Reworking the spectacle: Punk’s appropriation of post‑war urban space

Existing histories of punk tend to represent modernist architecture as symbolic of social and economic decline. This article argues that these environments also served as canvases upon which diverse expressions of subcultural identity and community were created. Drawing on zines and artefacts consulted at Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, it analyses how tower blocks, administrative centres and transport corridors were converted into repeatable motifs through captioning, collage, serial sequencing and low-cost reproduction. A series of case studies demonstrates how these methods worked in practice across a range of publications, from Situationist-informed montage and architectural critique to anti-racist organizing within estate environments. The article argues that these publications translate critical urban theory into practical graphic procedures, and that Situationist texts circulated across multiple zines as usable material. The article extends existing genealogies established by Greil Marcus and Jon Savage by foregrounding the visual mechanisms through which punk engaged post-war urbanism. Through close visual analysis of archival material, it connects punk graphic production to wider political and cultural debates of the 1970s.