or otherwise relate to one another. This moral politics approach, via value theory, provides one way of tracing an ethical urbanism that exists between conflict and consensus. It allows us to reframe the central challenge of agonistic pluralism as the transition from antagonistic positions, marked by moral intransigence and immutability, towards more flexible value positions that allow ‘adversaries’ to enter into a viable agonistic politics.

In this article, I address the influence of religious identity on the discourses of national belonging that traditionally dominate transnational discussions. Many of the children of the Iranian diaspora live in a state of exile from contemporary theocratic Iran. Living at a temporal and physical distance from the homeland has resulted in differential long‐distance imaginings mediated by the diasporic context. Through the reflections of the children of Iranian migrants on the desire to ‘return’, a picture is painted of differing transnational trajectories divided along religious lines within the Iranian diaspora. For many of the second generation from a Muslim background their centrality in the discourses of national belonging, typified through the conflated ‘Muslim Iranian’ of media representations, feeds a desire for return. In contrast, for many second‐generation Baha ‘is their positionality as a minority, in both the homeland and the diaspora, combines with an eschatological problematizing of national belonging, to lead them away from Iran. In this article I draw on discussions about email communication in the diaspora(s) carried out as a part of research with the Iranian communities of London, Sydney and Vancouver.