Welcome to the Digital Street Art Depot — a living archive where street art, memories and community stories come together. This guide will help you navigate the platform, use it in your practice, and contribute to a shared cultural archive. The Digital Street Art Depot enables cities to transform fragmented street art into a coherent, valued and actively managed urban collection — supported by data, community participation and heritage frameworks.

🌍 1. What is the Digital Street Art Depot?

The Digital Street Art Depot is a hybrid archive, database and civic heritage tool that connects street art, memory and community. It functions as a living, open and policy-aligned infrastructure that not only preserves street art, but also embeds it within formal heritage frameworks while enabling communities to act as co-creators of cultural memory.

It functions simultaneously as:

📦 A preservation system

• Safeguards street artworks through digital memory capsules (3D, VR, photo, video)
• Captures both the artwork and its spatial, social and temporal context before it disappears

👉 Responds directly to the challenge of ephemeral heritage, which is increasingly recognised within contemporary heritage discourse.

🧠 A living database (aligned with NED)

• Uses structured metadata (Meta-ID) in line with Dutch Digital Heritage (NED) standards
• Enables interoperability with wider heritage infrastructures

Each artwork is documented through:

• creator / authorship
• location and spatial context
• date and lifecycle
• themes and keywords
• community narratives
• documentation formats (2D, 3D, immersive)

👉 The Depot operates as a sustainable digital knowledge infrastructure, not a static archive.

⚖️ A heritage valuation framework (Aligned with Erfgoedwet & FARO principles)

The Depot integrates waarderingscriteria (heritage valuation criteria) directly into its structure and documentation process.

This allows street art to be assessed and understood through multiple heritage lenses:

• Cultural-historical value → relation to place, time, and urban development
• Social value → meaning for residents and communities
• Use value → role in public space, identity, and everyday experience
• Experiential value → aesthetic and emotional impact
• Future value → potential for reuse, education, and transmission

👉 This approach aligns with the Erfgoedwet, which recognises heritage as both material and immaterial, and increasingly acknowledges contemporary and community-based forms.

👉 It also directly reflects the FARO Convention, by:

• placing people and communities at the centre of heritage processes
• recognising heritage as a shared resource and civic right
• supporting participatory identification, interpretation, and transmission of heritage

💡 As a result, the Depot acts as a bridge between informal street art practices and formal heritage systems, making street art:

• visible
• assessable
• legitimate within institutional frameworks

🗣️ A participatory storytelling platform (FARO in practice)

• Collects stories, words, and community memories
• Enables multi-voiced documentation
• Supports co-creation with residents, artists, and local stakeholders

👉 This operationalises FARO’s principle of “heritage communities” — groups of people who value and actively shape heritage.

🔄 A reuse & public value engine

• Enables content reuse for:
  • education and non-formal learning
  • youth work and inclusion
  • placemaking and urban development
  • research and policy

👉 Contributes to public value creation, a core principle in both national and European cultural policy.

🤝 A connector between sectors

The Depot creates a shared space between:

• cultural sector
• social domain
• education
• urban development
• policy and governance

👉 Supporting integrated, cross-sectoral approaches to heritage and city-making.

🔓 An open-source and scalable infrastructure

• Built on WordPress (open-source CMS)
• Fully replicable and adaptable to other cities and contexts
• Supports distributed heritage ecosystems

👉 Aligns with:

• EU principles of open access and knowledge sharing
• DEN’s focus on sustainable and reusable digital infrastructures

🧭 2. How to Explore the Platform

At the centre of Digital Street Art Depot is the Street Art Collection, which exists today in almost every town around the world. The collection consists of the Artworks, which were created by the Artists. These Artworks can be viewed through Grid, List, City Map views and are registered with Artwork, Artist, Details, Archive, Stories, Immersive details. 

1. Collection : Grid view, List view, City Map view
   1. Artworks
      1. Gallery View – allows you to explore one by one
      2. Thumbnail View – allows you to see all artworks at once
      3. Timeline View – allows you to see the building and a lifespan of the artworks (from conception to demolition)
      4. About artwork
      5. Complex matrix based on RCE waardering criteria
      6. Archive – collateral information already available, e.g. news clips, photographs in press, articles, videos of the making off, all media from the beginning till the end
      7. Stories – user generated content from residents, stakeholders, visitors
      8. Immersive – VR, AR, 360, Splats, Google maps
   2. Artists
      1. Available information about the maker
2. Menu
   1. About DSAD
      1. How to Guide
      2. Dos and Donts
   2. About SAMA
      1. Who we are
      2. Why we made it
   3. Artists of the Collection

🤝 Start Now

Explore the platform: https://digitalstreetartdepot.nl/

🔍 Search and Filter:  Find artworks by artist, theme, or neighbourhood (e.g. identity, migration, community).

