Abstract:

Skateboarding has been dubbed many things, a sport, a hobby, a childish fad and by some definitions, a dangerous and disruptive pursuit undertaken by hoodlums and down and outs. The specific type of skateboarding; ‘street skating’, that this essay will examine has been by design, a nuisance to urban planners, architects and local municipal bodies since its inception in the early 1980s. This is because 1) it involves the misappropriation and in many cases the damaging of street furniture and 2) it does an exceptional job (whether its perpetrators do so consciously or not) of highlighting the manufactured nature of neoliberal public space, public space that is only public to consumers, office workers and other conventioneers whilst excluding and sectionalising other subsets of society such as homeless people, panhandlers, young people and the elderly through defensive architecture and punitive policy. Although some local authorities take a kinder view to street skating, whether it be for its entrepreneurial qualities that align it with neoliberal development goals or for its inherently anarchic and DIY image that helps cities brand themselves as centres of ‘creativity’ and ‘culture’, it is still largely viewed as an urban pathology by many western municipalities. This essay will explore with the aid of two located case studies (John F. Kennedy plaza in Philadelphia and the Southbank Centre’s Undercroft in London), how skateboarders and their ethos of rejection of control and active participation can physically and socially regenerate urban areas, weaving a more cohesive and engaged urban fabric.

Introduction:

Despite the fact that their practice makes use of public space in new and inventive ways, bringing animation to them and creating ‘lived space’ [1], skateboarders have been historically and are currently alienated from public space, both by local administrations and private companies. Ostensibly, this is because they will cause property damage, sue when they get injured, pose a risk to pedestrians, and foster an environment for anti-social behaviour and criminality. However, these views quickly become unviable once examined in any detail; ‘prior research has debunked claims made by cities that skateboarders will sue when injured or that property damage is insuperable’ (Giamarino and Chiu, 2019), skaters posing a risk to pedestrians is largely conjecture based entirely on what ‘could’ happen, and for better or worse, much research has shown that skateboarders actually often clear spaces of other urban undesirables, not attract them (Howell, 2005). The most likely explanation then for why urban authorities are so averse to skateboarding, is that it critiques the ‘simulated’ public spaces that govern cities (Howell, 2001) and by extension the market forces that create them. That is to say, public space that seems public however is exclusionary to those whose actions don’t have an obvious exchange value. As Michael Fotheringham, (an architect that gave San Francisco’s Union Square a makeover) explains - good design focuses on the ‘needs and comforts’ of the ‘prime client’ (Hansen, 2001 in Howell, 2001) rather than those of the average citizen.

It is important to note though that although this essay largely focuses on cities that do, not all municipal bodies take such a draconian, pathologizing view to skateboarding, they are ‘beginning to recognize that the incorporation of skateboarding into metropolitan urban fabrics may bring about positive social and economic benefits’ (Giamarino and Chiu, 2019). For example, the parisian suburb of Creteil actually restored marble benches that were worn down by skateboarders as they realised that the skaters’ presence helped to deter nefarious activity. Moreover, the city authorities in Copenhagen, Denmark allow, and even fund skateboarding all over the city for the annual ‘Copenhagen Open’ skate contest.

That said, this essay will explore how by resisting this simulated public space that rules many modern cities, the presence of skateboarders, through the interpretive and engaging nature of their practice, can have a positive and regenerative impact on urban areas, leading them to be more expression and engagement based rather than consumption based. It will do this by first outlining various conceptual perspectives relating to skateboarding and public space, I will then contextualise these concepts with the help of the two aforementioned located case study style examples - Southbank in London and Love Park in Philadelphia. The concepts covered will start with skateboarders’ position in the new public space, that is, increasingly controlled and commodified public space that restricts movement and expression. I will then discuss defence and surveillance - how hostile architecture, surveillance, and legislation flush out skateboarders and other demographics identified as urban pathologies. Finally, I will consider guerrilla activism - how skateboarding’s prefigurative and anti establishment ethos and mode of practice make it an innately potent criticism of neoliberal city space.

In terms of argumentative structure, this essay will not take an objective stance with equally weighted points on either side of the question posed by the title. Instead it will critically explore current conceptions and implications of public space through the lens of skateboarding in order to ultimately conclude whether the presence of skateboarders does indeed aid regeneration and civic engagement or not. The rationale for this is that a more objective stance would be too reductionist of an approach as it limits the anthropological and philosophical scope of the question, given that a large proportion of the essay would have to be dedicated to presenting data on the physical and economic impacts of skateboarding on property; a pursuit seems banal and technocratic relative to exploring the sociological impact of skateboarders in urban space making. That said, this essay will still be rooted in fact and by design, will address various perspectives contrary to its main narrative. Amongst these will be the perception that skateboarding breeds gang related activity and antisocial behaviour, the perception that skateboarders only degrade the urban environment, destroying property and leaving litter, and the perception that skateboarders are insular and exclude others from shared public space.

