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Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body
Skateboarders are an increasingly common feature of the urban environment - recent estimates total 40 million world-wide. We are all aware of their often extraordinary talent and manoeuvres on the city streets. This book is the first detailed study of the urban phenomenon of skateboarding. It looks at skateboarding history from the surf-beaches of California in the 1950s, through the purpose-built skateparks of the 1970s, to the street-skating of the present day and shows how skateboarders experience and understand the city through their sport. Dismissive of authority and convention, skateboarders suggest that the city is not just a place for working and shopping but a true pleasure-ground, a place where the human body, emotions and energy can be expressed to the full.
The huge skateboarding subculture that revolves around graphically-designed clothes and boards, music, slang and moves provides a rich resource for exploring issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and the family. As the author demonstrates, street-style skateboarding, especially characteristic of recent decades, conducts a performative critique of architecture, the city and capitalism. Anyone interested in the history and sociology of sport, urban geography or architecture will find this book riveting.
The huge skateboarding subculture that revolves around graphically-designed clothes and boards, music, slang and moves provides a rich resource for exploring issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and the family. As the author demonstrates, street-style skateboarding, especially characteristic of recent decades, conducts a performative critique of architecture, the city and capitalism. Anyone interested in the history and sociology of sport, urban geography or architecture will find this book riveting.
336 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2001
7 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
About the author
Iain Borden
38 books17 followersIain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, England.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 22, 2023
In Skateboarding, Space and the City, Iain Borden conceptualizes skateboarding as a tripartite and dialectical relationship between body, board, and the built environment. Drawing philosophical inspiration mainly from the French and German phenomenological traditions (i.e., Hegel, Heidegger, Lefebvre, etc.), Borden sees skateboarding less as an art or a sport, and more fundamentally as a space-producing and meaning-making way of being. Skateboarders relate to the cityscape in a completely different way than most civilians, and, in so doing, they re-interpret and re-appropriate objects and space.
In the performative act of skateboarding, the intent of an architectural design is subverted and erased, opening up a space for the inscription of new meanings and relationships. For instance, a handrail isn’t just a support for traversing stairs – it’s an obstacle to grind and slide. Thus, skateboarding encounters the public and private spheres from a unique phenomenological plane of being-in-the-world. There is, quite literally, such a thing as "the skater's eye"; it is an imaginative and challenging way of looking that is at once destructive and creative.
Unfortunately, this sort of encounter often leads to confrontations with others, resulting in power struggles surrounding the meaning, intention, and use-value of architectural space. Borden’s text is intellectually rigorous, but as a skateboarder himself, he understands the subculture better than any author I’ve read. His book will be accessible to college and university educated skateboarders with an experiential awareness of the dynamics of street skateboarding.
In the performative act of skateboarding, the intent of an architectural design is subverted and erased, opening up a space for the inscription of new meanings and relationships. For instance, a handrail isn’t just a support for traversing stairs – it’s an obstacle to grind and slide. Thus, skateboarding encounters the public and private spheres from a unique phenomenological plane of being-in-the-world. There is, quite literally, such a thing as "the skater's eye"; it is an imaginative and challenging way of looking that is at once destructive and creative.
Unfortunately, this sort of encounter often leads to confrontations with others, resulting in power struggles surrounding the meaning, intention, and use-value of architectural space. Borden’s text is intellectually rigorous, but as a skateboarder himself, he understands the subculture better than any author I’ve read. His book will be accessible to college and university educated skateboarders with an experiential awareness of the dynamics of street skateboarding.
July 13, 2020
This book was my intro into some of the urbanism and space production topics. A very interesting yet quite a complex read as I was unfamiliar with a few theories and concepts mentioned in there.
The prism though which author lets us look at the architecture, city and space is very different from what I've seen so far in my studies. It touches on many things like the (re)production of space and rethinking architecture in unique ways in regard to skating. Incredibly exciting for me were the ideas of how skaters while reinterpreting the city are actually rejecting its capitalist rhythms and systems and how skaters are basically being nowadays situationists wondering and marking the city.
Definitely a recommended book!
The prism though which author lets us look at the architecture, city and space is very different from what I've seen so far in my studies. It touches on many things like the (re)production of space and rethinking architecture in unique ways in regard to skating. Incredibly exciting for me were the ideas of how skaters while reinterpreting the city are actually rejecting its capitalist rhythms and systems and how skaters are basically being nowadays situationists wondering and marking the city.
Definitely a recommended book!
April 22, 2021
Really wanted to like this book since it's one of the only well-researched books on skateboarding and its history, but its full of over-intellectualized jargon from architectural theory that makes a lot of the book too dense. As an example, I thought this was one of the better passages:
"Embedded in the actions of skateboarders are reconceptualizations of architecture as reproducible micro-spaces rather than produced grands projets; production not as the production of things but of play, desires and actions; the purpose of spaces as use rather than exchange; richness as social wealth rather than ownership; place as composed of time and speed as well as a quality of space; and the city as interrogator rather than determinant of the self."
"Embedded in the actions of skateboarders are reconceptualizations of architecture as reproducible micro-spaces rather than produced grands projets; production not as the production of things but of play, desires and actions; the purpose of spaces as use rather than exchange; richness as social wealth rather than ownership; place as composed of time and speed as well as a quality of space; and the city as interrogator rather than determinant of the self."
April 2, 2020
Presenting on this tmw hehe
July 24, 2011
Damn this is good! A history of skateboarding, a critical architecture of cities, and tale of reclaimed and remade space. Far from a popular read, this book as a stunning piece of cultural theory and analysis that shows the power and usefulness of Henri Lefebvre's theories of the production of space.
June 4, 2013
Somewhat academic/esoteric at times, this book discusses several great points about how skateboarders use the built environment around them to appropriate for their skating needs and purposes, all of which adds to their own identities of nonconformists, iconoclasts, and rebels.
September 6, 2008
If you ever want to learn about the way skateboarding interprets and shapes future architecture, start with this book because it's the only one.
July 13, 2012
This is an academic kind of book - looks at the architecture of the city from the point of view of skateboarders. Covers the development of skateboarding pretty well.
June 20, 2013
this is a good book
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews