HelisWex

13/01/2022

Southbank skaters’ victory shows grassroots culture still worth fighting for
A year-and-a-half after the Southbank Centre published its plans for the redeveloped Festival Wing that would have removed the skaters from their habitual haunt in the building’s undercroft, the plans have been scrapped. A joint statement by the centre and the campaign to save the skaters’ undercroft, Long Live South Bank, stated that it would be kept open without charge, seemingly indefinitely.

This is quite a reversal of Southbank’s stance, with the centre’s rhetoric throughout the campaign towards the skating community and LLSB shifting from caring sympathisers, to annoyed landlords with nuisance tenants, to aggressive name-calling. The project’s failure can be pinned to three, related issues.

First, there was the overwhelming groundswell of support for the skaters. The Southbank seemed surprised by this. For decades skaters have been treated as anti-social deviants, yet the community thrives as a form of urban practice and creativity with roots going back decades – and the undercroft was a central part of this scene before the Southbank took off as a go-to area for hoards of tourists and visitors (who like to watch them).

Skateboarders use the city in unexpected and different ways, ways in which planners did not intend, and private landowners often don’t like. But their continued presence in cities all over the world demonstrates its appeal and longevity.

The skateboarding subculture is tied into the subconsciousness of cities. So when a key cultural site is threatened by “big business”, it was hardly surprising to see others standing with them, including London’s mayor, Boris Johnson. The undercroft is not just another skate spot – it had been defended for decades, with skaters facing off efforts to marginalise and criminalise them.

Grafitti artists making the space their own. David Jones/flickr
New isn’t everything
The Southbank included an alternative skate park in their plans, described as “an area for urban arts”. This was a clear and transparent attempt to commercialise skating from the outset, and was a rather patronising gesture.

Skate parks have long existed as places where skaters can go to practice, socialise and perform in relative safety and comfort. But as spaces designed for that purpose, they remove the element of creative re-appropriation of the city that is part of the culture. Such parks represent a spoon-fed consumerism that goes against the grain.

The proposed skate park was not only extremely corporate in appearance, but represented a complete whitewashing (literally) of the undercroft’s history, and would undoubtedly have been branded, sponsored, overly-policed and micro-managed. It was seen as a transparent attempt not only to remove skaters from prime real estate, but also to impose greater control over them.

Unoriginal thinking
Third and perhaps more importantly is that of the capitalist logic at work behind the Southbank’s plans. While the Festival Wing plans were heralded as dynamic, creative and visionary, really they only recreated cityscapes that have proliferated across the world. Coffee chains, “boutique” retail stores (usually owned by larger corporations), food markets, pop-up events – these are all indicative of the march toward the privatisation of space. Capitalism has become extremely proficient at creatively adapting its aesthetic appeal, while maintaining the end result of further privatisation of land, centralisation of wealth, and homogenisation of cities.

The skaters recognised this early and were able to expose its inherent contradictions. Why would a “culture for all” not include skaters? If Southbank was really committed to broadening the cultural offerings, surely preserving the undercroft was paramount. It already attracts marginalised young people; it already allows them to form diverse communities around a shared common interest; it already promotes social interaction, healthy living, and cultural engagement. The desire to create more saleable retail space is not reason enough to destroy a community that already matches the aspects the Southbank wished to promote.

In an era when our cities are increasingly corporate, private and elitist, Long Live South Bank’s successful defence of the undercroft proves that democratic, grass-roots community activism still works, and it proves that our cities are still worth fighting for.

13/01/2022

In praise of skaters – elves saving cities’ forlorn and forgotten corners
Skateboarders aren’t too popular with civic authorities. Routinely demonised as vandals and as a danger to other members of the public, they are often portrayed as an antisocial nuisance to be excluded by law or sometimes lured away to officially sanctioned skate parks. Skaters, being predominantly teenage lads, can seem like an alien and dangerous sub-species, scowling from beneath hoodies festooned with zombies, occult runes or lewd cartoons.

Yet the real trouble with skateboarding is that it challenges the dominant use of cities, which remain controlled by civic and corporate interests whose primary purpose is to run the place as a machine for consumption. Pesky skaters are at very least an unruly nuisance getting in the way of valued customers, or, worse still, are enjoying the cityscape for free, a specific symptom of a general teenaphobia.