Footnotes

1] This term was used by Sam Elstub, (a landscape architect for skatepark company Betong Park) at a design museum talk I attended titled ‘How does skateboarding shape cities?’

Copenhagen Open contest in full swing 

Urban misappropriation by skateboarders - a brief history:

Skateboarding officially began in the 1950s and 60s, however this style involved primitive technologies and was more a form of acrobatics than anything else, given that it purely involved doing handstands and other such gymnastic acts whilst rolling on four wheels. Consequently, it was viewed as a circus fad and quickly died out.

Therefore, the widely accepted birth of skateboarding as it relates to today's current forms came in 1973 with a group of surfers from the ‘Dogtown’ area of Santa Monica, California. The group were sponsored by local surf shop ‘Ho surfboards and Zephyr production team’, run by Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom who were accompanied by photographer and artist Craig Stecyk. In the following offseason, when the waves were flat, the team took homemade skateboards fashioned from a piece of plywood and old roller skates and began practising their favourite surfing manoeuvers on the concrete waves that were the embankments of the local schoolyard. From this moment on, ‘the modernist space of suburbia was found, adapted and reconceived as another kind of space, as a concrete wave’ (Borden, 2001). This newfound form of athletic expression quickly gained traction as the Zephyr team attended skateboarding competitions across the nation, showcasing their new fluid, low to the ground style. The legend of the ‘Z-boys’ only grew as the acclaimed ‘dogtown articles’ and accompanying photographs began to be disseminated in the magazine ‘Skateboarder’. Thereby, under the creative vision of Craig Stecyk, the anarcho-punk and DIY image that would go on to characterise the ensuing skateboarding subculture was forged.

The next innovation came in the following summers when the team realised that many backyard pools in the neighbourhood were drained to conserve water, and began trying their surf-like style on this new terrain. They pushed their limits further and further until they reached the lip of the pool and began grinding round the top, even flying clear of the concrete and performing an aerial, in what many have described as an almost spiritual act, and others have described as ‘centrifugal and centripetal space production’ (Borden, 2001). This style soon became the dominant mode of skateboarding as through the late 1970s and into the 80s pools as well as ‘Half Pipes’ or ‘Vert ramps’ were rapidly erected in backyards and designated skateparks alike.

Moving into the mid 80s, street skating was born; a style of skateboarding that involves, as this essay will cover extensively, the misappropriation of public space. This style would soon, for whatever reason, whether it be its appeal as a kind of ideational urban escapism (Borden, 2001) or simply the increasing lack of publicly accessible skateparks (Howell, 2001), rise to universal ubiquity and replace vert and bowl skating as the hegemonic mode of the practice.

The commonly accepted story of the first instance of street skating begins with a group of skaters sneaking into a private skatepark in Whittier, California due to them lacking the funds for the entrance fee. They were shortly discovered and kicked out, leading professional skater John Lucero to lead the group in protest
to the car park outside where, in full view of the owners and users indoors, they began to perform tricks on the curbs as if they were the lips of pools (Howell, 2001). Thereby, this transgressive act marked the beginning of the evolution of street skateboarding from a simple sarcastic protest to a legitimate subcultural career pursuit which holds influence in the fields of photography, art and film (Chiu & Giamarino, 2019).

Z-Boyz rider Nathan Pratt gets coverage in the famed Dogtown articles 

Section 1 - Concepts:

Skateboarding in the new public space:

Public space has been commodified, historically since the enclosure acts beginning in the early 15th century but more recently and more relevantly, since the start of deindustrialisation in the west and the subsequent onset of globalised imperial capitalism. Previously public land is now subdivided, controlled and turned into a commodity (Borden, 2001), resulting in ‘a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement’ (Davis, 2006) and making it increasingly clear that ‘we are welcome in public spaces only if we are moving fast and spending money’ (Wiseman, 2024).

In order to get a better understanding of the implications of citizenship in this new public space, it is useful to refer to the writings of sociologist and urban philosopher Henri Lefebvre. He advocates for a new dimension to political and social membership within the city context. Which, at its most radical readings, calls for a dissolution of Westphalian notions of scalar politics and the reimagining of conventional methods of democratic participation, i.e one’s political membership should be primarily defined by the city they inhabit and the populace should participate in decisions affecting space in their city not by proxy, through the election and lobbying of delegates, but far more directly (Purcell, 2002). This dimension is known as the right to the city and was laid out in a variety of Lefevbre’s books, however, he is ‘stubbornly vague’ (Purcell, 2002) about nailing down an exact definition, meaning the idea could also be taken more broadly as a call for the right of those people of all social strata to be able to experience and interact with the city in an unrestricted manner, and for the ‘right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban area’ (Lefebvre, 1991). The right to the city is thereby made up by two factors; ‘the right to participation’ and ‘the right to appropriation’ (Purcell, 2002), both of which are heavily paralleled by the actions and objectives of skateboarders.

