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Misused Transportation/Misused Space: A Brief History
Skateboarding was
invented in the 1950s in Southern Californian beach towns when surfers
tore the T-handlebars off of their scooters and skated on the asphalt
banks of the local schoolyards as though they were surfing waves. The
sport quickly took on a life of its own, and throughout the 70s people
could be found riding in empty backyard swimming pools of vacant houses.
The basic move was to ride up the transitioned wall of the pool, slide
along the edge, and plunge back down the wall. Soon cities and private
companies began building pools exclusively for skateboarders. The most
commonly accepted story about the origin of street skating starts with a
group of skaters being thrown out of the privately owned Skate City park
in Whittier, California in the early 1980s. Apparently they didn't have
the money to pay the entrance fee, so they snuck in. After being escorted
out, a professional skater named John Lucero led the group in a kind of sarcastic
protest in the parking lot. In full view of the owners of the park and
the skaters inside, they began to do tricks on the edges of the curbs, as
though they were the edges of a pool. These undesirables came back and
did this day after day and soon skaters from inside the park came out to
try this new style.
In the early and
mid 80s the style expanded out of the suburban parking lot and into the
more varied terrain of redeveloped urban centers, primarily Los Angeles
and San Francisco. This happened to coincide with America's explosion of
personal liability suits and, although Landscape Architecture Magazine
reported in March 1998 that there has never been a successful
skateboarding liability suit (Thompson, p. 82), nearly every one of the
parks was bulldozed—to be replaced by family fun centers. By and large,
the only people who could continue to practice the old style were those
who could afford to build private ramps. Thus street skating quickly
became the most urban and populist version of the sport: it didn't cost
anything except the price of the board itself, and it could be done
anywhere there was pavement. In 1999 there were an estimated 9.5 million
skateboarders in the U.S. alone (Levine July 26, 1999; 70), and by all
accounts, skateboarders are now a strong presence in nearly every modern
city, from San Francisco to Osaka to Sao Paolo.
"Skate and
Destroy/Skate and Create"
This sarcastic
motto from the late 80s and early 90s serves as a good introduction to
the philosophy of street skating. It used to appear on bumperstickers,
T-shirts, and skateboards—often one of the halves would appear
independently, and often the slogan would appear just as it's written in
the header above. The message is that while skateboarders consider what
they do to be an art form, they also recognize that skating on street
furniture is destructive, but don't feel too troubled by that fact. The
reasons that they don't feel much reverence for these spaces are 1) the
spaces are typically disused anyway, and 2) the skaters understand that
these spaces are scripted for use only by office workers, tourists, and
conventioneers. Absent from this list are not only the usual
suspects—homeless, drug dealers, and prostitutes—but also children,
students, old people, or anyone else who does not directly contribute to
a corporation's profitability and marketability (Loukaitou 1998,
181-188). As Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee note, "the design
characteristics commonly present in the [new downtown] plazas—introversion,
fragmentation, escapism, orderliness, and rigidity—are consistent with
the objectives of control, protection, social filtering, image packaging,
and manipulation of user behavior" (1998, 98).
These manipulative,
profit-driven spaces make up the vast majority of new public spaces that
are being built, and they are usually publicly subsidized through some
combination of floor area bonuses, land write-off or write-down, tax
abatement, zoning incentives, tax increment subsidies, and any number of other
carrots (Loukaitou 1998, 84). To spend public money on corporate window
dressing—spaces that exclude the majority of the public—is simply a bad
deal. But the corporations have the upper hand. A member of the Los
Angeles Comunity Redevelopment Agency stated, on the condition of
anonymity:
'Our job is to make development happen, not to chase
developers away. Developers are spending millions of dollars on a
project. They can say "If you make us build this there is no way we
can continue," or "Public open space may look nice, but it has
inherent security problems"' (Loukaitou 1998, 95).
David Martin, the
architect of the Willshire plaza in the Bunker Hill redevelopment area, frankly
expresses the most common solution to this dilemma: you make buildings
and plazas in such a way that "'the corporate edifice and the very
expensive building facades . . . intimidate homeless'" and other
unintended users (Loukaitou 1998, 146). Like the interior designs of fast
food restaurants that use garish colors to ensure that no one will want
to linger and tie up seating for other customers, these new spaces are
designed to keep commerce (people) moving along. Architect Nathaniel
Owings said in support of redevelopment's public spaces, "the key .
