| The primary focus of this study is to examine how urban youth producing graffiti in Los Angeles interpret, use, and govern space and conversely examine how they are simultaneously interpreted, used, and governed. Drawing on methods of ethnography and naturalistic field research such as formal and informal interviews, field observations, and official and archival records, this study offers a "thick description" and "emic" view of three distinct but overlapping categories of young people writing graffiti in Los Angeles: taggers, gang members, and writers. This study begins with a cultural investigation of these groups. Unlike previous accounts about graffiti, it study offers two unique contributions (1) a legal examination of the complex interplay between these forms of youth expression, an official criminal justice system, and unofficial forms of law and social control and (2) a spatial examination of the ways graffiti writers occupy and create particular places in properties not of their own making. In general, those who write graffiti (taggers, gang members, and writers) possess differing intentions, motivations, and worldviews. Official legal responses to graffiti, however, often do not make these distinctions. Legislators, law enforcement officers, specialized gang and graffiti enforcement teams, judges, and correctional officers have formulated and have enforced and implemented numerous laws and created many strategies to punish, fine, and control graffiti writing in the city, and those who write graffiti must navigate complex processes of officially and unofficially recognized social control in urban environments. At the same time, however, akin to urban designers and architects, they clearly engage in creative and expressive processes of place-making in a landscape filled with signature buildings and corporate signature logos. Despite their creative contributions, graffiti is still troublesome for many---property owners, legislators, law enforcement officers, judges, and others. At the heart of these troubles are ingrained habits of seeing and experiencing space and place as "owned" in the form of property and territory. Indeed, those who write graffiti regularly appropriate visible spaces of the city to promote their own emotional and political agendas and participate in constant negotiations of the proper appearance, meaning, and uses of urban spaces. |
