Tallinn's graffiti war

In the press
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There’s a bit of a battle going on in Tallinn at the minute over the works commissioned by the city: several of the sub-districts have been commissioning works every summer for the last few years, usually on things like electrical cabinets, water facilities, bridges etc, and this year several of them were defaced very quickly in an explicit declaration of war (though I guess they would say the city declared war first by painting over their throw ups…)

Most of the discussion online about this has been on social media, and mostly in Estonian, but it’s now made it to the English language edition of the public broadcaster:

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This is exactly why so many official programs misfire, because they have no understanding of the community.

Declaring an open war on graffiti and eventually erasing graffiti for their projects has never worked before. Look at NY.

Street Art is in many cases visual ‘prettier’ but graffiti is still very much entangled in the scene. Work with them or at least talk with them to see what works best.