Anyone visiting large cities in industrialised countries cannot help but see traces of graffiti. In many cities these are found on urban train systems, while in cities like Paris or New York, where security measures largely prevent graffiti on trains, buildings are often covered with the ‘tags’ of graffiti writers. In Paris, for example, during the 1990s the task of rendering building surfaces spray-paint-proof became a major area of the building industry. It is far from certain who is winning the battle – a walk along streets in Paris' poorer northern suburbs, or in areas like the 20th arrondissement, reveals a streetscape often covered in tags.

The phenomenon is not new, the first tags appearing in New York in 1971 (Vulbeau 1992: 24). These first American tags tended to reflect the locality of the graffiti writer, both in style (different neighbourhoods would have particular characteristics), and in the tag itself; for example, a tag such as ‘DEX183’ would indicate that the graffiti writer was from 183rd street. By 1973 the tagging had extended to the metropolitan railway system, which over the next decade would lead to increased surveillance and policing as well as, from the mid-1980s, programs to ensure that train surfaces could be easily cleaned. Great efforts were made to remove tags almost as soon as they were drawn. In mid-1989 the New York transport system was declared tag-free.