The City of Toronto is apparently considering a plan to eliminate graffiti in the city by charging business owners for having it removed from their property, regardless of whether the owners request such a service or not. Which means that if a bunch of kids tag the wall outside your storefront and the city spots it, they’ll come in to whitewash it and then send you the (rather massive) bill.
Such a plan raises a few questions. How, for one, are small businesses supposed to (a) pay for that kind of thing on a regular basis, and (b) deter the taggers without building themselves a customer-unfriendly security perimiter? And what if they like graffiti, or actually commissioned the work? The city has apparently reassured storeowners with regards to the latter point by telling them that it has a team of bureaucrats trained to determine which pieces on the city’s walls constitute proper “art” and can act accordingly, but for some reason, the idea of some pencil-pushing municipal workers being well-versed in the latest directions in street art seems to be a tough sell.
Aside from such points are even more questions: Like aren’t there other, more important things to worry about? And who are these people that are so incensed by painting on the wall?
It’s unfortunate that the so-called neighbourhood beautification types behind these sorts of initiatives always seem bent on eradicating the few aesthetic pleasures that the city has. Toronto is not exactly the most romantically beautiful cityscape on earth. Sometimes it seems like the graffiti is about the only part of our particular urban landscape not compromised by our stuffily practical and homogeonous approach to neighbourhood development; take it away and the already-bland grid of post-war row housing and mediocre mid-rises will be even more mind-numbingly barren than it already is.
I’m sure that most reasonable people would agree that the sight of some kid’s nickname spray-painted on the side of Old City Hall or some other tourist site is not the way we’d like to see some of our more significant buildings. And the concern among educators about the rise of gang-related graffiti claiming turf in school yards is very serious and very real, though it would seem to be a separate problem than the one targeted by this particular civic initiative.
But who really thinks that the whitewashed concrete of a pedestrian underpass is more aesthetically pleasing than some hit-and-miss splashes of spontaneous colour? Are there actually legions of voters out there fuming over the fact that there are pictures, words and colours on the back of our industrial warehouses rather than a uniform grey?
In a story in the Globe and Mail about the whole thing last week, the guy who owns the CHIN building on College St. described how businesses like his were more responsible to the community because they fight the “visual pollution” inflicted on our cities by graffiti artists. What he failed to mention was that his building, and his business as a whole, contributes in no small way to the visual clutter imposing itself on the eyes of passers-by in the form of advertising and station-identification. (You could make the argument, if you wanted, that the CHIN building, with its somewhat overwrought glass-and-marble street entrance, and the TV/radio station itself, with its cheap promos and its Mr.-and-Miss-CHIN-bikini contest, constitute some pretty serious “visual pollution” all by themselves). His argument would appear to be that someone who can raise enough money to pay for billboards is infringing on our vision quite legitimately, while some kid with a can of paint and a creative urge is an illegitimate polluter.
It’s a peculiar way of looking at things, but it appears to be widely shared; while the city considers its plan to rid our streets of people who paint on the walls, there has been scarcely a word uttered about its plans to deal with those who build 10-storey high flashing signs telling people what they want to buy. Perhaps if the city, or at least those residents who feel strongly about having to see unwanted messages everywhere they look, wanted to take a truly even-handed approach in its fight against “visual pollution”, it would follow up its graffiti-removal plan with a motion to charge the Eaton Centre every time a city worker had to go and tear down those advertising screens at Yonge and Dundas. But that seems unlikely to happen.
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