Governing young people as an aesthetic and spatial practice

Governing youth as an aesthetic and spatial practice

Journal: Urban Studies

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Urban Studies

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Abstract: The Graffiti Transformation Project was a City of Toronto, Canada sponsored program funding “marginalized youth” to paint over graffitied walls with public murals. I argue the imperatives driving the project extended beyond the reaches of policy concentrated on youth remediation, to include concerns of urban governance as a spatial and aesthetic problematic. I explore the manner in which practices of graffiti eradication and community mural making generated a set of calculations that were informed by globally mobile aesthetic norms, and were in turn, aesthetically informing. These calculations were used as an epistemological baseline for assessing, at least at the level of appearance, a host of urban problematics including Toronto’s desire to position itself globally as a functioning multicultural city. Turning to Jacques Ranciere’s thoughts about the space of political aesthetics, I draw on an ethnographic example to tease out a moment of aesthetic engagement in which youth artists interrupted the codes and practices associated with creative city entrepreneurialism to render another configuration of politics, another way of being social. Implications for broadening the scope of urban youth policy scholarship to include analysis of an aesthetic turn are considered. Keywords: aesthetics , globalization , neoliberalism , governance , youth The Graffiti Transformation Project (GTP) was a City of Toronto, Canada sponsored program spanning a 15-year period from 1996-2011. Community

organizations were funded to hire emergent youth artists and “marginalized

youth” in “graffiti prone areas” (City of Toronto, 2010: 2) of the city to paint over

graffitied walls with lively, public murals representing community experiences. At

its inception, the intention was to foster the employability of youth deemed “at

risk” and the “amelioration of neighbourhood deterioration” (City of Toronto,

2001). Nine years in to its deployment, the program had begun concentrating

funded projects in economically and socially disenfranchised inner-city and inner-

suburban areas of Toronto slated for economic renewal. Although a strong social

and moralized, safety-oriented directive continued to undergird its mandate,

funded graffiti abatement and mural creation initiatives were also understood, in

this second phase of operation, as viable civic tools for engendering “Toronto

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civic pride” (City of Toronto, 2010: 3) through urban beautification. To govern this

newly targeted set of spatially directed aesthetic imperatives, the Graffiti

Transformation Project (GTP) was cross-coordinated through two municipal

departments – Transportation Services and Community Development and

Recreation, falling under the broader vision of Toronto’s “Clean and Beautiful

Program” with its emphasis on neighbourhood aesthetics and its sister initiative,

reimaging Toronto as a “Creative City, a global Cultural Capital” (City of Toronto,

2003. p. 4).

How do we make sense of this youth governance initiative targeting youth

in specific geographical areas, and yet extending its scope of investments

beyond a focus on youth social remediation to include an economic and aesthetic

orientation towards positioning Toronto on the globalized stage? This article

suggests that the practices of the GTP with its emphasis on graffiti abatement

and neighbourhood beautification through mural production “constitute a field of

tension” (Lindner & Meissner, 2014, 8) between a localized management of

globally mobile policies of urban governance (McCann & Ward, 2011; Peck &

Theodore, 2010), and modes of political address possibly disruptive to the

dictates of neoliberal rationalities of rule. In one analytical register, the GTP can

be understood as an aesthetically grounded “verification mechanism” signifying

Toronto as a functioning and flourishing multicultural city. I first consider this

Toronto based community arts initiative as a technique of governmentality

operative, to borrow from Ghertner (2010), at the level of the aesthetic. Part of a

locally formulated knowledge apparatus (Foulcault, 2001), the GTP was

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instrumental for visualising and rendering intelligible inner city/suburban,

racialised youth and material spaces targeted for transformation.

And yet, there was a potential for murals to disrupt the very aesthetic

sensibilities understood to hold problematized youth and (sub)urban community

spaces in place. In this 2nd,analytical register, I draw attention to an ethnographic

example from my research to illustrate a moment of aesthetic engagement in

which youth artists interrupted the codes and practices associated with creative

city entrepreneurialism (Leslie&Hunt,2013) to render another configuration of

politics, another way of being social. By drawing on Jacques Ranciere’s thoughts

about the space of political aesthetics (Ranciere, 2007; Yusoff, 2010), I argue

that the intervention did not merely forward a semiotics of community experience

according to the normative regimes of a politics of difference (Hall, 1996) - an

economy preconfiguring the representational limits to what can be understood

and visualized about targeted populations and spaces deemed other, and thus

problematic, to the project of urban transformation (Hall, 1996; Munoz, 1999).

Rather, the very mechanisms through which community mural making becomes

part of the apparatus of creative city governance were interrogated. In so doing,

new possibilities for engendering a community’s relationship with public space

were opened up for consideration.

This article is organized into five sections probing how a global policy

phenomenon of securitization, creative city entrepreneurialism and neoliberal

citizenship was given material existence (Roy, 2012) in a geographically specific,

youth governance initiative, and the types of politics that were shaped in its

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implementation. In the first section, I draw from the conceptual work of Ranciere

and Ghertner to extend a line of inquiry found in an extensive body of literature

about community based arts programming’s socio-economic and psychological

contributions to urban regeneration. These working points then inform a

conceptual baseline for subsequent sections of the paper. I next turn to a

discussion of the globally mobile policy domains situating the emergence of the

GTP as an aesthetic technique of governance. In the third section, I investigate

the aesthetic calculative practices operative in the GTP and the different

knowledges distilled to inform lines of political intervention at particular sites. The

fourth section draws explicitly from Ranciere’s conceptualization of a political

aesthetics to tease apart the possible tensions arising when an expression of a

mobile globalized policy is grounded in place. The concluding section argues for

the utility of expanding our analytical sight-lines to assess the workings of, and

possibilities for, contemporary urban youth governance and community arts

based practices, tethered to the flows and imperatives of globalized capital

manifesting in the local. Regrettably, the scope of this paper dictates certain analytical

exclusions - principally, a close reading of participating youth’s experiences and

understandings of, and political investments in, the GTP. Analyses of these experiences

are written elsewhere (author, forthcoming).

