Tagging political territories: a geographical perspective on political graffiti in Linz, Austria

Abstract

This study explores the intersection of politics and tagging within social and cultural geography, focusing on political graffiti as a form of territorial marking. Drawing on the conceptual framework articulated by Ley and Cybriwsky in 1974, it argues that political graffiti serves as a tool through which political ideologies assert visibility, mark territories and symbolically reclaim the city. Its creators aim to mark symbolic, memorable, or highly visible locations, to maintain their own fixed space, and to claim urban territory, thereby turning it into a zone of political dialogue or conflict. These motivations shape both site selection and the thematic content of political graffiti. Field research in Linz employed a place-based elicitation method, adapted as geographically grounded semi-structured field observation supplemented by socio-semiotic analysis. This combination provided a sufficiently comprehensive overview of the political graffiti scene in the city and its layered meanings. Integrating insights from spot theory and the concept of political symbolic space, the study demonstrates how political actors strategically target significant and symbolic locations to amplify their messages, with left-wing ideologies prevailing. By examining the spatial dimensions of socio-semiotics through graffiti, the research deepens understanding of urban political-cultural landscapes and the ideological contestations embedded within them.

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