Darren O'Brien documents two developing communities of Sheffield as gentrification begins to take place. Both areas are seeing an influx of outsiders and changing community dynamics.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, young people in New York City radically altered the tradition of writing their initials on neighborhood walls. Influenced by the widespread use of famous names on billboards, in neon, in magazines, newspapers, and typographies from advertising and comics, city youth created a new form of expression built around elaborately designed names and initials displayed on public walls, vehicles, and subways. Critics called it "graffiti," but to the practitioners it was "writing."

"Taking the Train" traces the history of "writing" in New York City against the backdrop of the struggle that developed between the city and the writers. Austin tracks the ways in which "writing" -- a small, seemingly insignificant act of youthful rebellion -- assumed crisis-level importance inside the bureaucracy and the public relations of New York City mayoral administrations and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for almost two decades. "Taking the Train" reveals why a global city short on funds made "wiping out graffiti" an expensive priority while other needs went unfunded. Although the city eventually took back the trains, Austin eloquently shows how and why the culture of "writing" survived to become an international art movement and a vital part of hip-hop culture.

This study examines the waves of graffiti that occur before, during, and after a conflict-important tools of political resistance that make protest visible and material. Graffiti makes for messy politics. In film and television, it is often used to create a sense of danger or lawlessness. In bathroom stalls, it is the disembodied expression of gossip, lewdness, or confession. But it is also a resistive tool of protest, making visible the disparate voices and interests that come together to make a movement. In Conflict Graffiti, John Lennon dives into the many permutations of graffiti in conflict zones-ranging from the protest graffiti of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, to the tourist-attraction murals on the Israeli Separation Wall and the street art that has rebranded Detroit and post-Katrina New Orleans. Graffiti has played a crucial role in the revolutionary movements of these locales, but as the conflict subsides a new graffiti and street art scene emerges-often one that ushers in postconflict consumerism, gentrification, militarization, and anesthetized forgetting. Graffiti has an unstable afterlife, fated to be added to, transformed, overlaid, photographed, reinterpreted, or painted over. But as Lennon concludes, when protest movements change and adapt, graffiti is also uniquely suited to shapeshift with them.

The title, ALL CITY WRITERS, describes a vast research on the Writing movement, focusing particularly on the process of its exportation from New York to all of Europe during the '80s. The first part of the research analyzes how graffiti in media such as movies, videos, magazines, and books from New York influenced Europe. When images of the New York subway arrived in London, Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam, a huge milestone was set: A first generation of European graffiti writers started to follow the letters, the method, the techniques, and the general lifestyle of New York in the '70s.

The book, a massive volume of more than 400 pages, has been conceived as an imaginary newspaper. The chronicles it contains have not been penned by real journalists or narrators but by people who define themselves as 'writers.' In this volume, a chorus of uncensored voices in the first person reveal their knowledge of European cities, their infrastructures, interstices, and neighborhoods. This is the generation who, in the last two decades of the 20th Century, imported the countercultural phenomenon from New York commonly known as 'Graffiti.'

At the outset, the obsessive repetition of a tag and the search for urban fame became a widespread and spontaneous act, an infinite ego trip that was rarely dissociated from the reproduction of the chosen letters. In these pages, European writers abandon the compulsive act of tagging for a moment, to narrate the city and cast a personal eye--not always detached--on the trains, the streets, and the urban surroundings that common citizens generally cannot or will not acknowledge. The chapters that compose this book focus on special themes, comparable to the sections of a daily newspaper, presented here as special reports on the New York subway, the European network, or the first urban strongholds.

The combination of these elements, including, among others, a detailed, in-depth description of the phenomenon's explosion in Italy during the '90s, provides a unique history of the variety of pathways they explored and documents the desires of an entire generation intent on describing and interpreting their cultural movement. Through historic and detailed documentation deriving from a singular urban episode, the New York City Subway, ALL CITY WRITERS wants to investigate the evolution and the consequences of a countercultural phenomenon, which in the last decades has provoked a change in the rules of aesthetics and communication in modern day society.