Maude LaVaute Final

Introduction & Background:

Graffiti has become synonymous with New York City, and it is nearly impossible to visit any place on this map without encountering some form of it. It is a form of expression that grew out of tensions specific to New York in the 1960’s, and thus has become part of the city’s identity. The versions of graffiti that we see today grew as graffiti writers perfected their practice, sharing techniques along the way.

However, because of graffiti’s ties to an impoverished, grimy New York, and its often-illegal nature, it is an art form that is heavily policed. Many pieces that today’s work grew from can now only be seen through photographic documentation, if at all. Although many original works are gone, they were still integral in the formation of graffiti that exists today, and it is interesting to consider the tensions that both cultivated and hindered the art form over the years.

Today, Graffiti-Free NYC is a task force employed by the city government (a cooperative effort among the NYC Economic Development Corporation, the NYC Department of Sanitation, and the Office of the Mayor) that cleans reported instances of illegal graffiti across the city. From 2013, they have been updating a database that contains information about the location of a reported graffiti incident, the date it was reported, the status of it’s cleaning, and the date it was cleaned on. The Graffiti-Free task force is currently paused so the city can allocate more resources to figting COVID19

This data (from January 2019 to January 2020) is available on NYC Open Data, and I wanted to see what it could tell us about graffiti today.

Considering the history of graffiti, I wanted to think about things like:

• What does a year’s worth of reported graffiti look like in New York City? Does it still dominate the city like it did in the 1960’s and 1970’s?
• Where is graffiti happening the most across the city?
• What do the demographics of neighborhoods where graffiti is heavily reported look like?
• Does the length of time it takes for Graffiti-Free NYC change from neighborhood to neighborhood?

Through the use of data visualizations and maps, I was able to answer some of these questions, and think about how this research could grow in the future.

Innitial Visuliazations:

This set of primary graphs and maps helped me gain more understanding about the data, and helped direct the rest of my research. ##### Fig. 1: This bar chart shows the total count of real graffiti incidents reported in New York City from 2019-2020, categorized by borough. The raw data set contained information about reports where graffiti did not exist, so I did filter these out. It shows that Brooklyn had the most graffiti reported (9,131 incidents) and Staten Island had the least (263). However, it is important to consider that this count represents only the graffiti reported to the task force, and there are likly other incidents that have not been reported.

ggplot(data = real_graffiti) +
  geom_bar(mapping = aes(x = BOROUGH, fill = "count")) +
  theme_bw()+
  scale_fill_manual(name = "BOROUGH",
                    values = c("#2abcc9", "#c46ec3", "#f27d07", "#6de373", "#f5e340"),
                    breaks = c("BRONX", "BROOKLYN", "MANHATTAN", "QUEENS", "STATEN ISLAND")) +
  labs(x = "Borough", y = "Count of Incidents",
       title = "Reported Graffiti Incidents in New York City 2019-2020",
       #subtitle = "Average of number of days for each incident grouped by borough",
       caption = "Source: NYC Open Data") 

Fig. 2:

This bar chart breaks the data down further, separating incidents into “Closed” (meaning case closed, graffiti cleaned), and “Open” (meaning case still open, case unresolved). Here we see that the number of open and closed cases in each borough reflect the number of cases total, that there is not a borough that has a significant more open cases.

Fig. 3:

This bar chard showcases