The Barcelona City Council is fine-tuning its fight against the graffiti that has disgusted many citizens for some time now. The government of the socialist mayor Jaume Collboni is releasing a new contract these days aimed primarily at curbing the growing proliferation of paint stains that affects a large part of the city. We are talking about a public expenditure of more than 16 million euros over the next two years.
Because the tags, the signature signature, the one that is printed in a few seconds anywhere, with paint sprays, a powerful marker or even an adhesive, do nothing but expand, and on top of that everywhere: doors of housing estates, any element of urban furniture, transporters’ vans, protected facades… At the moment the doodle arouses more indignation than ever, but in a few circles it is very popular, it has many followers.
The t-shirt commemorating the last subway assault has just gone on sale. A few days ago, around 70 people broke into the Sant Jaume station and smashed everything they found. The cleaning bill for all those firms amounted to 135,000 euros. Lately in this underworld intensity, insistence and perseverance count for much more than any consideration of whether or not the chosen place is better painted. And illegality is key here. Otherwise you can’t be countercultural. Painting a signature in an authorized place becomes part of interior decoration.
Also, the lifelong rules of courtesy among sprayers have been a thing of the past for years. Social media has also done a lot of damage here. The graffiti artists step on each other, more and more, without contemplation, and on the old walls they have lost their privileges. Monuments, churches and other old stones are also occasionally scribbled on. Some recent examples: the Pi church, the Lloctinent palace, the Botero cat, the Petó mural, the Migdia bastion, the Santa Maria del Mar basilica, the Jaume Plensa sculpture in front of the Palau de la Música, the surroundings of the old Santa Creu hospital…
With the new contract, Barcelona City Council will dedicate up to 131 workers to alleviate this situation, 30% more than until now. And these employees will no longer focus mainly on the walls, they will also pay special attention to benches, fountains, planters, railings, bike stations, information boards, plaques with the names of streets and squares… Because any place is good for unsheath the marker.
In addition, the new service of the City Council also foresees, for the first time, cleaning facades of heritage buildings cataloged as a Cultural Property of Local Interest, a Property of Urban Interest or a Property of Documentary Interest. Only buildings cataloged as Cultural Assets of National Interest will be left out, as these buildings need very specific cleaning work.
In fact, graffiti in general has been in the City Council’s sights for a long time. The civics ordinance, around 2006, ushered in the era of zero tolerance and put an end to a decade of collusion that had made Barcelona one of the world meccas of urban art. The characteristics of the new municipal cleaning service were combined during the last term of mayor Ada Colau. In 2022 the Council already carried out more than 123,000 actions of this type and cleaned more than 300,000 m2 of graffiti. What is happening is that Mayor Collboni’s executive did elevate the matter to the mandate priority category, a fundamental pillar of the blown-up Endreça plan. Colau preferred to be concerned about other matters.
One of the first measures of the PSC government was to convey to the Urban Guard that when sanctioning excessive revelry, street urination and any graffiti, it should opt for the highest amount included in the civics ordinance. In fact, the tightening of sanctions is one of the arguments of the municipal government when proposing to the opposition groups the reform of this ordinance. The problem is that the more the authorities go after graffiti, the more graffiti proliferates. If you only take a couple of seconds to leave your signature, it’s harder to get caught.
In addition, the matter has a political reading. The socialist executive only has ten councillors. And until he closes government pacts with the opposition groups, he has very little room for manoeuvre. Intensifying the fight against graffiti is one of the few ways they have of showing off government action to the public. And anyone who regularly walks through the city center has already verified that removing graffiti is underlined in red on the municipal agenda. Collboni is well aware that cleanliness is one of the great concerns of Barcelona residents, and that neglecting it leads to major political attrition.
The problem manifests itself throughout Barcelona. But it is mainly seen in the Ciutat Vella district. Here many streets and squares are a palimpsest. The neighbors tried to fix the doors of the estates a long time ago. And many graffiti artists understand that a few neighborhoods in this district are a conquered territory. They will not abandon him in any way. The only space that seems mysteriously respected is the one that houses the replica of Keith Haring’s anti-AIDS mural that stands in the Raval neighborhood, between the Macba and the CCCB. The surroundings are indeed full of graffiti, but at the moment no one dares to step on the legacy of the one who raised subway graffiti to the category of art.
