Across many Western cities, including Cardiff, walls narrate urban stories. Traces left by spray cans and paint raise increasingly familiar public debates on graffiti and street art.
Isabella’s research explores the legal geographies of graffiti in the city of Cardiff. Her dissertation focused on how public space is (b)ordered through law and policy, and how graffiti, often positioned as disorder, can instead be read as a spatial trace of identity, resistance, and presence. Informed by fieldwork, council interviews, and critical policy analysis, her work examines how participatory visual culture — especially youth-led mural practices — can be reimagined as both environmental pedagogy and spatial intervention. Her ‘Traces of Us’ concept situates graffiti as a potential tool for teaching ecological themes and fostering inclusive urban authorship.
About the Speaker
Isabella Ward is a recent graduate in Human Geography and Planning from Cardiff University. She is the founder of the Traces of Us concept — an initiative that uses mural-making and legal graffiti workshops to empower young people to tell their stories, mark their presence, and embed environmental messages directly onto the city’s walls. Isabella believes the future of planning must be collaborative, creative, and radically inclusive. Her work insists that urban space is not neutral, and neither is silence.
