We all have a responsibility to make the best of our surroundings, argues Julian Baggini on the Independent architechture. Unfortunately, especially in Finland, making our surroundings more beautiful with street arts is strictly forbidden. The attitude towards graffiti and other street arts is actually quite insane. Most of the cities’ decision-makers seem to prefer even grey dullness to colorful arts, when considering how our common surroundings look like.

I have not been researching this, but my common sense tells me that probably the most of the people have nothing against more inspiring and colorful environment. So why is it so that anything is better than street arts? And what could and should be done to make that right? I’ve been trying to figure that out and I’ve come up with a proposal that could be developed into a service that makes it nice and easy to turn our cities into inspiring street art galleries.

I think one of the main issues is the lack of communication between street artists & the inhabitants of a specific area. Not anyone is able to perform a high class art works so it is quite necessary to use services of visual artists to make up the grey walls and such. If people of some specific suburb could have their opinion heard on how they want their environment’s grey places to be colored, I’m quite sure they would feel those artworks more like their own. But at the moment there are no forums, where the inhabitants could meet the artists and discuss about the design and placement of the artworks.

That’s why we are now doing an experiment where people of Tampere collaborate with the artist Otto Maja. Anyone can take part via Internet in designing Otto’s next big piece of street art. They can have their impact by voting for theme, enviroment, characters and colours of the artwork and discussing and giving ideas on it’s Facebook-wall. After two weeks of designing, Otto Maja and his friend Rost arrive to paint the co-designed piece of art to Tampere’s town square.

Hope this is just a start for creating something bigger. We’re building a service that would let the citizens decide what kind of arts and from whom they want to see in their suburbs and where there. The artists, on their behalf, could suggest their artworks to be ordered to the streetview. This would also most likely improve the quality of the Finnish street art. The more artists would have chances to paint and the more there would be competition between the street artists, the faster the scene would upgrade.

In my eyes this would be a win-win situtation. The artists would have legal places to perform their arts and the cities would become filled with more and more high-class arts.

For the more colorful world,

Einari & Boys