Mapping Street Art around the World: From Underground to Mainstream

Street art emerges as a new creative sector across the world, putting cities on the map as a destination for art lovers to admire murals.

Street art has travelled a remarkable distance in just a few decades. What began as illegal tags on New York subway cars in the 1970s — rooted in hip-hop culture and youth rebellion — has become a recognized global creative sector, but it is not yet a separate artistic movement.

Artists like Banksy and KAWS now command auction prices in the millions, striking murals go viral on social media platforms within hours, and cities that once painted over murals now also often commission and protect them. All this helped catalyze the shift from underground movement to mainstream.

But how far has this diffusion actually gone, and where does street art concentrate? New data mapping pieces across hundreds of cities worldwide offers the first systematic picture of the movement's global reach.

Global Street Art Creativity: Pieces by Economy and Population – Streetartcities.com. Note: 2025 street art data is incomplete and uses 2023 UN population data. Chart: Creative Industries Insights Series, WIPO (2026) – Technical Note.

Top economies for street art: a global phenomenon with urban hotspots

At the economy level, Australia leads globally with 9,919 documented pieces, followed closely by the United States (9,503) and France (8,627). The top 20 economies—also including Spain, Belgium, Germany, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Switzerland, Argentina, New Zealand, Greece, and Austria—demonstrate street art's truly global reach.

Particularly notable are smaller economies like Belgium (6,426 pieces), Portugal (3,227), and Norway (2,306) achieving rankings comparable to larger economies, suggesting cultural factors beyond population size drive street art creativity locally.

For yet other economies like China, India, Indonesia, Bolivia, or many economies in Africa, arguably, the data is less well populated and total numbers might reflect fewer street art hunters in a place more than actual pieces created in a given economy. Hunters document and photograph pieces in cities worldwide, often sharing them through social media or dedicated platforms, helping the art spread and enabling artists to gain recognition beyond the place of creation.

Top cities for street art lovers

The cities with the most hunted street art pieces reveal some surprising patterns. While expected leaders like Paris (2,951 pieces), Los Angeles (2,337), and New York (1,620) appear prominently in the data, the top position belongs to Melbourne (3,827 pieces)—a city that has systematically embraced street art through legal protections and cultural policy.

Other surprises include Bergen, Norway (1,493 pieces) ranking sixth globally despite a population under 300,000, and Ghent, Belgium (953 pieces) appearing in the top ten. This could suggest street art flourishes not only in megacities but in smaller urban centers that create supportive ecosystems through legal walls, festivals, and community acceptance, or that have partnered with hunter platforms from early on. Cologne, Montpellier, Basel, and Antwerp, when weighted by population size, similarly punch above their weight, demonstrating that progressive cultural policy can cultivate disproportionate creative output.

The complete top 20 includes the following city destinations: Melbourne, Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Bergen, Lisbon, Cologne, Ghent, Valencia, Phoenix, Berlin, Montpellier, Brisbane, London, Basel, Antwerp, Lugo, San Francisco, and Brussels.

Top 20 City Destinations: Most Street Art Pieces – Streetartcities.com. Note: 2025 data is incomplete and population data from geonames.org. Chart: Creative Industries Insights Series, WIPO (2026) – Technical Note.

Street art culture as a valuable asset

Over the last decade, street art has evolved from subcultural expression to significant economic and cultural force worldwide. The new sector’s mere growth, democratizing impulse, and potential economic impact warrant serious attention from policy-makers, industry stakeholders, and researchers interested in the phenomenon.

As art lovers and cities worldwide recognize street art's value—documented in thousands of pieces hunted across hundreds of cities—the movement continues reshaping urban landscapes and challenging traditional boundaries between public space, creative expression, and commerce. The micro data co-published by WIPO and streetartcities.com is available via its open data initiative. It reveals not just where street art exists but suggests why it thrives: in communities that embrace it as cultural asset rather than liability.

Together with the data, WIPO will soon release a Call for Papers [PDF] aiming to encourage further research into global street art providing the basis for sustainable ecosystem development and an international forum for stakeholder exchanges.

Download the technical note on how the data was processed for the analysis