The findings presented in this paper are part of a wider study exploring the

aesthetic practices of youth governance strategies in Toronto. Between 2010 and

2011, I conducted 12 months of research at two youth serving agencies located

in different areas of Toronto slated for urban regeneration and renewal: the inner-

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suburban neighbourhood of Jane and Finch, and the downtown neighbourhood

of Alexander Park. Throughout this period, I relied on ethnographic approaches

including intensive participant observation, informal interviews, 20 semi-formal

interviews with city councilors and bureaucrats, police officers, youth workers,

community members, youth artists and participants implicated in the program’s

design and governance. This included discourse analysis of city generated

documents and documents produced by the youth serving agencies, and visual

methods of data generation such as photography and video, made by both

myself and others. Themes emerging through the different data collection

strategies included community arts practices as means of managing racialised

difference; multiculturalism as a political practice; youth empowerment and

resistance; and globalized political rationalities driving community development

and neighbourhood revitalization. Empirical findings located here are based on

my interpretation of printed documents, field notes and key informant interviews.

1. Theoretical Extensions: The theoretical scaffolding for this paper is, in part,

informed by Asher Ghertner’s (2010) thoughtful application of Foucault’s

methodological intervention for identifying the apparatuses of knowledge

production at play in the context of slum dwelling in India. Ghertner investigates a

shift from numerically-based calculative means of assembling truth claims about

slums, to the state’s reliance on what he refers to as “aesthetic techniques” to

render moral and legal judgments about certain urban spaces and subjects’

rightful place in the realization of globalized city aspirations. This re-theorizing of

a governmentality approach to urban governance is in conversation with a

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growing interdisciplinary scholarship (de Kloet, 2014; Lindner and Meissner,

2014) exploring the globalized circulation of aesthetic norms and practices at

work to signify a host of prized “global city” signifiers - “cosmopolitanism”,

“multiculturalism”, “creativity”. These delimited sensory formulations dictate

normative codes for how things, spaces, populations and actions should be

experienced sensually, recognized (or not), and targeted for intervention.

Importantly for these authors, the aesthetic, as a regulatory means of organizing

or distributing the sensible realm, has become increasingly operative in the

functioning of power and as such, is as much implicated in the playing out of

socio-economic politics and subjected to a vigilant policing to ensure its

continued propagation as it is contested and disrupted by other sensible

mappings.

Jacques Ranciere’s consideration of political aesthetics is a useful

extension for thinking through the types of disruptions possibly transpiring to

normative ways of doing and seeing social and political life. Ranciere’s

understands dissensuous acts (2010) as the declaration of a “way of bringing

about” a redistribution of a space/time, material/object, places/identities

configuration such that different modes of the sensible are brought into tension

with one another. In this moment of disruption, that which was rendered

unsayable, unthinkable, and those who were rendered speechless, invisible are

introduced to be heard, to be seen (Ranciere, 2009, p. 24). Clarifying what he

means by “political art forms”, Ranciere is careful to make a distinction between

his own formulations of political aesthetics and other models positing an easy

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connection between artistic form and political expression. For Ranciere, it is not

principally the semiotic content that art conveys about the current state of world

affairs that signifies a politics at work, nor is it the mode of expression as

representative of sociological categorizations of identity, tensions, or conflict that

work according to a priori constraints dictating how political coherency should

function. Rather, “art” can be understood as bearing upon the political because of

its very ability to suspend what is hegemonically configured as the common

(2009). To quote Ranciere:

The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of

disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the

thinkable without having to �use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is

the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture

with the very logic of meaningful situations...political art cannot work in the

simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an awareness of

the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensure, at one in the

same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political

signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by

the uncanny, by that which resists signification. In fact, this ideal effect is

always the object of negotiation between opposites, between the

readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of

art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all meaning”

(Ranciere, 2007: 63).

Ranciere’s thinking offers a cautionary tale about a tendency to over-read the

disruptive possibilities of arts practice (including mural making) while

simultaneously suggesting a “poetics” for more critically investigating spaces in

which a breach to the sensible might possibly be transpiring. Moreover, this line

of inquiry extends Hall and Robertson’s (2001) theoretical critique of public arts

initiatives and their place in either accommodating or resisting urban

regeneration efforts. According to these authors, advocates of public/community

art often fail to interrogate the “contested, fragmented and mutable nature of the

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conceptual claims they make about “identity”, “place” and “community”, and fall

short of accounting for the constraints and investments impinging on the

emancipatory or critical capacity of art pieces to move a politics forward in any

substantive way.

