The contemporary city, though heterogeneous from context to context, is an enigma for the twenty-first-century geographer — cities serve as sites of socio-spatial exchange, as hubs of modernisation, and as agglomerates of people, all with differing visions of change and progress (Fuchs, 2012). Cities also act as meeting points between scales, as places of interaction between national, regional, and municipal decision-makers and their constituencies, which are themselves fraught with differences along cultural and demographic lines (Shatkin, 2007).
Therefore, it is within the city fabric and its constellation of stakeholders that inequality and conflict emerge, especially as cities become increasingly tethered to a global capitalist economy (Pinson and Journel, 2016). Understandably, the question that twenty-first-century researchers and policy-makers face is how to resist urban inequality. In the following work, I propose an alternative, and indeed more radical, form of resistance that hinges on the harnessing of creativity — especially artistic expression. In a growing body of scholarship that highlights this urban creative resistance, authors make a point of differentiating between ‘urban art,’ ‘street art,’ and ‘graffiti.’ in this report, I tend to use ‘urban art’ — a broader “umbrella term” that better encapsulates the various motives and media practised by artists, as well as their differing styles, narratives, histories, and geographies (Radosevic, 2013, p. 7). I also feel that ‘urban art’ avoids the murky and pejorative connotations of ‘graffiti,’ which is often synonymised with vandalism, lawlessness, and the dissolution of social order — all pre-conceptions that this work hopes to dispel.
