The city as a canvas: who decides what stays, and why?
When a wall becomes public, everyone becomes a stakeholder and not everyone agrees. An interesting discussion on the first panel talk of the Crystal Summit.
The Crystal Ship turned ten this year and with it, The Crystal Summit marks a decade of transforming Ostend into one of Europe’s most vibrant open‑air art museums.
What began as a bold experiment has grown into a cultural engine: a festival, a community, a meeting point for artists, hunters, locals, and curious wanderers. For the 10th anniversary, Tourism Ostend and Street Art Cities launched something new: the festival built its first Expert Conference, a professional half‑day gathering structured around three core tensions shaping the future of street art:
The City as a Canvas – Who decides what stays, and why?
Street Art: Social Impact or Artwashing? – What responsibility do artists carry?
Street Art & Tourism – Where promotion helps, and where it hurts.
The first Expert Conference: The City as a Canvas: Who decides what stays, and why? brought together three voices who represent the full spectrum of street art governance: grassroots culture, municipal policy, and festival organization. Their conversation revealed how public space is negotiated, protected, contested, and sometimes fought over.
Three worlds collide: grassroots, city policy and curated culture
Grassroots: Gary McKay (Yardworks Glasgow)
Gary embodies the raw origins of street art , the kid with a tag, the writer looking for a wall, the young person who needs a safe space more than a canvas. Yardworks has spent two decades building exactly that: a community‑driven ecosystem where graffiti becomes mentorship, employability, and belonging.
He reminds us that in many cities, street art still begins with trouble:
kids trespassing on railways, tagging their neighborhoods, getting arrested. Yardworks steps in not to neutralize them, but to give them a place to grow.
Gary’s Glasgow is a city of unwritten rules, sectarian colors, territorial tensions, and the constant negotiation of what is “allowed.” His team often acts as Switzerland: neutral, careful, and deeply aware of how a single color can spark conflict.
Policy: Ted Fenton (Stadscuratorium Amsterdam)
Ted represents the other end of the spectrum: public space as a regulated commons.
Amsterdam’s approach is built on shared ownership, residents, councils, building owners, heritage boards, and artists all have a stake.
Ted’s key point:
Public space is shared, and shared space comes with procedures.
He doesn’t advocate for more rules, he advocates for more awareness. When murals go up without understanding the legal or social context, they can come down just as quickly. He cites two recent Amsterdam cases where resident complaints forced murals to be removed or reconsidered.
Policy, in his view, isn’t about control, it’s about preventing heartbreak.
Organizers: Daniël Claessens (All Caps Rotterdam)
Daniël sits between the two worlds. His festival model is a “pressure cooker”: 20 murals at once, 20 lifts, 20 artists painting side by side. The result is choice, if a resident doesn’t like one mural, they can walk one street further and find something they do.
His philosophy is simple:
Artistic freedom is essential — but context matters.
Artists at All Caps research neighborhoods. They adapt. They choose not to provoke for provocation’s sake. Daniël doesn’t censor, but he also doesn’t force artists into statements that don’t fit the community.
What the panel really revealed
1. Public space is co‑owned
Artists, residents, building owners, municipalities, tourists, and even social media audiences all feel ownership. This makes every mural a negotiation.
2. Street art is losing and reinventing, its “sexy” edge
Commissioned murals are safer, more polished, more visible. Unauthorized interventions are fewer. But festivals like All Caps keep the rebellious spark alive through curated interventions.
3. The line between art and offense is contextual, not universal
A watermelon painted in Glasgow can be a political symbol.
A color can be a provocation.
A mural can be removed because one resident feels it affects their “living quality.”
4. Decision-making power is distributed, inconsistent, and emotional
Sometimes the building owner decides.
Sometimes the municipality.
Sometimes the neighborhood.
Sometimes the artist.
Sometimes culture itself.
There is no single authority, and that’s exactly why this conversation matters.
Why this matters for the next decade of street art
The Crystal Summit’s first Expert Conference shows that the future of street art will not be defined by artists alone. It will be shaped by:
grassroots spaces that protect authenticity
policies that protect fairness
festivals that protect artistic freedom
communities that protect meaning
Street art is no longer just an act, it’s a system.
And systems need dialogue.
The Crystal Ship’s 10th anniversary marks a turning point: from creating murals to creating frameworks, from painting walls to shaping the culture that surrounds them.
This is what the Crystal Summit is becoming:
a place where the global street art community decides how the next decade will look, feel, and function.
Watch the full episode
Watch or listen to the full talk to hear all the opinions.
Full episode: The City as a Canvas – Who decides what stays, and why?
Conclusion: A Street Art Cities Perspective
From where we stand, this panel wasn’t just a conversation, it was a mirror held up to the entire ecosystem we document, support, and connect. Street art has never been one thing; it has always been a collision of backgrounds, motivations, and realities. What this discussion made unmistakably clear is that the future of public art will be shaped by how well these worlds learn to listen to each other. And exactly something we wrote earlier about:
For Street Art Cities, that means doubling down on what we do best:
mapping the full spectrum, not just the polished murals; amplifying local voices, not just institutional ones; and making public space legible, so artists, residents, and cities understand the stakes of every wall. The tension between autonomy, policy, and community isn’t a problem to solve, it’s the landscape we operate in.
As The Crystal Ship celebrates its tenth year, the Crystal Summit shows us what the next decade demands: more transparency, more dialogue, more shared ownership. Street art doesn’t belong to one group, it belongs to everyone who walks the city. Our role is to keep that conversation open, honest, and accessible, so the walls we love can keep evolving with the people who live around them.