Word: graffiti
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...murals have lent the city a dismal air, a constant reminder to Iranians that they are living under an Islamic theocracy that is hostile to everything it considers Western, including beauty. Now the billboards display attractive black-and-white photographs of grinning revolutionaries and Islamic calligraphy that resembles urban graffiti. One morning a white van with PEYK-E KHORSHID (MESSENGER OF THE SUN) emblazoned on its sides rolled into my neighborhood, and two women in powder blue chadors opened its doors to unveil a portable library. They smiled at passersby and handed out white gladioluses and free books as part...
...painted mostly by locals. And they have an even more practical purpose than beautification or attracting tourism: they're an anticrime initiative. Philadelphia has grappled with a murder-a-day crime rate that is among the highest in America's big cities. For many years, the city's rampant graffiti problem was seen as closely linked to more violent crimes, whether explicitly as gang markings or simply as a sign of neighborhoods in disrepair. But in 1984 then mayor W. Wilson Goode made a fateful decision: instead of declaring war on the spray-painting vandals, he would offer them amnesty...
...only beautify but also pacify, Golden, now 51, has spent the past 20 years enlisting as many communities as possible--mostly schoolkids teamed with artists but at times other groups, like cops or prisoners--in planning and painting the murals. A decade ago, she spun off from the Anti-Graffiti Network and started the Mural Arts Program, an organization inspired by F.D.R.'s Works Progress Administration that, as one former student says, is pro-art rather than antigraffiti. "Race, crime and violence, immigration, gentrification--I think it's our responsibility to help people grapple with these different issues," says Golden...
...graffiti war continues unabated in other cities. New York City recently doubled sentences for graffiti offenders. Peoria, Ariz., has placed surveillance cameras in graffiti-prone areas. Philadelphia doesn't keep exact stats on graffiti crimes but says the mural-as-peacemaker model has proved its worth. In the late 1990s, the Grays Ferry neighborhood suffered an outbreak of racial violence. Golden believed the divisiveness called for a multiracial mural. Not everyone agreed. "It was a mess, a real mess," recalls Jim Helman, a white neighborhood activist. "And along comes this diminutive little thing [Golden] who promises to do this ridiculous...
...Talibanization and violence of its neighbors. It was rare to see people in public carrying guns. Women don't wear veils when they do their daily chores outside their homes or visit neighbors. There were only a handful of seminaries. And it was difficult to find anti-American graffiti or the slogans of Jihad on houses and buildings along its narrow roads that zigzag into the hills...