An affirmation of urban life
Skateboarding and socio-spatial censorship in the late twentieth century city

By Iain Borden, republished with permission.

Skateboarding can be regarded as a metaphor for creatively using public space. A socio-spatial practice, it shuns the conventions of urban life. The repressive measures taken as a result say much about the changing role of public space in our society today. Iain Borden calls for a more sympathetic perception.

Cities are always places of contestation and contradiction, conflict and counter-cultural engagements. While some architects and planners seem to want to homogenize the city, rendering it into a uniform plane of public squares, promenades and polite cafés, there will always be others who want to make noise or be silent, pursue sex or read philosophy, ride motor-cycles or sun-bathe; the rhythm of suits-on-weekdays and sweaters-on-Sundays will always be interwoven by those quietly yet determinedly making their own lives in countless different subtle yet explicit ways. For this is urban life.

But of course cities are also places of power, and the contradiction between homogenization and fragmentation of urban space is continuously fought over, as urban managers of all kinds (architects, planners, police, commercial interests, building owners) seek to dictate the character of social space. The urban practice of skateboarding is one such area which they seek to control.

The intensification of skateboarding in public streets – street skating or streetstyle as skateboarders themselves call it – has led to a pervasive form of repression and legislation. Some US cities such as San Samon and San Diego * in California * have placed curfews or banned skateboarding in public areas. 'Skateboard ticket' fines for US$75 are handed out by police on Huntingdon Beach. Other such legislation has been passed in Arizona *, Chicago *, Denver, Fort Worth, Philadelphia *, Portland *, Sacramento, San Francisco *, Santa Cruz *, Savannah and elsewhere across the US. In the UK *, city councils including Chelmsford, Birmingham *, Manchester and Plymouth have banned skateboarding from parks and promenades, and this pattern has been repeated worldwide from Australia * and Sweden * to the Netherlands * and Canada *.¹ The general effect has been to embed the threat of arrest, fines and even imprisonment within skateboarding's everyday activity.

Why is this? Capitalist abstract space is more often about prohibitions than stimulation and this often involves issues of time. While the UK Labour Party and police forces in 1996 * and 1997 * considered imposing curfews for children, for many skateboarders this has long been a reality; San Francisco City and County, for example, banned skateboarding in 1986 * from all roads and sidewalks during night-time hours. Skateboarding, contradictorily, is at once 'criminalized' as a night-time activity (as US President George Bush remarked of skateboarders, 'just thank God they don't have guns'²) and represented as 'child's play' at other times. Even usually thoughtful newspapers like the Washington Post * have cited skateboarding as an irresponsible and vandalous activity to be banned from city streets.³

Skateboarders have encountered a politics of space similar to the experiences of the homeless. Like the homeless, skateboarders occupy urban space without engaging in economic activity of interiors, to the annoyance of building owners and managers. As a result, the urban managers have declared skaters as trespassers, or cited the marks skateboarding causes as proof of criminal damage: 'they smash up all the new kerbs and scratch all the banisters.'⁴ Skaters are also arrested for waxing curbs and other elements of street architecture. Even private citizens seem to delight in 'confiscating' skateboards – an action which is legally theft – while the American skateboard magazine Thrasher * has detailed a litany of aggressive actions by skater-phobic police officers and neighbourhood residents across the US. To give a more specific example, at the prestigious Liverpool Street and Broadgate office development in London's City area skateboarders who frequent the stone benches on Bishopsgate, and more occasionally the street furniture deeper within its pseudo-public spaces, have chipped away edges and left coloured streaks. The City Corporation, its police force and private security forces has consequently begun systematic video surveillance of skateboarders, and implemented a £30 fine. Skaters are now routinely excluded from the site. 'With sparks flying and the grinding sound of truck against marble echoing throughout the night sky, we are inevitably clocked by the notoriously petty Liverpool Street security brigade', as one of the victims puts it.⁵

Where the homeless are ejected from business and retail areas by such measures like curved bus benches, window ledge spikes and doorway sprinkler systems, so skaters encounter similar treatment. Managers have added rough textured surfaces to discourage skaters, while more overt measures include spikes and bumps added to handrails, blocks of concrete placed at the foot of banks, chains across ditches and steps, and new, unridable surfaces such as gravel and sand.

Pleasure versus toil
There is an increasing tendency for the state and pseudo-official groups to take action against spatialized forms of urban social protest, ranging from the 'zero * tolerance' of the UK Labour Party toward graffiti artists, mass arrests at 'Reclaim the Streets' event-parties, 'farm watch' schemes to prevent raves, and direct action against road protesters. In Germany *, the annual 'Chaos Days' anarcho-punk festival held in Hanover is now controlled by police out-numbering punks by six to one.⁶

Skateboarding does not mount the kind of explicit political critique of many of these groups, nor does it provoke much by way of social disruption. But it threatens nonetheless because it is neither explicit protest nor quiet conformism, game nor sport, public nor private activity, adult nor childish and, above all, precisely because it is a spatially and temporally diffused and dispersed activity. The repression of skateboarding is then rarely systematic, certainly when compared to national laws against serious crimes. Treating skateboarding as a crime verges on the ludicrous. Consider the comparison with automobiles. 'Skateboard made of wood, metal and plastic, costs about £100, runs on leg power; causes chips and scratches on bits of stone and metal. Car, costs a fortune, runs on poisonous shit, pollutes the air and water, fills the city with "smog", causes the death of hundreds of thousands of people every year. Mmmm? And yet despite all this cars are o.k. but skateboards are evil, objects of vandalism, a dangerous menace that must be stopped.'⁷ Considered this way, skateboarding can only be rendered criminal through the most petty-minded of laws. This is largely because skateboarding is aimed at the appropriation – and not domination – of time and space. Thus skaters care little of ownership, and so implicitly oppose this capitalist principle.

