This editorial on the tension between graffiti, street art and commercial control of public space was originally published in my street art newsletter, Beyond the Walls, which lands in inboxes on the 1st of every month with reflections and unexpected finds. This excerpt is from the February 1st, 2026, edition. Subscribe here to receive future issues.
Rebalancing visual power between street art and advertising.
At its core, graffiti and street art began as acts of presence. Leaving a mark on a wall is a way of claiming a small piece of public space, and this very act sits within a broader struggle over who gets to use the city, who gets to speak through its surfaces, and which messages are allowed to dominate the visual landscape. This applies regardless of style, intention, or content; simply intervening in public space already carries political weight.
Who is allowed to speak in public space
Public space is often described as open and shared, but it is far from neutral: visibility in the street is regulated and paid for. Advertising enters public space through permits, contracts, and economic agreements that turn walls, facades, and streets into billboards.
Graffiti operates under completely different conditions. Writers work without authorization, on surfaces that are already owned or controlled by someone else. Their visibility is temporary and always at risk of removal.
This contrast reveals a clear hierarchy: the city allows certain messages to repeat themselves endlessly, while others are erased or never tolerated at all.
When a wall is covered by advertising, its occupation is rarely questioned. When a wall carries an unsanctioned mark, it suddenly becomes contested.
Advertising is built to last. Even when a campaign changes, the structures that support it remain in place. Graffiti and unsanctioned street art exist under the opposite conditions: removal is expected, sometimes immediate, sometimes delayed, but always “part of the game”.
This ephemerality is often seen as part of the art form itself. In reality, it is the result of unequal rules. One form of visibility is granted time and protection, while the other is denied both.
Public space as a marketplace
At this point, the economic logic behind visibility becomes hard to ignore. Public space increasingly functions as a marketplace, where (our) attention is the most valuable commodity and surfaces are treated as assets. In the street, advertising cannot be switched off, placing constant pressure on an already fragile attention.
This shift changes the role of public space itself. Instead of being a place for encounter, movement, or shared experience, it is repurposed as a channel for commercial messages.
Within this framework, anything that falls outside advertising’s rules is seen as disorderly. Graffiti is framed as the problem, even when it is responding to an environment that is already saturated.
Cities without billboards as counterexamples
If advertising dominance feels natural, it is largely because it is everywhere. Yet some cities have chosen to interrupt this logic, showing that commercial visibility is not an unavoidable feature of urban life.
A striking example is São Paulo, where the Lei Cidade Limpa law, introduced in 2007, led to the removal of almost all outdoor advertising, allowing buildings and architectural details to re-emerge and changing how the city was experienced.
In Europe, similar choices have taken more localized forms. Grenoble removed hundreds of advertising panels in 2014, replacing them with trees and civic information boards. Oslointroduced strict limits on large-scale and digital advertising in central areas and on public transport.
These cases show that visual pollution is a choice, shaped by policy and economic priorities. When those priorities change, the city looks and feels different.
Banksy captured this idea clearly in a video from 2007:
Rebalancing visual power
Marking a surface without permission exposes the imbalance between authorized visibility and informal presence. In a city where visibility is regulated, purchased, and carefully maintained, graffiti and street art are often framed as intrusions, or even acts of visual aggression.
This tension becomes especially clear in practices like subvertising, a street art practice born from the fusion of subvert and advertising, also known as brandalism (as in: brand + vandalism). By using the language and infrastructure of advertising against itself, subvertising turns ad space into a site of visual disobedience. I explored this practice before, so I am linking that newsletter from exactly three years ago.
Beyond subvertising, many artist-led initiatives work along similar lines. Projects like Art Over Ads bring artists together to collectively intervene on advertising spaces, covering corporate messages with artworks, a way of pushing back against the dominance of commercial imagery and reintroducing community presence into the visual fabric of the city.
In all these cases, the street is not treated as an empty canvas, but as a contested surface. A place where art responds to existing power structures and quietly asks a larger question: who is allowed to occupy the city, and under what conditions?
