Graffiti is a controversial urban art form. While graffiti artists often work illegally, and many people consider their projects to be vandalism, a new trend for "clean graffiti" projects involves artists legally creating images by removing areas of dirt from old buildings. The renegade UK-based graffiti artist Banksy has become so popular Hollywood stars buy his work for hundreds of thousands of dollars, helping to legitimize graffiti and inspire smaller-scale graffiti projects in urban centers internationally. Some local projects employ professional graffitists to work in areas they fear would otherwise be defaced by vandals.
Buildings are at the very heart of most urban art projects. Prize-winning "high-tech" architects such as Rianzo Piano and Richard Rogers (who designed the renowned Pompidou Centre in Paris), or Spain's Gaudi, with his fantastical nature-inspired designs, are 20th-century examples of how urban art projects can be inspired by both the industrial and the organic. Small-scale modern urban architecture projects such as a hand-made school in Bangladesh, which featured in a 2010/11 exhibition at New York's MoMA, focus on urban art projects as a way of meeting vital local needs.
Urban environments have inspired photographic art since the 1800s. Leading photographers in this field include Henri Cartier-Bresson and Wolfgang Tillmans. While urban photography can focus on the built environment, the genre usually revolves around documentary projects looking at specific aspects of urban life and "street photography," which mid-20th-century American photographer Walker Evans described as capturing a "cross section view of average people." Now, cheap and easy-to-use cameras allow community groups to run photography-based urban art projects documenting local daily life, which may provide important social history records for the future.
British painter L.S. Lowry was a pioneer in capturing the artistic "beauty" of urban landscapes as he recorded the changing face of industrial Manchester in the early to mid-20th century and his projects inspired new attitudes and styles of urban art. In 2010, American conceptional artist Spencer Tunick announced a "public art" project inspired by Lowry involving 1,000 nude volunteers posing for his "Everyday People" exhibition. The dramatically different interpretations of a similar theme illustrate the endless possibilities of urban art projects.