The consumerist sentiments of the new public space permeate all subsets of urban life but especially threaten creative endeavours as these are usually undertaken for the sake of people, not profit. For example, as urban historian Ocean Howell points out in his 2001 paper ‘The Poetics of Security’, the Art Ribbon sculpture which is a series of cement blocks running down The Embarcadero in San Francisco, has been subject to restriction of artistic agency in order to deter skateboarders and therefore restrict public space. Not only were the architects’ original plans to build ramps and banks into it rejected, but in 1999 the city installed metal brackets called ‘pig ears’ to put an end to the new use that skateboarders had found for the sculpture. This was in spite of two of the contributing architects voicing their support for skateboarders’ creative misuse of their project; Vito Acconci saying ‘Our goal is to make spaces that free people - to create devices and instruments that people can use to do what they're not supposed to, to go where they're not supposed to’ and Barbara Solomon echoing that the skateboarders’ usage was ‘part of the world’ (ArtAndArchitecture - SF, 2000). The other architect, Stanley Saiowitz, sided with the city, saying he felt his ‘sculpture had been ruined by skateboarders’ although he has since expressed that ‘The real problem with the Ribbon Promenade is that the design team were forced by budgetary concerns to use cheap concrete which chips easily’ (Varland, 1997). The installation of the pig ears erased the sculpture’s interactive quality and with it the only demographic that had found a tangible use for it, as one local woman pointed out in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle ‘(skaters) are actually using the benches in the only way possible. Concrete benches by the water are cold, you can’t sit on them.’ (ArtAndArchitecture - SF, 2000). Therefore reducing Art Ribbon from an environment that people inhabit, to an object that people passively consume (Howell, 2001).

Skateboarding juxtaposes itself with the idea of passively consumed space by creating a new type of space hidden within today’s neoliberal acropolises where ‘the built environment purposefully guides and restricts behaviour’ (Wiseman, 2024). This new space is an urban commons where the objective isn’t the maximising of profits and production of capital but the fostering of creativity and production of community. These urban commons are often fleeting and are not architectural spaces in the traditional sense as they involve no altering of the physical environment but are made by the experiences and feelings shared there. A research article by then PhD candidate Adelina Ong ‘The path is place: skateboarding, graffiti and performances of place’ supports the idea of experience produced space, arguing ‘place can be created in a matter of minutes’ (Ong, 2016) and likening the placemaking activity of skateboarding to jesuit priest and scholar Michael De Certeau’s concept of la perruque - a placemaking tactic which ‘finds ways of using the constraining order of place for one’s own purpose’ (De Certeau, 1984 in Ong, 2016). This temporary, experience produced space is central to understanding the history and purpose of skateboarding, however, architectural historians and urban planners often ‘limit their conception of architectural space to the designed building/object - a fetishism that erases social relations and wider meanings’ (Borden, 2001). This conceptually narrow view leaves them with only skateboarding’s physical impacts on the urban environment and its ostensible non profitability. Attributes which group it in with other urban undesirables like the homeless who are constantly legislated against and forcibly excluded from ‘public’ space. A point which leads me to the second concept - defence and surveillance.

San Fransisco's art ribbon equipped to ensure no fun is had by those pesky skateboarders

Defence and surveillance:

We have now established that public space is a controlled commodity, only on sale to the textbook consumer and overtly off limits to those considered urban undesirables. However, the vigour with which cities strive to keep their public space inaccessible to these undesirables is astounding. They defend public space with spikes, fences, bars and other such revanchist [2] measures, sending a clear message that handrails are not for sliding, benches are not for grinding and doorways are not for sleeping. The dystopian atmosphere that these strategies produce is a ‘concrete embodiment of a society at war with itself’ (Wiseman, 2024), or as Mike Davis puts it in his ‘Fortress L.A’ analysis, ‘The neo military syntax of contemporary architecture insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers’ (Davis, 1990). This ‘conjuring of imaginary dangers’ in order to measure and control public space has been particularly prevalent in postmodern times and arguably is the result of a wider rhetoric of scapegoating of the urban poor, as championed by figures such as Rudy Giuliani. In his 7 year term as New York’s mayor from 1994 to 2001, he launched a campaign which was characterised by ‘a vendetta against the most oppressed-workers and "welfare mothers," immigrants and gays, people of color and homeless people, squatters, and anyone who demonstrates in public.’ (Smith 1998). This involved employing such policies as Police Strategy No. 5 which was dedicated to ‘reclaiming the public spaces of New York’ apparently by disseminating demeaning posters of homeless people reading ‘Don’t give them your money!’, cutting welfare spending, and mobilising police to arrest anyone whose actions ‘threatened quality of life’ (Smith, 1998).

