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Introduction
I
began skateboarding in 1984, when I was 11 years old, and immediately
became a devotee. When I was 18 I became a professional street skater, earning
my living from royalties from sales of skateboards that bore my
endorsement. The company that sponsored me, Birdhouse, was a small
independent operation owned by longtime pro, Tony Hawk. My job was to
appear in magazines, videos, and contests using these Birdhouse brand
boards to jump down stairs, slide on benches, and generally abuse street
furniture in the most skillful and creative way that I could; and by
example, to encourage others to do so. I did this professionally for six
years, until I graduated from college and retired.
I now work as an
editor at a publishing house in downtown San Francisco. But I also
continue to skate and I contribute essays and stories to a skateboarding
magazine called Slap. As both a skateboarder and an office worker,
my experience of the public space downtown is always split. I
unconsciously scan my surroundings for both a place to practice my
disruptive sport, and a nice quiet place to have lunch. Of course, when I
come downtown to skate, I receive a colder welcome than when I come
downtown to work. It is not only police, security guards, tourists, and
office workers who view me differently; but increasingly, I am also
treated differently by the design of public space itself. From
threatening metal spikes to fortuitously-placed cobblestones, an arsenal
of design tactics communicate to me—with varying degrees of subtlety—that
skateboarding is not a legitimate public use of these spaces.
Skateboarding is what planners and architects have sometimes referred to
as an "urban pathology." So, psychologically, I move through
the open spaces of downtown as both a public nuisance and as a legitimate
member of the public whose right to eat his lunch in peace is to be
architecturally defended.
There is nothing that is immediately objectionable about this
tension. An office worker contributes his labor and ensures the
functioning of the city; an office worker is productive. A skateboarder,
on the other hand, gets in people's way and chips up benches; a
skateboarder is destructive. Given that the downtown is zoned for
commercial use, it is clear why the design of open space should consider
an office worker a member of the public and a skateboarder a nuisance;
and the purpose of this essay is not to suggest that skateboarding should
be permitted in public space. Rather, I intend to inquire into the
processes by which public space is produced, specifically into the
interrelationship between dominant and subordinate spatial knowledges:
architecture and skateboarding. These discourses are not simply opposed
to one another—as institution to individual, outside to inside—but are
mutually constitutive, in much the same way that the Symbolic and the
Real are mutually constitutive in the Lacanian framework.
For length reasons, this essay will focus narrowly on the
physical (architectural) and representational expressions of this
relationship, and will only indirectly consider questions of skateboard
culture’s modes of identification, and group formation and exclusion.
This means that some pertinent questions—most notably the culture’s
masculinism—cannot be addressed here.
Literature on
cities is replete with the metaphor of public space as the site, the
physical embodiment, of democracy. Its purpose is to facilitate
interaction between all citizens, not just consumers; it exists to foster
debate—even conflict—among the various competing interests that are
represented in the citizenry. To these ends, a public space should be
both "'physically and psychologically accessible,'" (Loukaitou
1998, 301) as Kevin Lynch would put it, to the public, in all of its
unmanageable diversity. The work of William H. Whyte alone provides
abundant evidence that when this is accomplished, a space will not need
to be managed from the outside—it will regulate itself.
Without going too
far into all of the discussions, I acknowledge here that many critics,
like Rosalyn Deutsche, rightly ask if there has ever been a space that
unequivocally welcomes the public. Haven’t constructions of publicness
always entailed exclusions? It can be further argued
that to even talk of “simulated” urbanism is already to exhibit
nostalgia, to project back to a virginal and originary public space that
has been defiled, and to identify with the civically whole citizens who
inhabited this transparently public space. In her discussion of Michael Sorkin’s Variations on
a Themepark (1996 283-4), Deutsche appositely notes that these public
citizens—be they Renaissance Italian or Ancient Greek—were members of the
dominant classes, and that this nostalgia never thinks to ask where the
subordinate classes were in this public space—be they workers, women,
racial minorities, gays, lesbians, or others. I do not intend to suggest that we need to recuperate the
lost agora, but to argue that in industrial America there has been
a movement from a kind of paternal, Olmsteadian public space that
welcomed large segments of the public on certain disciplinary conditions,
towards a public space that excludes subordinate people outright and more
strictly disciplines even the dominant classes.
