A journey through the history of this type of demonstration and its influence on cities.
By: Miguel I. Baduel
Intense colors, walls covered in messages, and graffiti on peeling walls like scars of time. Walking through any city in the world will lead us to corners that speak with tones and textures impossible to find in other contexts. From New York and London to Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, we're referring to urban art or street art , a practice that, while quite old, still feels contemporary with each generation.
Among purists who view even young DIY enthusiasts with suspicion, the debate surrounding this street art practice seems endless. But how did this movement emerge, and what impact has it had on our culture?
With a somewhat hazy past, we can say that the origin of street art as we know it today dates back to the 1960s in Philadelphia, USA. There, a group of artists began to intervene on walls with messages of protest and frustration with social inequality, racial discrimination, and the lack of opportunities in marginalized neighborhoods, thus claiming a voice in the public sphere.
This trend, which was considered vandalism and is still known today as bombing , spread to the Bronx district in New York, where it had a close link with rap, hip hop and breakdancing, practices that were sometimes also part of the public spectacle, and therefore, of art taken to the street.
In the 1980s, American street art began to be replicated in European cities such as Paris, Berlin, and London, especially in Bristol, where Banksy, an anonymous artist known for painting provocative and critical messages on the city walls, began his career.
Street art has also reached Latin America, with murals like those of Mon Laferte in Chile, garnering both local fans and detractors on social media. There's even a website from the Buenos Aires tourism board that promotes its urban art scene.
We cannot leave behind the Poetic Action movement, started by the Mexican Armando Alanís Pulido but with influence throughout the subcontinent, in which space is intervened with fragments of romantic poems.
Spain is not to be outdone, and in 2013 the city of Segovia held an event to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the World Heritage Cities. A giant banner was unfurled displaying photos of the heritage sites of the 13 cities, and open-air artistic and performance art pieces were offered, accessible to the entire community.
But in academia and among the general public, art in public spaces has not always been well received. This is demonstrated in Julieta Infantino's research, "Street Art Is Not a Crime: Processes of Politicization of Culture in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina," which discusses how the criminalization of this practice is not only legal but also symbolic. Infantino recounts how a 2018 proposed reform of the code of misdemeanors would allow anonymous complaints against street artists and enable arrests for interventions in public spaces.
Another example of this is how the Madrid city council removed, in February 2025, works by the urban artist Basket of Nean, known for his pixelated mosaics in the city streets, with reproductions of classic works and references to pop culture, which had already become part of the identity of the Madrid urban landscape and whose demolition aroused indignation and rejection among the inhabitants.
It was André Gide who said that “art that loses touch with reality and life becomes artifice.” But beyond the metaphor, street art, for Professor Antonio Remesar, is the aesthetic intervention that, by impacting the territory, generates mechanisms for appropriating space and co-producing meaning. In other words, those murals, graffiti, and posters that invade public spaces are not mere decorations that accompany daily life, but rather become agents that inhabit, influence, and evolve with the site—aesthetic residents with opinions and ideas that they share with the human residents.
Félix Duque presents us with the perfect synthesis of the two previous ideas: art is not authentic unless it is communal. And what is more communal for art than taking it to the streets? The unique identity we give to public spaces through art exhibitions is the first step toward dialogue between cultures and generations, sharing meaning beyond verbal language.
Thus, from its beginnings in Philadelphia in the 1960s to its destruction in Madrid and its current promotion in Buenos Aires, street art not only connects cultures from different parts of the world, but also creates micro-communities and environments of inspiration and contemplation that continue to be replicated generation after generation. All art inspires new works around the world. Cities, therefore, become community galleries where every corner is a canvas that holds brushstrokes that converse with one another.