Who Owns The Streets? Its Not Us

VIA Vandalog
This is a very nicely rounded articulation of the push and pull between the individual and the community in public space. The streets are a vibrant playground where self expression and the need for communication with your environment, comes in conflict with societies desire to curate and on some level control our shared visual space. The problem is this is an idyllic scenario, and conflict of the future. Currently this push and pull between the individual and the community takes place within an environment ruled by corporate messaging. This incredibly unfair power distribution between corporate interests and community interests, serves to reinforce a visual environment that is dominated by a singular capitalist message. We have come to fully accept that a majority of the visual landscape will be sectioned off for corporate messages in the form of bilboards, bus shelters, free standing, phone booths, wallscapes, lollipos, etc. We do this by perpetuating a system of private property ownership that biases access to our visual landscape to those with money. Without breaking that system of dominance in our visual landscape, the fight for self expression vs community interests will be undertaken within a larger context of cultural domination by corporate agendas. It would seem our conversations about tolerance will be overshadowed by a devotion to the images that surround us and the consumerist ideologies which are tearing at our social fabric and the very planet we live on.