Signs, billboards, and graffiti a social-spatial discourse in a regenerated council estate

Abstract

Residents within a council housing area in Stirling, Scotland, which is undergoing regeneration, took photos for an auto-driven photo-elicitation study. There was limited guidance on what images to capture. Residents were simply invited to focus on the neighbourhood. An unexpected finding was the significance participating residents gave to the linguistic and semiotic landscape such as signs, billboards and graffiti. Within the interview, it became apparent that the participants considered the signs as part of the expression of spatial social discourse. Therefore, the billboards and signs placed there by the powerful social actors such as developers were understood and scrutinised for their claims and the lived reality of residents. Also, graffiti was understood in context with the social-spatial dialectic of being inscribed within a community with an underlying sectarian discourse.