2. The three axes of urban regeneration.

Creative city politics: The introduction, in the late 1990’s, of neighbourhood

specific, youth-targeted community based arts initiatives, like the GTP, into

Toronto’s social-urban planning policy initiatives was symptomatic of a

sedimentation of three interconnected, globally mobilized governance strategies

for managing lagging post-industrial economies: creative city urbanism,

heightened securatization and penal governance of spaces and populations

deemed threatening to a city’s economic competitiveness, and cultivation of

neoliberal consumer citizenship (author’s own, 2012; Leslie & Hunt, 2013;

Rogers & Darcy, 2014). In accordance with the constraints imposed by a

decade’s worth of federally and provincially induced “neoliberal” austerity and

monetary policies (McBride and McNutt, 2012), plans were negotiated to facilitate

Toronto’s competitive and “creative” advantage on the globalised financial stage

(Desfor et al., 2006). The Creative Plan for the Creative City, adopted by

Toronto’s city council in 2003, borrowed heavily from the doxa of a globally

circulating policy heralding “creative city entrepreneurialism” (Leslie & Hunt,

2013) – a paradigm for urban transformation in which the production and

celebration of “culture” is forwarded as an expedient resource for facilitating

global economic competitiveness and fuelling economic growth (Lindner &

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Meissner, 2014; Yuddice, 2003). One of the key tools in this policy model was an

aggressive marketing campaign aestheticizing Toronto’s image as a world class,

creative city (Boudreau, Keil and Young, 2006). Trafficking an aesthetics of a

functioning, ethnically diverse and livable cosmopolitanism as a lure for

globalised capital investment required a shifting of policies and practices geared

towards reinvigorating and regulating Toronto’s geo-social landscape (cf

Boudreau et. al. 2009; Kipfer and Klein, 2002).

Urban Securitization: Community policing as a preferred means of

security management in Toronto emerged as a parallel mobile urban governance

directive to creative city entrepreneurialism (Ericson, 1994; Jackson, 1994). This

state-regulated control apparatus, developed in American urban centres in the

1980’s, makes use of calculative measures and surveillance oriented policing

strategies to manage the perceived threat of low income, mostly racialised

neighbourhoods to municipal cohesion and image (Wacquant, 2009). Under a

“penalization” calculus, divisions and exclusions previously enumerated along

quantitative lines (the haves/have nots) were racially recoded into qualitative and

heavily moralised distinctions (“depravity”, dependency, incapacity,

dangerousness, risk) where certain zones and identities were problematised for

their non-compliance to responsible productivity, and targeted for specific

reformatory or punitive attention (Fairbanks, 2010; Miller and Rose, 2008;

Sharland, 2007). Increased police presence in urban governance was supported

legislatively by the Province of Ontario in 1999, with the introduction of punitive,

fear induced “war on crime” and “safer streets” strategies targeting young

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offenders, welfare “abusers” and those “at risk” of offending (Case and Tester,

2000). Further measures were introduced at a municipal, and then at a federal,

scale following a spate of youth involved gun related violence in the mid 2000’s

(Leslie & Hunt, 2005).

Bundled in this circulating assemblage of techniques for managing urban

security was the “doxic assumption” of broken windows (Fairbanks, 2010). First

introduced in an essay by Wilson and Kaiting (1982), the term was embraced in

criminology, and subsequently in North American-wide policing and urban policy

practices. Broken windows suggests the indexical traces of urban disorder -

property vandalism together with “uncivil behaviours” such as “aggressive

panhandling”, loitering, and drunkenness - can be used as a metric for assessing

the community’s normalization of everyday “incivilities” (Fairbanks, 2010).

Applying the logic of actuarialised risk, these behaviours and material signs of

disorder are then read as foreshadowing an increase in more socially egregious,

more violent criminal offences (Johnston & Shearing (2003).

Graffiti became a flashpoint for broken windows and safe streets

calculative practices, a policy and media fixation that could only make sense in

the context of the 1990’s, early 2000’s in which Toronto was orienting its planning

sensibilities towards urban restructuring and globalized, cosmopolitan aesthetics.

Indeed, it was precisely during this period of urban upheaval and regeneration

efforts that Toronto witnessed a resurgence in graffiti production in selected

gentrifying downtown neighbourhoods and the inner-suburbs (Senses Lost,

2009). A mounting public debate began circling about graffiti’s aesthetic qualities

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and its legitimacy in a city becoming aware of its financial needs and aspirations

(Farkas, 2011). In Toronto’s media, graffiti bore the weight of its by then

politicized and commercialised association with racialised inner city life

(Dickinson, 2008; Farkas, 2011).

Much has been written about the urban politics of graffiti writing (see for

example Farkas, 2011; Keith, 2005; Iveson, 2007). Influenced by hip-hop culture

and deriving originally from New York’s economically disenfranchised, racialised

neighbourhoods (Style Wars, 1983), graffiti as a visual, material and spatialised

practice, signifies its own distinctive aesthetic forms and sensibilities. A

distinction is made in graffiti communities between tagging (as the originary

graffiti form) and ‘street art’. Graffiti proper can be productively thought of: as a

textual practice involving stylized letter formation speaking to the individualized

expression/identity of the artist (and the crew to which the writer belongs) and to

the skill required to master its formal qualities and presentation (Lewisohn, 2008);

as a “decentralized, aesthetic insubordination” or disruption to the proper and

entitled ordering of the modernist city landscape (Farka, 2011, Keith, 2005;

Iveson, 2013); as an emergent technology of communication between, and

exclusive to, graffiti writers “sharing an intolerance” (Keith, 2005,p.149) to the

normativised codes of hegemonic visual regimes; and as an index of a fault-line

separating the liberal ideals of universalist inclusion and democratic participation

from a social reality of racialisesd economic exclusion and inequity (Iveson,

2007). “Street art”, in contradistinction, is a sub-genre of graffiti that breaks with

the tradition of tagging. In aesthetic conversation with traditions of public murals

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as social and political protest (Lewiston, 2008), its forms are representational,

more accessible to wider publics, and include textual and figurative gestures and

references adapted from commoditized and popular culture. Unlike graffiti, which

refuses the legal, social and aesthetic conditions of its spatial placement (Iveson,

2013; Lewison, 2008), street art’s representational forms are set in a

recognisable dialogical relationship with the localized social and political

environment.

