Abstract
Cited as an elusive metropolis, the city of Johannesburg largely resists the imagination.
Following on from Lucy Gasser’s (2014) reading of Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with
Keys this article considers how graffiti and street art offer ways of ‘mapping’ the city.
Focusing on Nuttall and Mbembe’s distinction between surface and depth I argue,
through a particular focus on the Westdene Graffiti Project, how street art captures
some of the tensions in current South Africa and provides new ways of understanding
Johannesburg by meeting a map’s six key functions: getting to know, re-forming
boundaries, making exist, reproducing reality, inscribing meaning, and establishing
patterns of control. The result is a city written from below.