This vengeful rhetoric, which was not limited only to New York, therefore manifested itself in hostile architectural forms which are intended to exclude undesirables (namely skateboarders and the homeless), thereby ‘reclaiming public spaces’ (for the middle class consumer, office worker, and conventioneer).
However, too much explicitly hostile architecture, and the desired public begin to take umbrage with the increasingly draconian appearance of their public space, writing into magazines calling pig ears [3] and other such deterrents ‘so mean spirited!’ (Fuller 1999 in Howell, 2001). Therefore, city administrations must take a more nuanced approach so as not to upset this desired public, striking a balance between overtly hostile tactics such as pig ears, spikes and police sweeps and more subtle strategies like omniscient surveillance systems and proscriptive design. A balance which Howell calls a ‘poetics of security’. If exclusionary measures are too harsh, they ‘arouse sympathy for the criminal/victim, and thereby reveal the criminality of authority itself’ (Howell 2001), therefore undesirables must be forced to regulate themselves, excluded by the psychological nature of a given space rather than the physical.

This concept harks to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prisons, in which all prisoners were observed from a central watch tower where they were not physically restrained in their cells, but were compelled to behave by the ever present gaze of an invisible surveyor. Bentham’s panopticism was first introduced to the public realm by retail mogul Alexander Haagen. His malls such as the Willowbrook and Watts centres in south central L.A boasted eight foot high wrought iron fencing, motion detecting video cameras, and a hidden central control room containing LAPD officers on standby (Davis, 1990). Similarly to the panopticon, skateboarders and other perceived miscreants are compelled to behave by an ever developing system of CCTV cameras which force them to ‘internalise discipline’ (Howell 2001) under the scrutiny of an ever present, accusatory eye. As Mike Davis laments; ‘Today’s pharaonic scales of residential and commercial security supplant residual hopes for urban reform and social integration’ (Davis, 1990).

Cameras are not the only new subtle measure to exclude skateboarders though, city authorities and development corporations are beginning to design-out skateboarding with the use of anticipatory skate stoppers which are far less noticeable to the average citizen than post design alterations like pig ears and spikes. For example, in the redesign of John F. Kennedy plaza in Philadelphia, wooden benches were positioned in front of concrete ledges, obstructing a would-be skater from sliding/grinding along them and granite tiles were removed to make way for grass strips, surreptitiously blocking the run up and roll away to other ledges and benches (Howell, 2005). Furthermore, Melbourne based skate stopper company ‘Korb’ offers “integration into the design process” for the skate-stoppers in its range (McDuie-Ra & Campbell, 2022) allowing them to go unnoticed by the general public.

Therefore, local authorities are moving away from traditional, conspicuous deterrents for skateboarding as these arouse too much sympathy from and irritate the public and instead are moving towards strategies of scrutinising observation and inbuilt exclusion. Strategies which can extirpate undesirable activity without arousing suspicion from the general populace, producing space that is ostensibly public, but in reality, is carefully designed for defence and surveillance.

Footnotes

2] The revanchists (from the French revanche, meaning revenge) were a group of ‘bourgeois reactionaries’ (Slater 2009) who were against the liberalism of the second republic and especially the socialist uprising of the paris commune. They sought to restore bourgeois authority with a militaristic strategy and claims of reinstating a civilised public order. As urban geographer Neil Smith puts it ‘revanchism blends revenge with reaction’ (Smith, 1998).

3] So named owing to their rounded triangular appearance, ‘pig ears’ are metal devices fixed to benches, ledges, and other grindable surfaces to inhibit the sliding of a skateboard.

Bentham's panopticon prison

Guerrilla activism?

Skateboarding is often a catalyst for activist activity, whether it be providing skate spaces and training for children of developing countries (as is the case with NGOs like Skatepal and Concrete Jungle Foundation), or campaigning for a specific cause such as SkateForJustice, an organisation that coordinates wheeled protests to raise awareness for the Black Lives Matter movement. However, this section won’t discuss activism in this traditional sense, rather it will look at how skateboarding itself is an inherently ‘enunciative act’ which ‘hence carries meaning in a less mediated manner’ (Borden, 2001), making it in and of itself, a form of activism.

