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Paper short abstract:

Walls are one of the main artifacts of urban management that operate through rules and binary conceptions. Despite this, some uses defy such standards. This paper aims to reflect on these uses and their effects based on São Paulo's graffiti ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

At least in the context of São Paulo, urban planning works, fundamentally, based on a series of binary rules, which aim at all times to establish a public and a private, a permitted and a prohibited. Walls are one of its main artifacts: they found physical separations and reinforce - while helping build - symbolic distances. Therefore, walls are one of the main signs of a borderizantion process, of which Achille Mbembe speaks, on the city's scale; that is, a process where groups in power transform spaces into insurmountable places for certain classes of people, defining an inside and an outside. Despite the rules that set an exclusive use of the owners' walls, there are other uses, multiple and microbial, that take place on its external face, challenging these norms daily. This paper aims to reflect on these other uses from the graffiti practices, specifically from the renovation of the wall process, as the writers of São Paulo call it. This painting situation includes the updating of agreements and alliances with the wall's owners and other agents that may be related to these spaces, based on a dynamic that cannot be framed in dichotomous notions such as those of public and private, highlighting other ways possible to use and share urban spaces. The proposed reflections are based on ethnographic research carried out in 2016 and 2017 in São Paulo, Brazil.