GRAFFITI AND GUM: two of the most difficult things to get rid of once they start, insidiously, to permeate a city. Forget the ancient biblical challenge of attempting to count the number of stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beaches. The modern head-thumping version of this task would be trying to count the pieces of chewing gum that pock the pavements of cities around the world. Dublin is no exception. Step out anywhere in the city centre, and you are guaranteed to spot instantly a small, black, flattened piece of gum, writes ROSITA BOLAND
As for graffiti, there is only one Banksy. Although there are some highly talented street artists, the majority of graffiti in Dublin is done by people who are more interested in defacing public spaces in non-artistic ways. Most of their graffiti is visually aggressive, consisting of meaningless scrawl and offensive language. We’ve all seen the ruined facades – there’s a lot of them out there.
However, according to Dublin City Business Improvement District (Bid), an organisation established last year, the city centre should be graffiti-free by next month. Richard Guiney, Bid’s chief executive, who made the announcement this week, also declared cautiously that it hoped to make “significant progress” in eliminating the sight of gum from the city streets.
Bid is a non-profit organisation working with existing city authorities, whose mandate is to help create “an attractive, welcoming, vibrant and economically successful” area in Dublin city centre. The area it covers is the 2.5sq km of the city that gets most footfall, a T-shaped space running down from Parnell Street to St Stephen’s Green, and across from Capel Street to Amiens Street.
The businesses in this catchment area that pay rates are obliged to pay Bid one-twentieth of their rates bill, which goes towards improving their local environment. For almost a year now, the key job Bid has been focusing on is removing graffiti. There is a rotating team of “ambassadors” whose main function is to walk the area, by day and night, on the lookout for graffiti. They then photograph it, measure the area it occupies, and note the location. The information is passed on to the main office, and one of Bid’s two current contractors, either P.Mac or Euroclean, come to deal with it.
To date, a staggering 3,542sq m of graffiti has been removed from the streets of central Dublin.
“Most graffiti in Dublin is pure, wanton vandalism,” Guiney states. He reports that there is now less than 500sq m left to be removed. “The rate it is being re-applied has started to fall off, which is more or less what happened in the US. The pattern goes: we remove it, they spray again, we remove it, they spray again. Then they do it less and less.”
BID LOOKED TOthe American model when planning its approach. Famously, in 1982, in an essay in Atlantic Monthly, the influential "broken windows theory" was first mentioned. Writers James Wilson and George Kelling argued that in neighbourhoods where broken windows were left broken, people got the implicit message that societal norms had stopped functioning. Thus, broken windows led to further broken windows, with an accompanying rise in crime.
At that time, New York’s crime-ridden subway system was a mess. The cars were constantly covered in graffiti, people dodged their fares and few wanted to ride the subway after dark. David Gunn, who was then head of New York’s city transit system, tested Wilson and Kelling’s theory. First, the graffiti problem was tackled: clean cars, went the theory, would create respect, thus changing the behaviour of those who used the subway system. Cars that had been freshly tagged with graffiti, even after they had already just been cleaned, were not released into the subway system. The strategy worked. Eventually, the graffiti stopped and the subway system slowly began to lose its no-go reputation.
The successful campaign to make the New York subway graffiti-free was widely seen as a breakthrough in fighting crime in both that city and elsewhere in the US, where the same model was applied. The theory was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 bestselling book, T he Tipping Point.
Richard Guiney hopes that from next month, when Bid has completed work on removing those remaining 500 square metres of graffiti from Dublin city centre, the task will evolve into a smaller-scale matter of being vigilant about any new graffiti that goes up. The resources of the Bid team will then be focused on the less visible, but even more challenging, problem of getting rid of chewing gum.
“It’s a pity people can’t be more responsible about disposing of it,” he says ruefully.
The chemical cleaning equipment used to remove graffiti can also remove chewing gum, but it’s not cheap. Everything is measured in square metres, and currently the estimate is that one square metre of a Dublin city centre street has between five and 10 pieces of gum stuck to it at any one time.
“The cost per square metre to remove gum is €5.50,” Guiney explains. By the end of the year, he estimates that Bid will have spent €200,000 on the cleaner streets project.
BID HAS HADcontact with other cities around the country, looking for advice on how to tackle existing problems in their local environments. "We've talked to people in Cork, Belfast and to a lot of people out in industrial estates," Guiney says.
Industrial estates in particular, where people work but do not live, suffer from a lack of public social ownership and are often targets for graffiti and littering.
Will Dublin ever be gum-free? On-the-spot littering fines are €150, but it’s obvious from simply looking at the ground anywhere in the city that the vast majority of people who daily drop gum in Dublin are not fined. Guiney hedges his bets. First he says: “People don’t even realise gum is litter. They drop it, they’ll do it again, and they’ll keep on doing it. Unfortunately, we’ll have to keep at the gum problem.” But later, he says hopefully: “People would have said they’d never see a graffiti-free Dublin, and we’re confident of having that. So I do see a day when we’ll have a gum-free Dublin. Or at least, whatever gum is dropped won’t be resting there too long.”
Gum and Singapore
Singapore is the most infamously intolerant place in the world when it comes to chewing gum. Back in the 1980s, when people were still chewing it there, they didn’t just drop it on the ground but carried out creative acts of public vandalism, placing gum in mailboxes so that letters stuck together, in keyholes, over lift-buttons and on the seats of buses.
A proposal was made to ban gum as early as 1983, but no action was taken.
In 1987, Singapore’s new metro system, built at a cost of $5 billion, started operating. The vandals began to target the metro, sticking gum on the door sensors of trains, thus preventing doors opening at stations. As a result, frustrated passengers were unable to get on or off, and the entire system was sometimes temporarily slowed down.
In 1992, chewing gum was banned. It was no longer sold anywhere in the city, and anyone found smuggling it in was publicly named. A first-time offender had to pay a fine of $1,000 (€485), while repeat offenders got fines of $2,000 and were given corrective work orders, which usually involved cleaning the streets and wearing a high-visibility jacket. The media were invited along to report on the public punishment of the shamed offenders. Five years ago, the ban was revised. The sale of gum with “health benefits” – chiefly nicotine gum – was permitted. Nicotine gum is only on sale in pharmacies and is only sold to those who produce government-issued ID (if pharmacists are discovered selling gum without checking ID, they risk a fine of $3,000 and a two-year jail term). Singapore does not have a chewing gum littering problem.