The Situationists were a group of avant garde artists, academics and political theorists founded in the late 1950s. They vehemently critiqued the signs of the autocratic rule of laissez faire capitalism and market economy that they saw around them, Guy Debord, one of the key figures of the movement called this oppressive reign and the proscriptive, soulless urbanism that it produced ‘the spectacle’. They felt that the spectacle pushed people from individual expression through real lived experiences and authentic desires, to a sort of proxy individual expression through the consumption of pointless commodities. They believed this overarching societal shift had far reaching and degradational consequences for people’s quality of life and the fulfilment they found in the everyday. To combat this erosion of authentic experience, they engaged in the ‘guerrilla resticances’ (Howell, 2005) of drift and detournement. Drift is ‘an act of wandering the city according to no set route and no set schedule’ (Howell, 2005), by doing so, the Situationists believed they were experiencing the city authentically and simultaneously rejecting the spectacle by not contributing to the production of capital. Street skateboarding shares similarities with this practice as it too involves exploring the city according to a route simply dictated by spaces that grab a skater’s attention rather than a pre-planned path. Moreover, the act of skateboarding itself encompasses the ethos of drift; it is both a time consuming and effortful endeavour but produces no commodity ready for exchange (Borden, 2001).

Meanwhile, detournement can be translated as any of ‘hijacking’ ‘misappropriation’ ‘reuse’ or ‘rerouting’ and refers to the artistic practice of turning the manifestations of the capitalist system and its accompanying media culture (i.e newspapers, maps and new public space) against themselves. Examples of this include subvertising, graffiti, pastiche and culture jamming.

The ‘tactical transgression’ (Chiu and Giamarino, 2019) that skateboarders commit by performing tricks on street furniture can therefore be seen as a continuation of the situationists’ detournement in that it is a ‘misappropriation’ of public space. An act which raises questions as to the manufactured nature of such space, by extension challenging the market driven forces which make them so proscriptive and exclusionary to authentic (i.e non consumption based) use and experience. The manifestation of the capitalist system (consumer centric public space) is thereby critiqued and turned against itself through an expressive reuse, in much the same way that subvertising might with capitalist media campaigns.

It was professor Paul O'connor of Exeter University who, at a talk that I attended about skateboarding and academia, drew the parallel between the act of skateboarding and the concept of prefigurative politics. That is to say, modes of social organisation that aim to reflect the type of society that groups want to achieve, rather than campaigns or manifestos explicitly defining this vision. By sliding down rails and over ledges and asserting themselves as contributing members of the urban environment, skateboarders are rejecting the status quo and taking part in a society that they envision: one of participation and inclusion. In this way, skateboarding can be seen as both a continuation of the situationists’ practices and an act of prefigurative expression - a sort of prefigurative situationism; prefigurative in its immediate and unstructured mode of practice and situationist in its likeness to drift and detournement.

Marcello Campanello detourning an NYC picnic bench with a back noseblunt

(photo by Jason Sherman)

Section 2 - examples:

Southbank - London:

The Southbank Centre (SBC) is a complex of artistic venues and galleries on the south bank of the river Thames in London. More relevantly, the underbelly of its festival wing (Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Purcell Room) has been the mecca of UK skateboarding since the first boards began arriving in the early 1970s, owing to the fact that it houses an assortment of seemingly pointless banks, stairs and pillars. The space, often called ‘the Undercroft’, or simply ‘southbank’ by those who come from further afield, is now the oldest continually skated spot in the world. A fact which is unsurprising to anyone who has visited (whether as a practising skateboarder or spectating member of the public) and felt the space’s palpable cultural and artistic gravity. The Undercroft attracted skateboarders by design as when planning started in 1963, three of its architects belonged to the avant garde architectural group ‘Archigram’ and purposefully left the space open for ‘unknown and unpredictable uses’ (Borden, 2016). Before skateboarders adopted it, the Undercroft and the surrounding area was largely inhabited by homeless people given its sheltered nature. However, soon after skateboarders started using the space, foot traffic began to pick up, first from other urban creatives such as graffiti artists, photographers and filmmakers, and then from the general public, who came to observe the strange urban performances of the skaters and make use of the expanding facilities of the SBC. As Henry Edward-Woods (former leader of the Long Live Southbank campaign), pointed out in an interview with the Guardian’s Bruno Rinvolucri, ‘There were no shops there ... in the old days it was a cardboard city. That is what skating does: it fills the cracks in society left by capitalist development ... It’s like a fungus, it’s like moss, it just grows in the corners where no one else wants to be.’ (Rinvolucri, 2017). Investment and various regeneration projects followed, creating the thoroughfare that today attracts around 25 million visitors to the Southbank area and its artistic institutions which, according to a 2021 report by the Southbank Business Improvement District (BID) contributed around £500 million to London’s economy in 2018/19 (Southbank BID, 2021). Skateboarding took the edge out of the area and paved the way for it to become a place of varied yet cohesive urban arts.

