Photographing the street art of Melbourne has been a passion, or more truthfully an obsession, of mine for the last twelve years, so becoming involved with Street Art Cities was a great partnership for me.
Street Art Cities (SAC) is a web and mobile based application that attempts to map the street art of the world. It was born in Europe in 2016 as a small attempt to create an online map to help out two street art hunters to hunt more effectively in their cities. Now, it is one of the world’s largest street art communities with over 1,600 cities in over 100 countries represented in the database.
In August 2023 I was asked by a street art hunter friend if I would like to join her efforts to update the Melbourne map on SAC. She had been “recruited” a month or so earlier and had quickly realised how much work there was to do. When she joined the SAC hunter team the Melbourne map had 237 artworks on it, and over the following year or so we added over 2,000 artworks and got the Melbourne map to where we felt it was a much better representation of Melbourne as one of the world’s leading street art cities.
It was a huge project that involved working suburb by suburb and artist by artist, analysing which pieces we didn’t have on the map, and checking through our extensive photo archives and determining which pieces were still in existence. It took a lot of organising, effort and travelling around our city, but that said it was a lot of fun and very satisfying.
We have since had another friend join the team and the three of us now try to do our best to keep the map up to date. It’s not an easy task, as the street art landscape is constantly changing. We are fortunate to be part of a vibrant street art community and we have a number of other street art hunters who assist us and allow us to use their photos.
We are all very proud to have had Melbourne sitting at the number one position in the SAC list of popular cities for the last ten months or so. Other Australian cities in the top 50 currently are Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra.
You will find the web-based version of SAC here; https://streetartcities.com
The SAC web page home screen is shown in Figure 1.
Fig 1 - The SAC Web Home page
You can search for cities, artists, hunters and other things like street art festivals using the search field at the top of the home screen.
Clicking the “All cities” button on the home screen will display the SAC Cities screen (shown in Figure 2).
Fig 2 - SAC Web Cities page
This screen displays the top 50 “most popular” cities in the SAC database. “Most Popular” is a ranking that combines the number of active artworks in the SAC database for the city and the number of “visits” to the website or mobile app for the city.
You can also see the rankings based on the “number of artworks” or “number of visits” using the drop-down on the Cities screen.
Clicking a city name will display that cities map (see Figure 3a) which is usually centred around the CBD.
Clicking a city name will display that cities map (see Figure 3a) which is usually centred around the CBD.
Fig 3a - SAC Web City Map page
There is a scrollable window to the right of the map that contains other information about the city.
You can scroll around the city map and zoom in and out using standard gestures.
Artworks are indicated on the map with small circular icons, where artworks are clustered closely together a red circle is shown with the number of artworks at the location displayed in the circle. As you zoom in the clustered artworks break up into the icons showing the artwork.
When the map is at maximum zoom, if there are still too many artworks clustered at a location to be shown individually you can click the red circle icon, this will display a small tooltip that contains the icons for the clustered artworks (see Figure 3b).
Fig 3b - SAC Web City page (zoomed)
Clicking one of the artwork picture icons on the map will display that artwork in the scrollable window at the right of the map (see Figure 4).
Fig 4 - SAC Web City page with Artwork
Here you will see all of the photos of the artwork that have been uploaded, the address (location) in text and on the map, the artist(s) name, the description (as entered by the hunter) and some other details.
You can click the Navigate button to launch the location in Google Maps or click the artists name to go to the artists page for more of their artwork.
SAC will automatically gather all the artworks for an artist and create a page for them, then the artist has the ability to “Claim” their page, and once verified by the SAC admin team they gain control of their page and have the ability to upload a profile picture, biography, website link and social media links. Once verified, artists can also upload their own artworks, and control to a limited degree how their page displays.
Figure 5a shows an artist page for a “claimed” verified artist page, Figure 5b shows and artist page for an unclaimed page.
Fig 5a - SAC Web Artist page (claimed)
Fig 5b - SAC Web Artist page (unclaimed)
When an artwork is a collaboration between multiple artists it will be shown on all of their pages in a special section of the artist page titled “Collaborations”.
When artworks are badly tagged, damaged, removed or painted over by other artworks they are archived rather than deleted, so they remain on the database as a history for the city and the artist. On the artist page these are shown at the bottom in a section titled “Archived”. They can also be accessed via the Artworks and Historic Artworks buttons in the City Map screen.
A map showing all the artists artworks is shown at the bottom of the artists page.
Clicking an artwork from the artists page will show the artwork page (see Figure 6).
Fig 6 - SAC Web Artwork page
The mobile app, available for both Apple and Android devices, provides very similar functionality, but is slightly less effective in some ways, but has some added features not available on the website.
The app screenshots shown are those for the Apple version of the app.
Figure 7 shows the SAC apps Home screen and the Explore screen (accessed by pressing magnifying glass icon).
Fig 7 - SAC mobile app Home and Explore screens
The map on the Home screen uses the devices location services and centres itself on the users location. Use standard gestures to scroll and zoom the map, and click on an artwork icon to display the artwork information (see Figure 8).
The bottom half of the Home screen shows an activity stream that can be configured to either show everything (all SAC activity) or just activity for cities, artists and hunters the user has chosen to “follow” on the app. This activity can include “hunter” activity like adding, updating or archiving artworks as well as “community” activity as the mobile apps add the ability for users to “Like” artworks, to flag that they have “Seen” the artwork, as well as adding “Community Notes” if an artwork has been damaged, removed or painted over, or if they believe the information is incorrect. These community notes are forwarded to the hunters for that city for their action. This is a wonderful avenue for information to keep the city data up to date.
The search features on the Explore page work similarly to the search functions on the web page.
Fig 8 - SAC mobile app City Map and Artwork screens
Please note that the SAC app map features do not work quite as well as the web page for closely clustered artworks. The red circle icons do not show the number of artworks, and sometimes closely clustered artworks do not appear on the map at all. For that reason, if you are using SAC to plan outings or street art hunts, I recommend using the web based app.
Street Art Cities is a truly magnificent global achievement managed by a large global team of largely volunteer people to promote and support the street art community.
Street Art makes our cities much more vibrant and beautiful places to live and visit, the many artists whose work adorns our streets are superbly talented and amazingly dedicated, viewing their work gives me a huge amount of pleasure. So, if you’re a fan of art on our streets, take a look at Street Art Cities and go and explore the street art in your city, or any city in the world you’re visiting.
This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of Artists Down Under magazine.