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The
Poetics of Security: Skateboarding, Urban Design, and the New Public
Space
by Ocean Howell
(© 2001. No
portion of this essay, text or image, may be reproduced without author's
consent.)
Abstract:
Skateboarding is a
thorn in the side of landscape architects, planners, and building owners;
so much so that there are now design workshops that teach a series of
defensive architectural tactics for deterring the activity. The type of
skateboarding that plagues these architects and the spaces they create,
"street skating," has only existed for about 15 years, and in
fact was born out of the barren, defensive spaces created by
redevelopment. Viewed in this light, it is clear that street skating is
not only an impetus for defensive architecture, but also a symptom of
defensive architecture. Recognizing that redevelopment spaces fostered
pathologies, cities and corporations have begun to build more friendly
spaces in the past couple of decades. But they have been careful to
ensure that the spaces are only friendly to a select subset of the
public, namely office workers and consumers. To create such spaces
requires knowledge of the minutest details of undesirable behaviors—a
knowledge that can only be gleaned through surveillance. Because the
resultant spaces appear open but exclude the vast majority of the
citizenry, they represent a restrictive discourse of publicness. Although
the destructive effects of skateboarding have been exaggerated, the
purpose of this essay is not to argue that skateboarding should be
permitted in public space. It is by virtue of its status as a misuse of
these spaces—and because it is a symptom of defensive design—that
skateboarding is exceptionally good at drawing attention to the quietly
exclusionary nature of the new public space. Ultimately, skateboarding
affords an observer glimpses of the larger processes of surveillance and
simulation by which public space, both physical and cultural, is
produced.
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