Although the relationship between the users of the Undercroft and the SBC is now convivial and the access to the space has been indefinitely guaranteed, securing it as a legitimate skate space has been far from an easy process. Over the years, there have been many random actions taken by the SBC to discourage skateboarding, despite the fact that the SBC have made improvements to the space for the betterment of skateboarding such as adding floodlights and a railing demarcating where the public should observe from. This affirmative action against skateboarding includes turning off said lights, spreading gravel over the space, lifting up and removing concrete slabs and even hosing down the ground (Borden, 2016). Furthermore, in 2004/5 the SBC abruptly reduced the amount of skate space available by two thirds, removing access to the beloved ‘little banks’. These restrictions of the space didn’t solicit any significant resistance from the local skating community though, as skaters simply adapted to the changes and the space continued to prosper. However, when in 2013, the SBC revealed a £120 million redevelopment scheme with plans to completely remove the Undercroft, filling in the previously vibrant space with retail units (Rinvolucri, 2017), there was outrage from the skaters as well as the wider community.

Subsequently, skateboarding’s innately activist spirit prevailed and the Long Live Southbank (LLSB) was born. Spearheaded by lifetime Southbank local Henry Edwards-Wood and others, the campaign vehemently opposed the redevelopment plans proposed by the SBC. They opposed two aspects of the development. First, the physical destruction of space in order to maximise profits, releasing such campaign videos as ‘Southbank centre - consumerism over culture’ (LLSB, 2014), and second, the stipulation that the skateboarders would be relocated to a purpose built site under the nearby Hungerford bridge. The campaigners expressed their desire to remain a contributing force in urban space making and not simply be shunted into a proscriptive, culturally sanitised space, adopting slogans such as ‘you can’t move history’ and ‘preservation not relocation’ (Borden, 2016) - therefore resisting ‘the co-opting of citizenship into state and capital sanctioned channels.’ (Warin, 2018).

The campaign lasted 14 months, gaining the support of hundreds of thousands and even winning ‘engagement campaign of the year’ at the annual Change Opinion Awards (Borden, 2016). They disseminated their message through an effective combination of physical presence in the form of marches and events and digital presence in the form of posts on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc as well as a petition which gained over 150,000 signatures. The campaign also gained widespread public support, with MP Ben Bradshaw saying he was ‘horrified’ to learn of the redevelopment plans and calling the Undercroft ‘part of the heritage of that cultural area of London’ (LLSB, 2013), even the conservative leaning Times opined that removing the space would amount to ‘cultural vandalism’ (Purves, 2013 in Borden, 2016). The decisive moment in LLSB’s eventual victory though, came when London mayor Boris Johnson voiced his support for the movement saying that the redevelopment ‘should not be at the detriment of the skate park, which should be retained in its current position.’ and hailing the Undercroft as ‘the epicentre of UK skateboarding’ and ‘part of the cultural fabric of London’ (Brown, 2014). This effectively vetoed the SBC’s application and they subsequently capitulated, signing a section 106 planning agreement with Lambeth borough council, recognising skateboarding for its contribution to the cohesive, cultural hub that is the Southbank and guaranteeing its existence at the Undercroft for perpetuity (Borden, 2016). Following this, relations between LLSB and the SBC have been more genial and in 2017, a planning application to reopen the destroyed ‘little banks’ put together by LLSB, was approved by the SBC and Lambeth borough council with construction completed in summer 2019.

Not only were these resistances about protecting and preserving the physical architectural space of the Undercroft itself, but more importantly, protecting and preserving what the physical architectural space represents; an area skateboarders are ‘afforded a freedom, one that emerges from the capability of the skaters to shape the landscape discourse ... imbuing the architectural forms with new meaning through endless repetition of physical acts and as such, transforming how and what we understand these architectural forms to be.’ (Warin, 2018).

Therefore, skateboarding at the Undercroft has displayed how through their participative and creative use of public spaces, skaters can transform them from ‘cardboard cities’ to ‘part of the cultural fabric’ of urban environs. Furthermore, it has shown that when required, they can mobilise social campaigns, further engaging the local community and standing up for their Lefebvrian ‘right to the city’, their role in the process of urban space making, and in a wider sense, their right as a socially marginal group to belong in the city without contributing to the production of capital.

The undercroft packed with skateboarders and spectators alike

Love park - Philadelphia:

John F Kennedy plaza, better known as ‘Love park’ owing to Robert Indiana’s famous aluminium sculpture, has been the battleground of various disputes between skateboarders, the city council, private companies, and the homeless. Topics disputed include citizenship, inclusion, gentrification, and redevelopment.
Built in 1965 as part of a series of centre city modernist redevelopments, the plaza was originally a vibrant hub for office workers on lunch breaks, street performers, and pedestrians of all classes, however, thanks largely to restraints on welfare programs put in place by the Reagan administration, by the late 80s, it had become a ‘makeshift home for the homeless’ (Howell, 2005). Media coverage of the plaza around this time painted the homeless as an urban pathology, likening them to vermin and disease; the Philadelphia Inquirer referred to the plaza during the time that the homeless were occupying it as ‘an open air mental health clinic’ and ‘an urban black hole’, publishing articles such as ‘Who Eats at JFK Plaza? Brown-Baggers, Homeless, and Rats.’ (Howell, 2005).