By the mid 1990’s, both practices of graffiti had become a globalised,

youth-based creative/political practice popularised and commoditised through

hip-hop music videos and related commercial products like album covers, video

games, magazines, and film. Graffiti or “street art” as an emergent nomenclature,

had also firmly established itself as a normativised style/sensibility understood to

define urban youth identity. In fact, because of its assumed visual appeal to

youth, most of Toronto’s youth agencies in priority neighbourhoods frequently

relied on images of “graffiti writing” to promote social programmes, and to

decorate drop-in spaces (O. Segin, Social Development project coordinator,

2011).

Urban spatial politics and the rise of neoliberal citizenship: In line

with these two globally mobile paradigms tethering the indexes of a “strong city”

to neighbourhood revitalization and investment, “safe streets”, with its attendant

penalization platform, and a thriving economy (Leslie & Hunt, 2013), Toronto City

Council turned its attention to the regeneration of targeted inner-suburban

geographical zones. Despite the presence of mostly racialised poverty in several

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inner-city neighbourhoods, only a very limited number of these communities

made it onto a prioritized list for urban renewal (Boudreau, et. al, 2009). These

zones were experiments in urban modernist design, home to many of the city’s

immigrant populations, urban aboriginal households, and the working and

marginally poor. They were understood to be plagued by the socio-economic

conditions rife for social disruption and violence: concentrated poverty, crime, an

excess of public housing, and too much un-integrated, concentrated racial

difference (Rigakos, Kwashie, and Bosanic, 2004).

In 2003, “The Strong Neighbourhood Task Force”, comprised of

community groups, business, municipal and provincial state representatives, and

the United Way of Toronto forged a strategy to address trends of increasing,

insular concentrations of neighbourhood poverty, “inadequate community

infrastructure” and risk for violent crimes (Wilson & Keil, 2008). In a move

signaling managerial efficiency, thirteen identified zones of disenfranchisement

were bundled into localized “Priority Neighbourhoods” and targeted for

“immediate investment” (Boudreau et al., 2009; Bradford, 2006). The doxa of this

investment politics was twofold: First, poverty and social exclusion, together with

their perceived impact on the “health, well being, and prosperity” of “the entire

city”, were understood not as indicators of systemic failure, but calculated as

symptomatic of place-specific pathologies (Wilson & Keil, 2008). Second, in

keeping with a neoliberal rationality and the strategies of creative city

entrepreneurialism, it was argued that an infusion of joint public-private

expenditure in neighbourhood regeneration would generate globalized

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opportunities for fiscal and capital investments (Boudreau et al., 2009).

While the three levels of the state were called upon to redirect energies

towards social and infrastructural renewal, the onus to redress patterns of

uneven development and socio-economic exclusion was placed squarely on

“local partners” - an amalgamation of residents, social service and health care

agencies, criminal justice, business, and neighbourhood associations (United

Way, 2004). A host of authors (Author’s own; Boudreau, et. al., 2009; Leslie &

Hunt, 2013) have argued that in its push to normalize global city

entrepreneurialism practices, Toronto has repositioned the rights and

responsibilities of citizens away from a Marshellian notion of welfare citizenship

(Rogers and Darcy, 2014), with its attendant focus on social spatial justice,

democratic involvement and rights entitlement based on membership. In its place

are a series of market-oriented, regulatory and disciplinary policies and practices

(Brown, 2006) geared towards cultivating and rewarding resident subjects who

performatively display their compliance as self responsivised, global city

participants and collaborators in realizing creative city aspirations (Author’s own;

Leslie & Hunt, 2013; Rogers and Darcy, 2014). Indeed, as Iveson (2007)

suggests, part of the impetus of a creative city entrepreneurialism with a “safe

streets” securitization platform, was an understanding that residents newly

engendered with sensibilities of community ownership and pride would engage in

self-directed surveillance and social regulation of public space.

Practices of youth community and civic engagement fit neatly within this

logic According to an emergent scholarship (cf Kenneley, 2011; Torres et al,

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2013), discourses of ‘active citizenship’ function as control strategies by

discouraging youth’s participation in a politics threatening to normative values

and practices, while simultaneously shoring-up a pacified political sensibility

restricted to practices of own self care, non-state dependency and

understandings of community as a localized mechanism for securitization and

productivity (Harris, 2004; Rose, 1999).

3. The Graffiti Transformation Project:

Taken as a policy assemblage, these three directives for stimulating

economic growth generated a reorientation of community social programming,

including community arts initiatives targeting “at risk” youth. As Leslie and Hunt

(2013) demonstrate, advocacy for community based arts programming in

Prioritized Neighbourhoods was mentioned explicitly in numerous municipal

policy documents - The Cultural Plan for the Creative City (2003); Creative City

Planning Framework (2008), the Mayor’s Agenda for Prosperity (City of Toronto,

2008), Imagine a Toronto (2006), and the Creative Capital Gains Report (2011).

In these reports, arts programming was understood as an expedient resource for

economic and socio-political amelioration with its attendant focus on community

development and the enhancement of social cohesion across difference. Youth

as prioritized subjects of investment were targeted across these documents.

