Spatial distribution of graffiti types: a complex network approach

Urban art constitutes an important issue in urbanism. Previous studies on the spatial distribution of graffiti rarely consider visual categories and how the city topology can impact graffiti production. In this work, after assigning graffiti occurrences to three categories, we analyzed their spatial distribution while searching for possible biases. Concepts from complex networks were adopted. First, communities defined by the connectivity profiles of the city network were obtained and the prevalence of each type of graffiti over these regions was analyzed. Next, to study the relationship between the density of graffiti occurrences with the visibility of specific city localities, a measurement (accessibility) based on the dynamics of the network was related to the distribution of the occurrences of graffiti of each type. Our case study considered the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The results showed good agreement of the detected communities with the main city areas and no biases between the relative density of each type of graffiti. Relatively high correlations were obtained between the density of graffiti and the accessibility when calculated inside each of the identified communities, suggesting that graffiti tends to appear more frequently in certain regions of the city with high accessibility. Graphic abstract