. . is not merely a conglomeration of goods. Rather it is good
circulation—ease of movement . . . [P]otential shoppers should be occupied
in noticing displays of goods, not in watching out for people who might
bump into them" (1969, 129). These are literally consumer spaces:
they are intended to be passively and briefly consumed, but they invite
no participation. Arguing with police, security guards, and concerned
citizens about what public space is, and should be, is a right of passage
for skateboarders. They understand that public space is precisely about
bumping into other people—it is about interacting with the public, not
with goods. They understand that the design of this verisimilar public
space is a selective discourse that classifies its users, defining as the
legitimate public those who consume and pathologizing those who put the
space to any other use. Street skating is a counter-discourse, a
challenge to that construction of publicness.
Skateboarding is
not protest or activism, but is more like what Michel de Certeau
described, in The Practice of Everyday Life, as a 'spatial
practice.' Skateboarding is "a certain play within a system of
defined places" (1984, 106). As the public space of the Central
Business District (CBD) becomes more authoritarian, skateboarding
"'authorizes' the production of an area of free play on a
checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities. It makes places
habitable" (1984, 106).
William H. Whyte
provides a good example of a spatial practice, in his film The Social
Life of Small Urban Spaces, when he affectionately shows how people
can find a place to sit even where they are architecturally discouraged from
doing so. In a demonstration of remarkable adaptability and quotidian
creativity, people place small blankets over spikes that are meant to
intimidate them, balance on intentionally narrow ledges overlooking
fountains, and remain perched on canted planters that are designed to
deposit them right back onto the sidewalk (1998b). Whyte laments the way
that open spaces enhance a corporate image while alienating the public
that they nominally serve. In one scene he shows an intentionally
solitary bench, and announces that "this is a design object, the
purpose of which is to punctuate architectural photos" (1988b). But
because there are no obstructions (people), this is precisely the type of
bench that skateboarders love to inhabit. In spite of the corporate space's
disregard for the public, a small, resourceful portion of the public can
still find a way to put the space to public use.
Using a military
metaphor, de Certeau calls these spatial practices tactics, which
he opposes to strategies. Tactics are the arts of guerrillas, the
disempowered who must hide in and subvert the space of the Other in order
to create space for themselves, must cleverly manipulate existing systems
for a fleeting advantage. Strategies, on the other hand, are the institutional
procedures of massive organizations whose principle strength, brute
force, is also their principle weakness, immobility. Strategies, then,
are used by institutions to manufacture places, centers of power
(like corporate plazas); while tactics are used to momentarily subvert
these places in order to create spaces that individuals can
inhabit. (I will not follow de Certeau's convention of distinguishing
places from spaces in this essay.) But this distinction between
strategies and tactics is useful in explaining the relationship between
skateboarding and corporate public space. Still, I will argue later that
the example of skateboarding also illustrates how this distinction
between strategies and tactics relies on a simplistic dichotomy between power
and resistance, a romantic notion of the individual.
An even better
discourse with which to describe the activity of skateboarding is that of
the Situationists, a group of European Avant Guard artists, theorists,
and activists who were prominent during the 1960s, and who influenced the
thinking de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. The Situationists hated the
mechanized, rationalist urbanism of such figures as Hausmann and Le
Corbusier, which sought to "suppress incidents and places that
contradict narratives of authority" (Saddler 1998, 99). Guy Debord,
one of the leaders of the movement, referred to the products of this
brand of capitalist urbanism as 'Spectacle.' It was this urbanism that
systematically replaced unselfconscious, anarchic, and deeply human
places like the old Les Halles market, with proscriptive, consumerist,
and dehumanizing places like the new Les Halles shopping mall and
entertainment complex. So in order to create space for humans in this
city of spectacle, the Situationists engaged in guerilla resistances:
drift and détournement.
The
flâneur-inspired drift is an act of wandering the city according to no
set route and no set schedule. The Situationists believed that one would
discover the truths of the city by immersing oneself in its streets
without ever going anywhere, without participating in the production of capital;
the slogan was "'Work to Make Ourselves Useless'" (Saddler
1998, 92). The French word détournement can be translated as any
one of the following: "'diversion,' 'rerouting,' 'hijacking,'
'embezzlement,' 'misappropriation,' and 'corruption,'" (Saddler
1998, 17) and all of these meanings apply. Examples of détournement
can be found in the Situationist art forms of graffiti and pastiche, both
of which take established systems (maps, the new public space, mainstream
newspapers) and hijack them, misappropriate them for their own diversion.
To go for a skate is to go for a drift, to explore the streets looking
for hidden places, opportunities for creative misappropriation; it is to
recombine the artifacts of production and reinterpret the city for
oneself. Skateboarders have even hijacked the sanitized Les Halles for
their own art and diversion—it is one of the best-known skate spots in
France. As Situationist thinker Constant Nieuwenhuys put it, "'human
beings were born to manifest themselves'" (Saddler 1998, 97), even
in places as lifeless as the new Les Halles.
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