Dialogue: It's long past time to get the writing off our walls

If other parts of New Zealand have adopted lessons from overseas to keep themselves graffiti-free, why can't Auckland do the same? asks DAVID HILL*.

Nothing is worse than people who return from overseas and drone on about what's being done there that we should do here.

I don't want us to do some things we found happening in countries A and B. I don't want to have to boil drinking water, wear a smog mask on still days or risk death on every pedestrian crossing.

But as just three days in Auckland on the way home reminded us, I wish we could emulate country A's and country B's lack of graffiti.

A and B were places of ferment and disaffection. Yet the only two wall-writings we saw were political slogans. If we had asked locals about graffiti, they would probably have pictured an Italian entree.

Auckland? There was tagging on hoardings by the airport, on pavilions in Manukau and Browns Bay, on shopping centre walls in Glenfield and Glen Innes.

Why is it in New Zealand and not in A or in B? Partly because it's an image and fad copied from the United States, and countries A and B work very hard to resist American influences.

Also, I suspect, the teenagers in A and B have other preoccupations - war, poverty, national aspirations. Tagging seems a phenomenon of the affluent, bored world.

Another factor is that the city centres of those other countries are lived in - all the time. They don't empty when offices and shops close. In the evenings, families stroll through them, men play cards in corners, children chase one another down alleys.

As far as places of concrete walls and steel shutters can be, they are people-friendly.

Being full of people, they are difficult for a tagger to work in. And you felt that in A and B, residents saw the city as their city. They were not going to stand for graffiti being sprayed across its walls.

Okay, getting people to live in the commercial centres of Auckland and other biggish towns is a long and labyrinthine process. But there are simpler steps. Takapuna, where pleasant seat-and-shrub walkways now connect city centre streets, has an impressively low graffiti index. It welcomes people with human-scale features rather than blocking them with big blank walls.

In our own provincial town, tagging in one of the most-sprayed areas almost stopped when the council built a skateboard ramp. Teenagers were invited in, not shut out. It became their territory, and we all know what dogs don't do on their territory.

There are other, equally straightforward steps Auckland and other cities could take to reduce graffiti.

In Timaru (I think), city centre businesses put up a graffiti wall. Contributions were solicited. Awards were mentioned. Tagging in town dwindled. Just like the skateboard ramp - if you can't beat them, let them join you.

New York has taken another approach to graffiti. It's the zero tolerance technique, and focuses on subways. Tagged trains stay in stations until they are cleaned. The stations close if graffiti appears. Tagging affects everyone. So? So the public stopped shrugging shoulders and leaving it to authorities the way they do here.

In Taranaki's Stratford, the local body painted public walls a new colour. They were not grim grey or glaring white any longer. They were a quiet, user-friendly (okay, abuser-friendly) green. They seemed to make taggers feel friendly, too. The walls remain almost pristine.

In our town, there is 60m of downtown concrete-block wall that just begs to be tagged. It never has been. Why not? Well, a mural covers the 60m, a mural with lots of empty space, but one which has brought a bright human presence to a blank excluding slab. Go figure.

Central Wellington has done it, too. The Manners St loos have murals which make them among the gaudiest in the land - and the most graffiti-free. If Wellington can do it, then surely .hs.hs.

Those cities in countries A and B were not places of beauty. There were litter and rubble. People spat in the street, threw slops in the street. City centres that belong to the people often carry people's less pleasant traces.

But unlike our swept, washed, people-empty downtowns, they are also city centres where the writing is not on the wall.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.