Central Park, one
of the most beneficent of all American public works, is the paradigmatic
example of the nineteenth century, ‘missionary’ philosophy of public
space. The idea was to manufacture a bucolic idyll in the dense urban
center in order to divert the potentially revolutionary passions of the
workers away from the industrial system that subjugated them. Allowing
the workers to mingle with the elites was to have the effect of
civilizing the workers. In the early twentieth century, City Beautiful
plans—which were always sponsored by corporations (Loukaitou 1998,
17)—sought to 'inspire' good citizenship among the lower classes with
grand neoclassical symmetries.
Even though these spaces fall short of the ideal
democratic space, the fact is that the marginalized were still conceived
of as a presence. While these spaces took it as their duty to gently
coerce the dispossessed, thus acknowledging the presence if not the
necessity of conflict, the new public spaces have taken up the task of
obviating competing viewpoints and the presence of the people who advance
them. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee point out, in their
book Urban Design Downtown, how the design metaphors that
architects use to describe public spaces have shifted from the 'plaza'
and the 'green' to the "'room,' 'terrace,' 'court,' 'garden,'"
and other soothing, private spaces (1998, 229). More to the economic
point, Michael Fotheringham, the architect who is presently giving San
Francisco's Union Square a makeover, explains how good design should
focus on the "'needs and comforts'" of the "'prime
client'" (Hansen April 2001, 23). The often stated problem with
Timothy Pflueger’s City Beautiful inspired Union Square was that it was
attractive to homeless, skateboarders, street performers, and pan
handlers—people who are not clients at all. Where designers might have once used a term like
"citizens," they increasingly talk about "consumers."
Public space is commercial space.
Skateboarding is
not terribly important in the grand scheme of things; it is a young urban
counterculture that admirably seeks to challenge power relations and less
admirably seeks to escape from them. But it does provide a unique
perspective on the creeping privatization of public space. Like the
Freudian symptom or 'return of the repressed,' skateboarding was born out
of the defensive, barren plazas of redevelopment—on the sites where
street life was forcibly subverted to property values.
Of course, no one
defends redevelopment spaces anymore, and there has been a push for a
resurgence of the public sphere in cities. The designers of public spaces
in Giuliani's New York, for example, have taken certain of William H.
Whyte's recommendations to heart, creating spaces that people want to
inhabit. But they have been careful about selecting which people. The
redevelopment spaces succeeded in excluding the marginalized people whose
neighborhoods they supplanted, but their hostility also warded off the
middleclass whose safety the spaces sought to assure. Pleasant and
‘psychologically open’ spaces have the opposite problem of welcoming
everyone. To attract the upscale public while deterring the masses has
been a primary urban design goal of recent years. This is a complicated
task that this essay will argue has only been accomplished with extensive
surveillance of undesirable behavior. This information is used to create
exclusionary spaces that appear public to the selected users; it is used
to simulate a public sphere.
Through a discussion of how skateboarding has been appropriated
by corporate marketing, this essay will also argue that the cultural
space of advertising and public opinion is produced by the same processes
of surveillance and simulation. If it were made plain that the exigencies
of capital quietly determine nearly every aspect of every space that
people inhabit, many would not accept it. So it is imperative that
corporate capital obscure this fact with sophism, cover it with an
aesthetic gloss, and demonstrate that the interests of private profit are
equal to the interests of the public at large. Accordingly, private
interests study and meticulously document any challenging cultural
formation—any activity that draws attention to the commercial nature of
public space—then vilify it as a threat to the public while
simultaneously claiming a sanitized version of the culture's philosophy
as its own position. Using the example of skateboarding, this essay will
argue that it is according to these joint processes of surveillance and simulation
that public space is produced.
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