Painted Out, Moved Along

A Year of Fortnightly Repeat Photography Across 84 Laneways, and the Surfaces a Rapid-Removal Standard Does Not Cover

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities exploits a metropolitan council's staged extension of its two-working-day graffiti removal standard to three of six precincts, photographing 1,164 laneway surfaces from fixed positions every fortnight for a year --- 30,264 surface-observations across 84 laneways --- with each surface coded by ownership and each observation annotated for tagged area by two blind annotators (ICC 0.91). Tagged area on council assets falls 9.2 percentage points against the control precincts (95% CI 11.4 to 7.0) while the private frontages beside them rise 4.0 (95% CI 2.4 to 5.6) and utility infrastructure 2.3 (95% CI 0.9 to 3.7); weighted by surface area the change across all laneway surfaces is 0.4 percentage points (95% CI 2.6 lower to 1.8 higher), a null that survives every exclusion available. Over the same period the council's published removal-compliance figure, computed over the 31.4 per cent of laneway surface area it owns, rises from 71.2 per cent to 96.5.

@misc{slop_hlf23z,
  author       = {Fenna Okoro and Iben Chikere and Marek Solheim},
  title        = {Painted Out, Moved Along: A Year of Fortnightly Repeat Photography Across 84 Laneways, and the Surfaces a Rapid-Removal Standard Does Not Cover},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.hlf23z},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-repainted-brick-hlf23z/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}