The design of the GTP together with the planning and criminal justice

apparatus supporting it, was grounded in precedents firmly established by the

Mural/Anti-graffiti Network programme in Philadelphia, and similar graffiti

abatement/community based strategies in New York and Chicago. Assuming that

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“the issue of unwanted graffiti negatively impacts neighbourhoods across the

city” (City of Toronto, 2010: 3), the programme adopted by Toronto Council was

geared towards supporting and highlighting youth at risk’s civic participation in

the dual acts of criminal remediation - the erasure of an illicit aesthetic intrusion -

and neighbourhood beautification (p. 3). With a budget of approximately

$350,000, the Social Development office, in conjunction with Transportation,

solicited proposals from community arts organizations and non-profit social

service agencies servicing “marginalized youth facing multiple barriers to

employment” (City of Toronto, 2009: 5), engaging them to run summer graffiti

eradication and mural creation programmes. Proposals were assessed on the

applicant’s experience working with “marginalized” youth and their record in

working with neighbourhood beautification/enhancement initiatives. The

anticipated “impact of the project across the city” (2010: 4) also weighed in the

decision for funding.

With the turn towards a focus on aesthetic enhancement of targeted areas

of the city (2006-2011), community based service agencies hosting the GTP

were required to involve local neighbourhood associations, other community

agencies, and business improvement associations in the design and

implementation of the murals. As Toronto’s last annual report on the programme

proclaimed, since its inception, the Graffiti Transformation Program was

responsible for removing “25,000 individual tags” and “cleaning 350 sites of the

illegal presence of graffiti”. 720 murals were created in their place, and

approximately 2,128 youth had received some form of financial remuneration

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together with skills acquisition (City of Toronto, 2011). Participants tended to be

between the ages of 14 and 24, and identified along different racial and ethnic

lines depending on the location and “vibe” of the agency hosting the GTP.

In theory, successfully funded projects (approximately 20 per year) needed

to accomplish the following goals: (i) employment of neighbourhood youth -

through wage or honorarium; (ii) education about the impact of graffiti on built

form (i.e, its illegality, its aesthetic blight); (iii) targeted graffiti and tag removal;

(iv) skills training - “customer service”, “technical aspects of graffiti removal and

outdoor art installation”, life skills, cultivation of “strong work habits”, pro-social

skills; (v) establishing partnerships with local police precincts, business

associations, neighbourhood associations and local business owners to secure

space for community murals; (vi) negotiation with community members about the

content of murals; (vii) and the employment of a community artist to work with the

youth team (O. Segin, Social Development project coordinator, 2011, personal

communication; City of Toronto, 2010).

Evident in these policy guidelines for the GTP, and in line with other

guidelines for youth focused, arts based programming targeting Toronto’s Priority

Neighbourhoods (Leslie & Hunt, 2013), is the marking of youth with a

fundamental ambivalence (Author’s own; cf Fleetwood, 2005; Muncie, 2006;

Sharland, 2006), On the one hand, youth were being viewed as a valuable

resource in terms of their future market value/potential, their nascent

entrepreneurial savy, and their current currency as invested neighbours

(Fleetwood, 2005; Sharland, 2006). The GTP, like other community based arts

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initiatives, identified involvement in the arts as a vehicle for enhancing youth

capacity for depoliticised civic engagement, cultivating responsibalization (i.e.,

the moral imperative for youth to take responsibility for their own socio-economic

futures), and supporting employability and social skills training (Kenneley, 2011;

Leslie & Hunt, 2013). These capacity building attributes revealed, in part, arts

programming’s operative neo-liberal governmental rationality (Leslie & Hunt,

2013; Muncie, 2006). Conversely, youth were problematized as risky business,

and importantly as Sharland (2006) alerts us to, were deemed central to the

operationalization of neighbourhood risk mediation and to the safety of the wider

communal and productive social body (cf Kelly, 2001; Skott-Myhre, 2008).

Read as an expedient urban planning resource (Bradstadter, Wade and

Woodward, 2011), I argue below that the GTP sought to deploy the aesthetic as

a calculative procedure in three “expedient” ways: (i) as visualized actuary; (ii) as

index of social cohesion and global hip; (iii) and as a technique of

regulation/caring.

The GTP as visualized actuary: In one instrumentalist register, graffiti

abatement through mural production can be read as Toronto’s attempt to visually

coordinate and ”institutionalize” risk perception and remediation (Feldman, 2005,

p. 206). Drawing from Allen Feldman’s reading of the spectacle of American

securitization and the use of perceptual grids to visualize and territorialise the

perceived threat of the terrorist other, we can think of the GTP’s ability to govern

risk aesthetically according to the following modalities. First, relying on a

discourse of broken windows, “safety” and “social disorder” become diagnosable

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objects signifying the material presence of criminality (or its absence), or as an

actuarial measure assessing the risk of future criminality. Although now

discounted as an empirically verifiable strategy for managing crime (Harcourt &

Ludwig, 2006), “safety” and “social disorder” were managed here visually through

the anti-graffiti by-law enforcement squad’s tracking of graffiti’s disruptive

presence on the visual landscape. According to Schacter’s (2005) examination of

the governance economy of London street art, graffiti’s presence in

public/privatized space is being read by both detractors and

practitioners/enthusiasts alike not only for its aesthetic qualities and for its

semiotic content, but as a marker of its “corporeal illicitness”. In other words,

apart from its communicative qualities, graffiti is understood as a materiality that

performs its defiant disregard for hegemonic urban spatial governance, regulated

through the flows of capital and sanctioned by the state’s security apparatus. As

Schactner clarifies, the very medium (a wall, a sign, a bridge) as signifier of the

limits of a designated normalcy and legality of usage of space is being

overwritten by graffiti’s performance of its own impossible “subjectivity” – a social

being of sorts produced at an aesthetic and spatial threshold of what is

conceivable and allowable (2005). Understood here, graffiti is a transient “being”

that incises its illicit, material presence into a dialogue about space from which it

has been discounted. Then-mayor Rob Ford’s vociferous 2012 attacks on graffiti

as “violent” contaminant and contagious “blight” to city property, and Toronto city

documents (2010, 2011) discussing “vandalism” supports Schacter’s claim that it

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is the medium, its “corporeality”, as fused with the design, that demands

attention.

