Nadiya Parfan

Kyiv Graffiti: Production of Space in Post-soviet City Nadiya Parfan

This book examines Kyiv graffiti as a convergence of global and local, general and particular, structurally determined and structure-challenging. Each single piece of graffiti is linked with the outer world inasmuch as it designates certain surface, street, neighborhood, city. Along these lines graffiti brings together concrete physical place and bigger scale places and spaces. Standing on this initial point the author explores how Kyiv graffiti is distributed in space and what social meaning this distribution contains. Based on her ethnographic research she also shows how urban space is perceived and challenged by graffiti and how graffiti itself has changed under the influence of recent spatial transformations. The book will be useful to urbanists, anthropologists, sociologists and wide range of people interested in graffiti, youth subcultures and post-socialist urban change.