Iain Borden, the UCL professor whose ground-breaking book first brought the place of skaters in the city to attention recently suggested skating had achieved a more positive place in many cityscapes around the world, now recognised as a creative, challenging and healthy activity.

To an extent this is true. Skateboarding builds confidence and the social capital that can combat social exclusion, alcohol and drug abuse. The sport is becoming respectable with skateboarding designed into some spaces and superb new skate parks.

An ideal way to explore the big city. Chris Ford, CC BY-NC
However civic respectability may not be part of the attraction. Central to skateboarding is the sense of the skaters’ local scene, a heritage and culture that may be inscrutable to non-skaters. Skate culture is powerful social glue. Skaters will tell you that they can turn up in an unfamiliar city, skateboard in hand, and immediately be welcomed to join in with the locals.

Skateboarders’ bonds can also come as a surprise to city authorities. In the autumn of 2014 the city council in Norwich proposed a ban on skateboarding throughout the city centre. Norwich’s new skate park had been built, according to the council, on “the tacit understanding” that skaters would not use the city centre.

On the evening of the council debate to herald the ban the public gallery of the town hall was packed with skaters, with more beside left outside unable to fit in following a demonstration and a public petition with more than 6,000 signatures.

Who are these kids? Victor Leite, CC BY-NC-SA
The council withdrew its immediate plans for a ban although the possible use of a restriction, a Public Spaces Protection Order, has been mooted. This new PSPO legislation also threatened skaters in the town of Kettering, while more typical bans are also looming in Barking and Bristol. Iain Borden’s global optimism can seem a bit too sunny down at street level.

Stop, watch and learn
Skaters are not out to cause conflict. They would much prefer to be left to their own devices, often out of sight and out of mind. While the ominous hoodies and garish logos may look like trouble, it is worth taking time to watch skaters using their favourite spots, as against the fleeting encounters on the high street.

Skate scenes are very sociable, with their own etiquette for taking turns, working out tricks for competitions and looking out for each other. The sport fuels creativity through photography, video and graphics. Skaters treasure and look after top spots, raising money to build ramps and blocks. The spots may not be theirs to own, but they are very good at colonising a city’s forlorn and forgotten corners.

In my city of Newcastle upon Tyne the top local site, the Wasteland, was an old factory floor – skated for more 20 years. “Our summer home” the skaters would say – and they visited it up until the very day when developers finally excavated the concrete, including the parting graffiti: “Farewell our fair weather friend”.

Goodbye, Wasteland. Mike Jeffries, Author provided
A new wasteland has been found, again a demolished factory site – and money has been raised from DIY skate competitions to build new ramps and blocks. Revealingly the same site is also features on a recent list of Tyneside’s top eyesores. The skater’s eye sees the city differently.

In Tyneside their other favourite site is across the river in Gateshead. Called Five Bridges it is a windswept plaza where pedestrian walkways converge under a vast and gloomy flyover. It is an unlovely space, but Gateshead Council put more than £11,000 into building skate ramps and jumps – a great deal of money to invest in entertaining unruly youths.

All those pesky kids are helping keep Five Bridges safer. Mike Jeffries, Author provided
It did so after an elderly resident had told her councillor about the skaters who hung around on the plaza. Bracing himself for the usual complaints the councillor was surprised to hear that she liked it when the skaters were there because then it felt safe to walk through.

So don’t think of skaters as hooligans and vandals. They are much more like a badly dressed version of the Boy Scouts, although the skaters I got to know through my research are not so keen on that cosy description. Maybe a better idea is like the elves in the fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker, a mysterious and often invisible presence busily making the city a better place to live.

13/01/2022

Skateboarding defies the neoliberal logic of the city by making it a playground for all
Skateboarding today is a global phenomenon, with around 50m riders and thousands of skate parks worldwide – it will even feature as a sport in the 2020 Olympic Games. From the full on testosterone of Thrasher skateboard magazine to the fashionable styling of Vogue, the skater girls and boys of Kabul to the Native American reservations of South Dakota, the skate parks of Brazil to the streets of Shenzhen, skateboarding is no longer just for punkish, subcultural rebels – it’s everywhere, for everyone.

Along the way, skateboarders have achieved great things in art, film, photography and DIY skate park construction, and have engaged with important matters of gender, community and professionalism, plus commerce, heritage and social enterprise.