Second, one can think of the coordinated spectacle of a crew of racialised

youth - as marked bodies of risk - performatively displaying (Butler, 1999) a

compliant, productive, multicultural citizen-subjectivity through their public

enactment of sanctioned erasing of illicit graffiti. Such a public orchestration can

be read as a type of visualized materialisation of the state’s ability to discipline

“criminality” and criminalized bodies (as actual or potential, projected futures).

Relatedly, we can also think of the sanctioned “putting up” of murals as an

exhibitionary flaunting of state vigilance in regulating insecurity and re-

territorializing dangerous public space as a zone of propriety and legality

(Iveson,2007). In other words, the mural’s utility as a calculative technique lies in

its assumed ability to agentically radiate its licitness. As a visual, material

presence, murals are suggestive of a corporeality in place, of a “subjectivity” that

abides by litigious and securitized codes of behavior, movement and flows of

bodies across the cityscape.

GTP as index of social cohesion and global hip: Mural production was

also deployed because it could traffic as a visual trace of local social cohesion

across economic and racial/ethnic divides, of a community “healing itself”, and of

a functioning multiculturalism. According to the Social Development Committee

officer responsible for the coordination of the GTP, the programme was designed

to afford youth, working in conjunction with community artists, the skills

necessary “to sell their ideas about what is important to them and to learn how to

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present them”, graphically, through dialogue with “invested partners” (O. Segin,

2011, personal communication). In conjunction with this effort to provide a space

for youth to “express their creativity, vulnerability, needs, and spirit” (S. O’Brian,

Police officer, 2011, personal communication), at the heart of the project was an

expectation that marginalized youth would learn the skills of negotiating different

understandings of “community” by working collaboratively with local business,

city councilors, police, and importantly other community members. Cultural

engagement, as a state regulated exercise, was thus understood to create, as

one city bureaucrat suggested, “an opportunity for citizens, who might never do

so to participate in civic dialogue and to contribute to an atmosphere of

understanding and respect” extending beyond the boundaries of their own

neighbourhood (O. Segin, SD officer, 2011, personal communication). Murals

were also thought of as an indexical trace of “the spirit of collaboration” at work -

as negotiation of racial differences - and as a representational accounting of how

a “healthy functioning diversity of different groups and cultural expressions”

operated in their neighbourhood (Jannice. B., project coordinator community

health centre, 2011, personal communication). Finally, murals were believed to

inspire the “strength” of a community to address and heal from its own social

dysfunction (Jannice. B., 2011, personal communication).

I would suggest the GTP’s practice of creating murals in “visible, public

spaces” previously stained by “disordered social behavior” (United Way, 2011),

adhered to a logic in which the social efficacy or verisimilitude of the murals was

thought to lie in their communicative exchange with local and wider publics. Their

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very ability to visually “dramatize” truths of resilience or functioning

multiculturalism, or to address unspeakable truths like the community’s presence

of “gang related” or “domestic violence” (Jannice. B., 2011, personal

communication), was understood by some administrators as a means to cathect

the audiences’ aspirational desires - to hope, to aspire, to heal, to witness. As a

mode of cathexis, murals could then function to channel individually or

communally manifested actions towards orchestrated ends. Ranciere (2009)

notes, in this logic’s fault line, given that anyone who recognizes the medium’s

message(s) already buys in to its identifications and prescriptions, there is no

modification (or redistribution) of how the aesthetic actually transpires.

Recognition, in this sense, is the effect of “a functionalist affirmation of the status

quo of objective givens” (Ranciere, 2007: 5) prescribing what can be counted as

a proper reformulation of community, and what will remain unheard or

unrecognizable.

I would argue that recognition of the “worth” of murals is in part a re-

articulation of a hierchicalized distinction between murals and graffiti, a genre

effect, which is then generative of other hierachicalized orderings of subjects and

actions. Read from the “outside” in, murals confer a verification of a

hierachicalized social ordering, by re-instantiating certain prescriptive qualities

(e.g., pathological, poor, creative, resilient, multicultural, dignified) to selected

people and spaces. In this sense, culture becomes a compulsively repetitive,

regulated mechanism for prioritized neighbourhoods to publicly visualize their

pain and accomplishments of empowerment, and to perform their victimization

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and resilience for a “general” (non-pathologised/non-priority neighbourhood)

public. It is precisely in this performative mode of difference that the very

spacialized and temporal boundaries between normal/empowered and those

always in the process of healing/empowering are reinvigorated (Yudice, 2003).

This perceived redemptive functioning of cultural expression trucks easily in the

domestic spaces of multicultural liberalism (Dhamoon, 2005; Thobani, 2007), as

well as in the circuits of globalised capitalism with its voracious appetites for

“authentic” or“survivor art”, “art from the diaspora”, or “outsider art” (Mercer,

1998).