Further, skateboarding produce no things, no services, and instead disrupts the apparent 'efficiency' and 'economic' logic of urban space, undertaking an activity which, by business standards, has an entirely different rationale. In reaction to such attitudes, one critic railed that skateboarding 'appears to serve no known purpose in life and does nothing to raise national productivity.'⁸ That, however, is exactly the point, for many skaters dismiss the entire notion of production and work; as one skater put it, 'I've told myself from the age of twelve, "I'll never work a day in my life".'⁹

The triumph of non-labour, however, does not entail an absence of effort but an even more profound redefinition of what 'production' might mean, and it is here too that skateboarding strikes at the heart of the business city. At first sight, skateboarders' labour produces no 'products' beyond the moves skaters make, a 'commodity' exchangeable only by means of performative action. Furthermore, skateboarders, like students, offer a potential labour force but they deny this by undertaking seemingly meaningless productions, and so appear to waste effort and time. But that 'principle of economy' which sees a 'waste' of energy as abnormal is itself a reduction of life to mere survival. Skateboarding, in contrast, undertakes a release of energy that either creates or modifies space, espousing play, art and festival.

Similarly, skateboarders deny the production of architecture and urban space as a commodity for exchange, or as a place where the exchange of commodities might take place or be directed. In keeping with the theorizings of Henri Lefebvre, skateboarders see the city as a place to assert use values over exchange values, pleasure over toil, active bodies over passive behaviours. (10) Skateboarding is a critique of ownership, but not of wealth. For if society should involve the rehabilitation of wealth as the socialized sharing of amenity, possession, then, is not private ownership but the ability to 'have the most complex, the "richest" relationships of joy or happiness with the "object"' ?~@~S we should own not nothing but more of things, without recourse to legal relations. (11)

Legislature directed at skateboarding is perhaps then not so much concerned with a crime as with finding ever new ways for the conventionalized operations of the society to be legitimized. Furthermore, activities like skateboarding allow the State to divert attention from real problems and to create room for new actions. The rave parties and travellers in 1990s Britain * thus resulted in the Conservative government's Criminal Justice Act, through which it gained a range of powers previously denied to it and entirely out of scale with the problem at hand. Analysis of the conflict between skateboarding and hegemonic practices shows that the most co-ordinated resistance on the part of skateboarding to the rest of society has come not from spatial contestations but in such campaigns as those to 'Stop Skate Harassment' or assert that 'Skateboarding Is Not a Crime'.

Ultimately, being banned from the public domain becomes simply another obstacle to be overcome, and so even adds to the anarchist tradition of skateboarding. 'They can kick us out, but we don't care, we'll be back. In the meantime, we'll just go on to the next spot and keep breaking it down.' (12)

Legislation and authority are there to be resisted. In this respect, skateboarders are part of a long process in the history of cities, a fight by the unempowered and disenfranchised for a distinctive social space of their own. For skateboarders the issue is not only 'the space of "no", it is also the space of the body, and the space of "yes", of the affirmation of life'. (13)

NOTES

1. The thrills as well as the spills of skateboarding are described in such magazines as Sidewalk Surfer, Thrasher, TransWorld Skateboarding *, Slap en Skateboard!

2. Thrasher nr. 3, 1992 *, p. 74.

3. Diane de Bernardo, 'Monumental Indifference: No One Is Stopping Skateboarders From Riding Roughshod Over Our Town', Washington Post, 3/12/1995.

4. Parodied in Fraser Hamilton, 'All About High Wycombe (and a Jolly Nice Council)', RAD nr. 103, 1991 *, p. 19.

5. Tim Hoad, 'Wednesday July 30th 1997', Sidewalk Surfer nr. 21, 1997.

6. Denis Staunton, 'Punks on Parade', The Guardian, 29/7/1996, p. 16.

7. Ben Powell *, 'The Number One Four Wheeler', Sidewalk Surfer nr. 9, 1996.

8. Jane Haas, in 'Off the Wall', Skateboarder nr. 6, 1980, pp. 74-75.

9. Mike Vallely *, 'Interview', TransWorld Skateboarding nr. 1, 1996, p. 95.

10. Cfr. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996, p. 131.

11. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume I, London, Verso, 1991, pp. 154-158.

12. Jake Phelps, 'Damage Done', Thrasher nr. 5, 1992, p. 37.

13. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, p. 201.

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