STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
between the two questionnaires. Questionnaires have been analysed in a quantitative way,
according to four main topics as follows:
• Regulations and permissions;
• Relationship between street arts and urban spaces – the choice of area;
• The different impacts of street art on the city;
• The opinion of street artists about the sustainability and the long term chances of their
event.
After a first evaluation, 16 questionnaires and 6 interviews remained as usable for further
comparison and analysis. Tables figuring in the following part of the study will be constructed
by these 22 cases 304 . In the tables figuring on the following pages, ‘1’ will indicate the positive
answer to the question; ‘0’ indicates when the answer is negative and ‘x’ indicates when the
person did not answer to the question.
3.1. Regulations and permissions
To begin with the most practical aspect of relationship between street arts, artists and the city,
questionnaires and interviews have dealt with problems of rules and permissions. What
permissions are needed to organise a street art event in the different cities, and which authorities
have to be connected in order to get these permissions? What types of regulations exist in the
different countries and which are the authorities initiating these rules? What are the main
difficulties artists and organisers have to face when claiming permissions? Are there common
problems or trends in the different countries?
Before analysing the answers, two remarks have to be made. The following analysis of
questionnaires will concentrate on how artists consider the problems related to regulations and
permissions in their countries. Although the extent of this research did not allow us to verify the
concrete regulations country by country, the following short text intends to give a general
overview on regulations in Europe with a specific view on two cases representing two extreme
situations: Hungary and France.
Street art regulations in Europe
Overprotection or ignorance?
By Levente Polyák
The European Union is often accused of being a mere economical cooperation
structure whose cultural dimension is less tangible than its economic processes.
Nevertheless, the cultural spheres and cultural industries that have their roots in the
separate nation states, are also increasingly globalised, and in certain measures,
„Europeanised“. A distinct feature of the European culture and urbanity is the traditional
quality and accessibility of its public spaces, its agoras, which are often described as
necessary spatial conditions for the dénouement of a democracy. Investigating the status
quo of European culture and cultural politics, one is inevitably confronted with the
question: how is culture present in these spaces? Or to put it in another way: how do
304 For the list of companies and persons interviewed, please consult the annex. Another interview has been carried
out on ECOC programme.
181
PE 375.307