Read from the inside out, murals are to be seen by community members

as proof of community resilience and spirit; a desire to pastorally contain, through

aesthetic dialogue, expressions of social unrest, formations of political excess,

and other aesthetic sensibilities. In this sense, murals, articulated as

communicative expression from both within and without, are thought to facilitate,

albeit in highly prescribed terms, a stitching of bodies and spaces (back) into the

fabric of a thriving metropolis. This is an accommodationist politics, as Ranciere

(2007) and Yudice (2003) suggest, seeking to mediate difference by “controlling”

how, and by what representational criteria a community is included in a

multicultural exchange. Foreclosed from the interaction, is a disruption to the

networks and flows of power that dictate the terms and limits of sensible

distribution in the first instance (and by implication of how “empowerment” “can

be experienced and expressed”) (Yudice, 2003: 161; Ranciere, 1999).

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Finally, the GTP can be seen as both visually conferring social support for

disenfranchised communities and youth, and more robustly, as a neo-liberal

governance strategy to socially regulate an “at risk” population. Despite these

appearances of state effectiveness in assuaging welfare sentiment and

inculcating youth self-responsivisation, one of the perceived shortcomings was

that the programme tended to attract youth who were already invested in its

stated goals of employability, skills acquisition and community engagement. The

moral and market oriented scaffolding supporting the GTP, and the means by

which the programming is implemented, tends to induce a further social

disenfranchising of potential youth participants already alienated from normative

modes of economic and social productivity (Author’s own).

The GTP, together with the more generic practice of throwing up funded

murals in neighbourhoods, is not without its detractors. Calling attention to the

growing discrepancy between rich and poor, and to the need for more sustained

and robust social and economic programming in her neighbourhood, one Jane-

Finch activist said this about murals: “Rich people get to buy their way out of

problems, poor folks get art projects” (Sorrel. P., 2011, personal communication).

Moreover, a number of community workers and residents I spoke with argued

against mural practice because of its “stigmatizing qualities”. As one youth

resident quipped, “we might as well have a neon sign saying ghetto” (Dwayne G.,

2011, personal communication). Complimenting this sentiment are the words of

one cultural youth worker in the Priority Neighbourhood of Flemingdon Park, who

suggested the need for racialised and economically disenfranchised people to

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step outside of what Yudice (2003) describes as the “double bind of

representation” (p. 156) - the desire by racialised communities to gain control

over stereotypical representations of their own experiences and the “compulsion

to see and put our guts on display” (Charlie P, 2010, personal communication)

for the consumption of the normative public. As the youth worker succinctly

argued, “as racialised immigrants, as people of colour, we are tired of telling our

fucking (sic) stories. We’re here, so get over it”.

4. Disrupting governance sensibilities of the GTP: As a local expression of a

globally circulating set of calculative mechanisms, the GTP was intended to both

signal the management of the aesthetiization of Priority Neighbourhoods, and to

regulate the types of representational economies participating in those spaces

according to a priori categories derived from creative and safer streets

aesthetics. But I would like to disrupt this limited reading of a youth governance

initiative with an example drawn from my research with the Alexander Park public

housing community, in which another politics was operative. In one sense, the

street-art produced here signaled a desire to participate in the ordering of

subjects and spaces (Yusoff, 2010), And yet its very presence – similar to that

staged by graffiti – disrupted the codes holding that ordering in place.

Six youth of varying ethnicities and races, ranging from 18 to 24, together

with newly emerging public/community artists, Joshua Barndt and Sean

Martindale, created a series of “sculptural interventions” in the social geography

of their neighbourhood. Six impermanent interventions and one permanent

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photo-based mural made use of locally found materials to document weeks of

activity making and community interaction with the sculptural forms. Entitled

Make your Mark on Paradise (see https://vimeo.com/36098823), these ”murals”

staged a response to mounting anxieties and discontents surrounding the

anticipated “revitalization” of their community (JB., personal communication,

2011).

The one project involved a sculptural intervention graphically emphasizing

an “act of vandalism” occurring months before to a basketball court at the centre

of the complex. The fence had been cut to access the court, which was locked at

night to prevent its use for alleged “illegal activities”. Taking found pieces of red

and blue plastic, the arts crew fashioned two arms with extended hands, one

placed on either side of the opening. In one sense, the intervention offered a

structural solidity, regardless of how impermanent, to a temporally fragile,

unsanctioned (and thus, in its neo-liberal guise, unproductive) act. That the

youth’s sculpture marked �a disruption to a policed visual field (a literal physical

incision into a regulation of borders and spaces), suggested not only a

willingness to engage with the resident’s discontentment with social life in the

public housing complex, but also suggested, in the register of the aesthetic, a

social interaction oriented around principles of access and equality. Remarkable,

is the team’s transformation of the fabric of social space such that the very

politicized practice of being public, together, was centred around an empty

space, recalling both a past foreclosure, its disruption, and a re- inscription as

opening towards future, as yet uninscribed social and spatial “enunciations”

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(Ranciere, 2010).

Paradoxically, the same week in which the team crafted their intervention,

city councilor Adam Vaughn had been invited by Barnes to address why the

community was in need of revitalization, and to pacify their fears and concerns

over possible dislocation from their homes. Vaughn offered a set of sentiments

culled from Toronto’s creative cities planning model, decrying the need for mixed

income neighbourhoods and the revitalization of derelict downtown housing

stock, and lauding youth artists/participants as “Toronto’s future”. In this rhetoric,

youth – as a designated subject category - had a vital role to play in re-imagining

their neighbourhood as an engine of Toronto’s globalised economic prospects.

Not only was the constituting of a re-imagined “social” aligned with late-capitalist

aspirations and a consensual ethics, but the conscription of youth, as Toronto’s

future, was also inscribed into this operative logic.