Skateboarders subsequently arrived on the scene at this time, eager to make use of and challenge these ‘left-over spaces of modernist planning’ (Borden, 2001). Given the open, flowing nature of the plaza, the granite ledges, cascading stairs, and plentiful handrails, skateboarding at Love park quickly proliferated and by the end of the 1990s, skateboarders had garnered the public support of the editorial boards of the Inquirer and the Daily News, Vincent Kling (the plazas architect), Edmund Bacon (the planning director responsible for its erection), local professors, over half the city council members (eleven out of the seventeen), and the executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League (Howell, 2005). The general consensus was that, as the Inquirer put it, skaters were ‘the good users’ making the plaza more inviting to the general public and contributing some vibrancy to an area otherwise considered an ‘urban black hole’. Furthermore, many commentators saw a financial opportunity in the skaters’ presence with the skateboard industry rising to $1.5 billion USD by the turn of the century, the plaza being featured profusely in skateboarding videos, magazines and ad campaigns, and ESPN’s X-Games looking to hold their 2001 and 2002 contests there (the games were ultimately held at a different plaza across the street and generated an estimated $80 million USD in revenue for Philadelphia (ON video, 2004)).

The burgeoning subculture was therefore showing promising signs of possessing lucrative socio-economic capital. Despite this, the administration of incumbent Mayor John Street persisted with their zero tolerance policy on skateboarding, closing Love Park for a redesign in 2002 and at the same time enforcing the 2000 citywide ban on skateboarding through an increased police presence, with some undercover officers even posing as homeless people (ON video, 2004). The redesign included placing pink planters in front of ledges to obstruct a would be skater from grinding/sliding along them, installing wooden benches with cross bar dividers to deter both skaters and the homeless, and removing granite tiles to make way for grass strips, surreptitiously blocking the run up and roll away to other ledges and benches (Nemeth, 2006). The facelift was wildly unpopular not only with the skateboarders, who staged multiple demonstrations protesting the exclusion (with both Edmund Bacon and Vincent Kling in attendance), it also attracted admonishment from notable members of the wider public. An architecture critic from the Inquirer called it a ‘badly executed’ ‘pepto bismol tinted makeover’, Urban theorist Richard Florida called the ban a ‘big mistake’ (Howell, 2005), and Edmund Bacon televised himself skateboarding across the park to display his displeasure with the mayor’s actions (Nemeth, 2006). In addition to this, a poll of over 2000 residents by the Inquirer showed that 92% supported skateboarding at Love park (News Forum, 2004 in Nemeth, 2006).

The question almost begs itself then, if skateboarders brought affluence and vibrancy to Love park, mediated and diminished the presence of drug dealers and the homeless, attracted the attention of an internationally televised TV event raising millions for the city, and had the widespread approval of economists and professors, the architect and planner responsible for the plaza, and the general public, then why close it, hastily redesign it, and invest municipal resources into ensuring the skateboarders’ extirpation?

The city’s ostensible rationale for these actions are damage and liability, however, these quickly appear unlikely when we consider that despite city officials estimating that skaters caused $60,000 worth of damage (Nemeth, 2006), it still spent $800,000 on a redesign and turned down a $1 million pledge to cover damage over 10 years from skate shoe company DC (Howell, 2005). Regarding claims of liability, a 2002 Study by city planner Joshua Nims found that traditional playground sports such as football or American football have comparable participation rates, yet have a much higher injury rate per thousand participants than skateboarding. Moreover, not a single liability lawsuit was filed against the City of Philadelphia by a skateboarder or a pedestrian in the years that skateboarding was occurring at Love park (Nims, 2002 in Spohn Ranch, 2014). These facts indicate that the city’s lack of tolerance for skateboarding is not as firmly rooted in property damage and liability concerns as it might let on, suggesting an ulterior motive for excluding them from Love Park and the wider CBD.

