Ottawalls: Street Art, Visual Hegemony, and Digital Placemaking

Ottawalls is a living archive mapping murals and legal street art across the National Capital Region. I began building the platform in October 2025, fresh from a sabbatical spent traveling through Europe and the Middle East.

You can often find the most interesting and honest street art in back alleys and popular community spots. It is in those places where I witnessed the sociopolitical power of public art. I saw this power firsthand across my travels: from the murals dedicated to workers' rights in Lyon, to the urgent anti-war commentary written on the walls of Tel Aviv and Paris, and finally to the highly curated installations at the STRAAT Museum in Amsterdam.This global exposure made me realize that public art is a vital, democratic medium that reflects the history and contemporary issues of the place in which it exists.

Returning to Ottawa, I recognized a gap in my hometown's relationship with its public walls and the lack of a long-lasting, quality digital archive. Apart from local resident John Sankey’s work mapping murals back in the year 2000 and the odd CBC article on the latest local pieces, I struggled to find information online about the murals I biked past on my daily commute.

For a long time, Ottawa's legal framework treated murals and public street art no differently than corporate signs. It wasn't until 2022 that the city recognized art as its own entity by introducing a standalone Mural By-law (No. 2022-304). This regulatory history explains why a lot of the murals I’ve personally mapped are new, painted post-2018. Because street art is inherently ephemeral, it is easily forgotten, which leads to the erasure of our local cultural history; Ottawa’s street art scene simply lacked the necessary infrastructure for longevity and recognition. So, I got to work.

Biking across the city, I began snapping photos and taking detailed notes on every mural I passed, constantly expanding my routes to widen the project's scope. When my collection surpassed 50 murals, I built a centralized database to organize the mix of artist names, field notes, images, and geospatial data. My ultimate goal was to open this data to the public through a modern, intuitive design, ensuring the community could easily access, explore, and value Ottawa's street art.That database became the foundation for Ottawalls. Over the last few months, I have focused entirely on making this project a true community effort. To democratize the data I collected, I added the ability for other websites to easily embed the map and murals. I also built a community submission process so that anyone can now add new murals, edit information, or contribute data to help this archive grow.

I believe Ottawa should be a city that celebrates its street art and muralists. That is why Ottawalls is much more than just a map or an archive, functioning instead as a foundation for civic movement. Built to scale and driven by the community, this platform will grow with our city. Right now, I am actively partnering with local Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) to get the map embedded on their websites. By tracking engagement through these partnerships, we can gather the real-world data needed to prove the economic value of public art and advocate for more civic arts funding in our communities.