These two aspects of an emerging policy/programme imperative, one

aesthetic intervention, and the other an unfolding of consensual mechanisms to

disengage potential dissent, hinged on how common experience and the futurity

of city space should be re-framed. In the spirit of Ranciere’s philosophical

method “of practicing another way of considering” (Ranciere, as cited in

Mechelon, 2004, p. 9), I wish to draw attention to the “dissociation” of one event

from another. One element of their disassociation lies in the spatiality of the

occurrences. The meeting with Adam Vaughn was contained spatially within a

designated community meeting space with its abiding goal of exercising

consensual agreement with youth. The other space, where youth regularly go,

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was marked by a two-fold disruption to the visual field: A first instance, marked

by the initial incision �in the fence, challenged the effectivity of surveillance

techniques to wholly monitor the uses of public space in the community; a

second instance disrupted the very ability of the “state” to lay claim to� this act of

defiance as vandalism (or in aesthetic governance terms – the optics of broken

windows) to justify revitalization. Their act dared to “beautify” in a different way

than imagined by creative city aesthetics (Jed B., personal communications,

2011) and make communal the initial, individualised act of incision. Moreover,

there was a temporal disjuncture between the two events. In one, a causal line

was drawn by Vaugn between practicing the art of responsivization through

cultural production and a speculative mapping of how entitlement to civic

engagement/leadership might look. In the other, a non-linear temporality was

staged that defied this order by short-circuiting a type of conscientising,

reprepresentational logic narrowing the field of acceptable outcomes of youth

arts practice. Finally, one can recount a type of disjunctuous unfolding between

different forms of subjectivisation: One was rendered through� a neoliberal

structuring aligning spaces and youth with individual/community responsivisation,

street safety, and city renewal. The other consisted of a set of aesthetic

propositions memorializing a tear in the securitization of public space enacted

previously, while gesturing towards a not yet performed set of subjective

interactions and placements in an indeterminate social space.

5. Conclusion

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As I have shown through an analysis of the GTP, the imperatives driving

the project extended beyond the reaches of policy concentrated on the socio-

economic disciplining and empowerment of youth deemed at risk, to include

wider concerns of urban governance as a spatial and aesthetic problematic. The

project provided the city with an operative knowledge apparatus designed to elicit

certain calculations on the social, aesthetic and economic compliance of targeted

spaces and subjects, in-line with the normative codes of creative city

cosmopolitanism, functioning multiculturalism, and safer streets aesthetics.

This research and analysis points to a reconsideration of current youth

governance practices as being implicated in the production of a complex weave

of intended affects, including those operating in the register of the aesthetic. On

the one hand, my analysis of the GTP supports the work of other urban youth

policy scholars in suggesting a contemporary trend towards understanding the

problematic of “urban at risk youth” in both spatial and political terms. Youth are

doubly marked in this new governance calculation as risky to their own

productive futures as individualized subjects – thus the need for interventions

designed to cultivate a more responsivized subject – and as a threat to the

spatial integrity/safety, investment and productive capacity of a neighbourhood or

wider geographical space (Muncie, 2006).

And yet, by introducing Asher Ghertner’s understanding of “aesthetic

governance” and taking account of the globalised mobility of urban policy

strategies like creative city entrepreneurialism and safer streets securitization, we

might question to what extent other urban youth governance, arts based

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initiatives are also problematizing youth in aesthetic terms, in line with the

normative codes of these circulating, regulatory sensibilities? This is a call for

research to interrogate how global policies, with their own economic and

aesthetic imperatives, are translated into practice in localized ways (Roy, 2012).

Relatedly, we might also query whether community arts-oriented youth strategies

are drawn upon as a type of calculative shorthand for doing the work of mobile

policies (McCaan and Ward, 2011), and for grounding their associated aesthetics

in a particular place. In other words, to what extent might we consider youth

policy as currently operative in shaping the politics of a particular urban

environment such as Toronto? In the example of the GTP, I drew attention to at

least three different domains of an aesthetic register operative in making material

interconnected models of urban planning – as a mediator and regulator of

normativised sensibilities, as an aesthetic barometer of subjective/spatial

compliance, and as an efficient tool for demonstrating, at least at the level of

appearance, a neighbourhood’s capacities for safety, creativity and investment.

If the analytical sightlines of the paper stayed close to a reading of the

GTP as a localized negotiation of the apparatus of creative city politics, I also

attempted to make an intervention into this rather prescriptive and confining

frame. By introducing Ranciere’s poetic reflections on political aesthetics, I

attempted to open the space of inquiry to investigate a youth mural-making

initiative as an act of dissensus. This re-calling of a moment that occurred in the

workings of the GTP illustrates an ability to think through a reimagining of other

futures for engagement with urban youth communities. Moreover, this analytical

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frame encourages a critical attentiveness to the aesthetic dimensions of urban

policy government as a terrain in which consensual practices and other

regulating strategies reformulate and condense hierachicalised social divisions,

and suggests ways in which these very (social) practices might be held in dispute

(Ranciere, 2010).

It is subject to debate whether these moments of disruption can serve as

touch points for a counter-mobilization, or as a sustained critique of the deep

structural conditions giving rise to disenfranchisement and inequality in the first

instance; the very issues that programmes like the GTP seek to address. And

yet, what the intervention of blue and red plastic did offer was an invitation for the

Alexander Park community (and possibly for wider publics), to spend a moment

at the precipice of an opening, to see and feel the scope of its enunciation about

what it means to claim a place in and beyond the politics of a specific locality.

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Governing young people as an aesthetic and spatial practice

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