Negotiating the right to the city: graffiti in Bogota

Abstract

The Lefebvrean concept of the right to the city denounces the realities of exclusion and alienation in urban society and demands social justice through the participation in, and appropriation of, urban space. Applying this concept to the contemporary context of graffiti in Bogota, this article aims to show how an analysis in line with an everyday geopolitics offers an insight into the everyday political practices performed by urban inhabitants. The right to do graffiti in the city is not simply demanded by graffiti artists but negotiated with the local government in Bogota, and this negotiation has both stemmed from, and contributed to, a legitimisation of this creative practice. However, graffiti artists also face the reproduction of processes of exclusion in everyday life and the limits of the right to the city are revealed through an aesthetic hierarchy that reproduces a social hierarchy.