Various analyses of the city's rationale have been mooted but I will focus on two differing yet not mutually exclusive suggestions. Professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Colorado Jeremy Nemeth argues in his 2006 paper, that in a deindustrialised and suburbanised urban landscape where federal aid to cities is reduced, capital is increasingly mobile and edge cities and business/retail parks are rife, the task of promoting urban economic growth has become increasingly decentralised and entrepreneurial. He cites urban sociologist Sharon Zukin’s observation in her 1991 book ‘Landscapes of Power’ that development has been ‘taken over by a kind of market culture, one made by real estate speculators, institutional investors, and big-time international customers’. Cities must therefore compete to portray their CBDs as a favourable destination for this ‘market led’ investment. Nemeth argues that such ‘capital attraction’ is often achieved by ‘economic strategies that prioritise visual coherence and order, such as urban design or aesthetic improvements, tourist spectacles, city marketing campaigns and slogans, and heavy-handed upgrading and enhancement of security measures’. He then posits that it is therefore unsurprising that the city might want to banish a group deemed to have a ‘disorderly presence’ who hurl themselves down rails and stairs, from the ‘showpiece’ of the very zone in which it is trying to convey ‘visual coherence and order’ to attract investment. Conversely, Giamarino & Chiu, 2019 argue that skateboarding is ‘beneficial in attracting creative crowds’ to cities in order to ‘spur entrepreneurialism’ and ‘weave authenticity, spontaneity, and vibrancy into their respective urban fabrics’.

On the other hand, in his acclaimed 2005 essay, associate professor of architectural history Ocean Howell cites the reason for the skateboarders’ exclusion as simply that their presence had served its purpose. While many skaters explained that they had befriended the homeless community, the perception was that they had ‘breathed life’ into Edmund Bacon’s design as Inquirer editor Chris Satullo put it, sufficiently dispersing the homeless to make way for the appropriate public to return to the space. Their presence was thereby no longer useful as they had effectively cured the plaza of its pathology, meaning they were shortly removed, becoming ‘the unwitting shock troops of gentrification’ ‘injecting a small capital flow into a distressed area’ and therefore ‘suffering from the same process they precipitate’.

Therefore, the story of Love park has indeed evidenced the potential of skateboarders’ presence to socially and economically regenerate urban areas ($80 million in revenue for the City and the exodus of the incumbent homeless population) and promote civic engagement (hundreds strong demonstrations and the reconnection of the wider public to JFK plaza). However, describing events in these terms ultimately obfuscates the reality of this narrative which is that skateboarders were written out of the regeneration story. This was because aside from initiating the gentrification processes that facilitated it, they were deemed to have no use in the pursuit of economic growth and the production of capital. As Michael Walzer put it in his 1986 essay Public space: pleasures and costs of urbanity,

‘Money buys membership in contemporary society, in the sense of being able to participate in the prevailing norms of rampant material consumption. Those that are unable to conform or choose to hold other norms, [...] may be marginalised from the mainstream and even physically contained or excluded.’ (p.475)

The exclusion of skateboarders thereby highlights a fundamental power disparity within neoliberal urban society; those possessing the most wealth can therefore ‘buy’ the most ‘membership’ and uphold the ‘norms of rampant material consumption’. Transgressors of these norms, whether they be homeless people or skaters, are therefore deemed out of place and hence, illegitimate users of public space.

Edmund Bacon protests skateboarding's expulsion from JFK plaza

Conclusion:

It is evident then, from the case studies assessed and the empirical evidence presented within them, that the presence of skateboarders does indeed aid regeneration and civic engagement to a large extent both economically and socially. Both cases helped draw in millions in revenue for their respective municipalities and (admittedly to the detriment of the skaters themselves), attracted fiscally substantial redevelopment schemes. Moreover, they initiated gentrification processes, ushering back in the desirable public to previously destitute areas and mounted campaigns protesting their extirpation when these processes inevitably necessitated their removal. The campaigns mobilised thousands and weren’t only limited to skateboarders but involved the ‘cross pollination’ [4] of urban populations , recruiting members of the general populace, architects, planners, politicians, and urban theorists.

The presence of skateboarders in urban areas is not entirely ameliorative though, as the renewal and upscaling that they bring with them is rarely holistic and often obfuscates issues of homelessness, meaning they are forgotten from conversations over access as their place within nested social hierarchies is now occupied by skateboarders. This is largely due to the fact that in an era of neoliberal socio-economic restructuring, where local government and quasi governmental bodies place increasing emphasis on the upkeep of their region’s economic competitiveness, the interests of those skaters who can attract mobile capital to the CBD will supersede those of the urban poor (even if they are ultimately to be removed via the same process that their presence predicts).

Even with this consequential social injustice conceded, skateboarding brings a multitude of other contributions to urban environs. It inspires debate and political participation (something severely lacking in increasingly disenfranchised cities), it challenges the motives and purpose of defensive and profit driven architecture, and above all, it makes people feel uncomfortable. Roused from their entitled slumber by this discomfort, skateboarding calls for people to confront their biases, and ask; does the word ‘public’ not imply that city space should belong to people of all social strata (no matter their exchange value)? And if so, should creative appropriations of such a space not be considered a crime, but simply self expression?

Footnotes

4] This was a term used by artist/designer/fabricator/urban enthusiast Charles Myatt in a panel discussion at the design museum talk ‘How does skateboarding shape cities?’

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