1 Draft article before production. To access published article in Visual Anthropology which includes all photos visit: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08949468.2015.973326?journalCode=gvan20#preview Title: Cracks and Contestation: Towards an Ecology of Graffiti and Abatement 1 Authors: Michelle Stewart, University of Regina Chris Kortright, Independent Researcher Introduction In many ways this article is about taking a walk—taking a walk with a camera. It is about moving slowly through city streets and alleys. It is about flicks and blotches of paint. That is all to say that this article focuses on graffiti and acts of graffiti removal—abatement—to investigate spatial antagonism and ideologies of private property. [Insert Figure 1] Informed in part by research with police in the United States and Canada over a three year period, the material presented here can be traced back to 2005 and 2006 and is one part ethnographic material and one part photographic interest. In conducting preliminary research on community-oriented policing, I attended workshops on crime prevention in which graffiti was discussed as a social blight. As part of this research I also worked closely with police as they indexed graffiti in particular neighborhoods as evidence of gang activity, or emblematic of regional disorder. Moving in the background of these discussions was an explicit engagement with the so-called “broken windows theory. 2 ” Police, working in collaboration with community associations and city ordinance workers, asserted that graffiti, if left unabated, facilitated (more) criminal activity. Seen this way, graffiti was understood as evidence of disorder and therefore seen as a threat that needed to be removed. The removal, painting over graffiti, is called abatement. I became familiar with the language of abatement through engagements with police and city ordinance workers. These discussions about abatement informed my walks, and