Writing About Town
"A bus or Rapid journey to Tower City and beyond reveals graffiti, debates on bathroom walls, billboards, public documents, writing on vehicles, and other “texts” that define the city’s neighborhoods differently and help to shape the urban environment."
This statement, and therefore the question itself, poses a number of different issues in my personal opinion. While the creativity of such things as graffiti and writing on bathroom walls is hard to replicate due to personal touches, the vast majority of the writing in Cleveland is not individual to it, nor does it help to define the city as a whole. What the different writing samples is more define the culture of our country than a single area. After recently being in Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and New York, I can safely and confidently say that the writing found in all of these areas was almost identical.
The writing within cities falls into two main categories that I have seen. Ads, which are the most prolific, follow the same structural and design outline. All the billboards or posters you see try to send similar messages in even more similar ways (usually trying to push a product upon consumers or ask for donations, in very bright colors with loud attention grabbing images). These types of writing do little more than outline the tastes, desires, and needs of the people in our society. They do not define a geographical area. The same can be said of the second type of writing that can be found in cities; Personal. While lots of personal writing can define an individual it defines an area even less than ads do. Again, while the writing shows much about the individual, it shows more about what is culturally acceptable on the whole, as opposed to the immediate area.
So in conclusion, I do not think the writing that is found in and around a city defines “what” it is, or shapes an area in any substantial way. If anything, it can contribute _slightly_ to the area as a whole, but it does not have that large of an influence.
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