Does Urban Art Deter Graffiti Proliferation? An evaluation of an Australian commissioned urban art project

In Perth, the capital city of the state of Western Australia, there is agrowing move towards the use of urban art as graffiti deterrence. Thispaper reports on an empirical evaluation of a commissioned urban artproject. A former graffiti hot-spot (three bus underpass walls at acommuter train station) and a one square kilometre area surrounding thehot-spot were monitored across four time phases (i.e. a baseline, two postartintervention and a follow-up period) over an 11 week monitoringperiod. Following the completion of the artwork site a marked reductionoccurred in the number of graffiti recorded at the artwork site across thetwo post-art intervention monitoring periods and a significant increase inthe graffiti frequency counts between the second post-art interventionmonitoring period and the final follow-up monitoring period. Similargraffiti spikes were found to occur in the control area surrounding theartwork site. Collectively, these results would suggest that mural artworksare not a general panacea for the graffiti proliferation problem whichinstead seems to require a non-homogenous solution.