Editorial

Inscribed Territories: Informal Governance

Abstract

This issue of Graffiti and Street Art develops from the 2025 edition of Urban Creativity, whose overarching theme—Territory—foregrounded questions of power, boundary-making, and the social production of space. Within that broader framework, Inscribed Territories: Informal Governance brings together contributions that examine writing, marking, and image-making as practices through which urban territories are regulated, contested, and reimagined outside formal institutional structures. Across diverse geopolitical contexts, the articles assembled here reveal how graffiti, muralism, and other forms of unofficial inscription operate as mechanisms of governance from below.