This may come as something of a surprise to those who are mainly familiar with the stereotype of skateboarders as white teenage boys. In fact, a skater today might well be Asian and hipster cool, black and entrepreneurial, female and physically challenged, older and gay – or any other variation imaginable.

Alongside gritty urban streets, new skate terrains have emerged, from DIY constructions, flow bowls and street plazas to longboard parks, multistory wonderlands and hybrid public spaces. Skateboarding’s influence even extends to preservation, heritage, planning and urban politics.

Entering a skate shop, you are as likely to see branded shoes and t-shirts as actual skateboards. Inevitably, big companies are also involved, including the likes of Adidas, Levi’s, New Balance, Nike and Vans.

Many university academics are even now researching skateboarding, from the perspectives of sociology, gender, sexuality, sports professionalism, graphic design, architecture, politics and urbanism. Personally, I’ve been actively researching skateboarding since 1988, culminating in my new book Skateboarding and the City: a Complete History, as well as being an active skateboarder since 1977.

Play over productivity
Most profound of all is skateboarding’s contribution to city streets and public spaces, for it remains, at heart, an urban activity. While cities are made up of housing, offices, banks, transport, universities and so forth, skateboarding makes use of these buildings without engaging with their productive activities. Freed from the strictures of regimented skate parks and the demands of organised sport, street skateboarders implicitly deny that cities should always be productive or useful.

The kind of skateboarding that rides up the walls of banks, slides down handrails and grinds across plaza ledges, disrupts the economic and functional logic of cities. Instead, skateboarding correlates with Pat Kane’s contention that our dominant work ethic should be accompanied by an equivalent “play ethic”, where play is not just personally pleasurable but also collaborative, creative and politicised.

Here, skateboarding suggests that our lives and cities should be full of mobility, pleasure and joy – and not just of sedentary labour and earnest endeavour. The result is, or should be, a city not of passive shopping malls but of vibrant bodily life.

This, perhaps, is the most overtly political space created by skateboarders: a pleasure ground carved out of the city, as a continuous reaffirmation of one of the central slogans of the 1968 strikes and student protests in Paris: that “sous les pavés, la plage” (beneath the pavement, lies the beach).

Overcoming obstacles
Today, skateboarding in public spaces is legislated against everywhere from Brisbane and Manchester to Quebec and the Bronx. This accords with a common social fear of teenagers in general, with skaters as young adults being regularly viewed as potential muggers, robbers or worse. As US president George H.W. Bush once said of skateboarders: “Just thank God they don’t have guns” (quoted in Thrasher, March 1992, p.74).

Physical barriers are also put in place to discourage skateboarding. As the homeless are routinely excluded by “defensive architecture” such as odd-shaped benches, spikes on window ledges and sprinklers above doorways, so skaters encounter rough textured surfaces, “skatestopper” blocks, chains and scatterings of gravel, deliberately intended to ruin their run.

Yet skateboarding can be an ideal training ground for entrepreneurs and other model citizens. Skateboarders are constantly learning and inventing new tricks, which demands innovation, risk taking and an ability to learn through failure. Their typical distrust of organisations, teams and routines means they are independent minded, with a sense of personal responsibility.

Skateboarding has provided an experimental space for the likes of video artist Shaun Gladwell, film maker Spike Jonze and photographer Fred Mortagne to hone their creativity (you can find more examples here).

It can also promote community values: the Pushing Boarders events (London 2018 and Malmö 2019) are exploring diversity among skateboarders. As African American skater Karl Watson put it: “The skateboarding community embraces all ways of life, whether you are black or white, old or young – it embraces all people.”

Read more: How skateboarding flipped its white male image and welcomed the whole world

More positive attitudes towards skateboarding are beginning to emerge, as people become aware of its economic and cultural benefits, and mindful of the need to encourage healthy physical activity among city dwellers of all ages. In cities such as Malmö, London, Brisbane, Rapids City, Coventry and Hull, public recognition for skateboarders has undoubtedly increased in the form of support for skate parks, skateable public spaces, skate-focused schools and city policy.

It seems as though skateboarding is finally being seen in its true light: critical, rebellious, non-conformist – and a dynamic presence in cities around the world.

13/01/2022

13/01/2022