🧵 Follow Connections:  Explore how artworks relate across time, place, and social context through stories and collections.

📊 Understand the Value:  Each artwork is structured using a valuation framework (RCE waarderingscriteria), linking street art to formal heritage approaches.

💡 Tip: Use the platform as a living archive and story map — not just a database, but a tool to understand how street art reflects and shapes the city.

🧑‍🏫Why to Use the Platform in Your Practice

For Youth Workers

• Use artworks as conversation starters
• Let young people interpret and respond
• Build your own mini-projects or workshops

For Educators

• Integrate into non-formal learning modules
• Link to themes like identity, public space, participation

For Cultural Professionals

• Use as a reference archive
• Develop placemaking or storytelling concepts
• Support community engagement processes

💡 The Depot works best when you activate it with people, not just observe it.

⚖️ Ethics & Good Practice

• ✔️ Respect artists and communities
• ✔️ Always credit creators
• ✔️ Ask permission when needed
• ✔️ Be mindful of sensitive stories or locations
• ✔️ Avoid extractive documentation — aim for reciprocity

🚀 Why It Matters

Street art is:

• Temporary
• Context-based
• Community-driven

Without documentation, it disappears.

The Digital Street Art Depot ensures:

• 🧠 Memory is preserved
• 🗣️ Voices are amplified
• 🌱 New projects can grow from past work

How to Contribute

The Depot grows through collective input.

You can contribute by:

• Adding new artworks or capsules
• Sharing stories, quotes, or local knowledge
• Working with communities to co-create content
• Connecting your projects or research

👉 Think of yourself as a co-archivist, not just a user.

🔓 3. Open Source & Replicability

Build Your Own Digital Street Art Depot

The Digital Street Art Depot is designed as an open and replicable system.

👉 The platform is built in WordPress Open-Source, which means:

• It uses widely available, low-cost technology
• It can be cloned, adapted, and localised
• No proprietary software is required

What does this mean in practice?

✔ You can clone your own local depot
✔ You can adapt and delvelop it to your community, city or project
✔ You can integrate it into existing platforms or programmes

⚙️ Step-by-step: Setting up your Depot Clone

1. Request access to the base Depot

✔ Contact SAMA via Answers@StreetArtMuseumAmsterdam.com to request access to the Depot database
✔ You will receive a download link and technical instructions from our developers

2. Create a full system copy

Download a complete copy of the Digital Street Art Depot, including:

• Database (all structured content)
• Media files (images, video, 3D assets)
• Backend configuration (WordPress + plugins)
• Front-end (themes, layout, HTML)

👉 This forms a one-to-one replica of the working Depot environment.

3. Install locally

Install the cloned Depot on your local machine:

• Set up a local WordPress environment
• Import the database
• Upload media files
• Configure plugins and theme

👉 You now have a fully functional local version of the Depot.

4. Clean and prepare your base version

To create a reusable starting point:

• Remove SAMA-specific media and content
• Strip out existing artworks, stories, and archives
• Keep the structure, fields, and system logic intact

👉 The result is a lightweight, clean Depot framework ready for new content.

5. Add placeholder content

Populate the Depot with:

• Dummy artworks
• Sample metadata
• Test stories and archives

👉 This helps verify that the system works correctly before real data is added.

6. Adapt branding and identity

The Depot includes default SAMA design elements. To localise:

• Replace logos, colours, and typography
• Update institutional texts and descriptions
• Align visual identity with your organisation

👉 The system is designed to be modular but requires branding adaptation.

7. Technical alignment with your developer

Before going live:

• Review the framework, plugins, and dependencies
• Check compatibility with your hosting environment
• Align on updates, maintenance, and scalability

👉 A short technical consultation ensures a smooth transition from clone to live platform.

💡 Result

You now have your own Digital Street Art Depot instance:

• Fully functional
• Structurally aligned with heritage standards
• Ready to be populated with your local street art collection

💡 Important:  Open source does not mean “copy-paste.”  Each depot should reflect local context, communities, and narratives.  Think of this as a framework for replication, not a fixed template.