Adelaide has very few recent urban ruins. So this does not provide a fruitful way to explore the past and the present caused by economic downturn, natural disasters, environmental accidents, or a rustbelt city's decline. What it does have is a lot of nineteenth century heritage buildings that stand empty. It is these building that many use to frame Adelaide as backward because it rejected “progress" in the form of post-war architectural internationalism. Preserving the old is seen to be condemning the city to stagnation.
Adelaide's decaying buildings and empty urban lots that have been marked by street artists, such as Jules:
In spite of the the zero tolerance policy of the early 2000s to steet art these sites of architectural decay are empty spaces or vacant lots often became a fluid open air gallery walls for street artists. In these places in our cities, often unloved, the street art transforms and creates meaning where perhaps none existed before. This kind of transitory street art is quite different from the monochromatic tags that appear overnight on your wall or fence or the practice of capping (ie., disrespectfully defaced works by prominent street artists).
CDH points out that street art emerged from graffiti culture. The key distinction of street art was that it was an open culture; the average person on the street was meant to understand it.
Street art typically used an iconographic vocabulary of mass-media motifs like celebrity faces and retro gaming aesthetics. Its immediate familiarity meant anyone could interpret this low form of art, even though it was in squalid and dirty back alleyways and made of low art materials. It suggests entropy, a running down, a decline or decay of modernism's formalist legacy in the art institution as well as a precarious art that lives on in photographic representations in a cyberspace that is constantly being reconfigured.