ancient cities

728 Skateboarding
in other media both within the SI and beyond it
after his resignation in 1960, was a vivid attempt
to develop such thinking. He always insisted that,
for all his own efforts to imagine and depict this
utopian space, its real builders would be the New
Babylonians themselves. Other situationists subsequently
charged Constant with technocraticism
during the 1960s, as they dropped the language of
unitary urbanism and shifted their emphasis toward
the political critique of existing conditions. Their
concern with transforming urban space as part of
a revolutionary struggle nevertheless remained
with the group, who addressed the events of the
Paris Commune of 1871 and, later, the revolts in
Paris in May 1968 in which they participated, as
moments of revolutionary urbanism when lived
critiques opened up new sociospatial possibilities.
Recent interest in the situationists from within
urban studies may be related to two wider trends
in this field, namely, (1) growing recognition of
the need to excavate the contested historical geographies
of modernist urbanism, especially with
reference to the previously neglected decades immediately
following World War II, and (2) increased
interest in a vibrant tradition of heterodox Marxist
writings on cities, including those by Walter
Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre. Also significant has
been the ways in which their concepts of the spectacle,
as well as psychogeography, have spoken in compelling
ways to certain current critical and
exploratory practices. The most striking legacies of
the situationist city today lie not in formal architectural
or design experimentation, despite the
interest in their ideas in those fields; rather it is in
the activities of radical political movements to
reclaim streets, to assert rights to the city, to transform
spaces as part of wider struggles, and thus to
take up the quest to change the world that was
always at the heart of situationist endeavors
although in the different conditions of the present.
David Pinder
See also Lefebvre, Henri; Marxism and the City; Paris,
France; Right to the City; Society of the Spectacle; Utopia
Further Readings
Andreotti, Libero and Xavier Costa, eds. 1996. Theory of
the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the
City. Barcelona, Spain: Museu d’Art Contemporani de
Barcelona/ACTAR.
Bonnett, Alastair. 2006. “The Nostalgias of Situationist
Subversion.” Theory, Culture and Society
23(5):23–48.
Debord, Guy. [1967] 1994. The Society of the Spectacle.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York:
Zone Books.
Knabb, Ken, ed. 2006. Situationist International
Anthology. Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public
Secrets.
Merrifield, Andy. 2002. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale
of the City. New York: Routledge.
Pinder, David. 2005. Visions of the City: Utopianism,
Power and Politics in Twentieth-century Urbanism.
Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Sadler, Simon. 1998. The Situationist City. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Situationist International Online (http://www.cddc.vt.edu/
sionline). (Collection of writings by Debord and the
situationists in English translation.)
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2002. “The Strange Respectability of
the Situationist City in the Society of the Spectacle.”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
26(1):153–65.
Wigley, Mark, ed. 1998. Constant’s New Babylon: The
Hyper-architecture of Desire. Rotterdam, the
Netherlands: Witte de With/010 Publishers.
Sk a t e B o a r d i n g
Skateboarding is the act of riding on a short, narrow,
flat board mounted on four wheels.
Skateboarding is a sport, a mode of transportation,
a cultural art form, and a recreational activity,
especially for youth. The practice probably
first began in the beach cities and suburbs of
California during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
While the waves were calm, many surfers tried to
alleviate their boredom by replicating their ocean
moves on smooth expanses of tarmac—this they
did by standing on a short wooden deck (the riding
surface) about 22 inches long and 6 inches
wide, connected to a pair of trucks (axle assemblies)
borrowed from a roller skate, and rolling on
metal or “clay” composite wheels. In 1964, the
influential SkateBoarder magazine appeared, and
by the summer of 1965 skateboarding was a U.S.wide
activity, gaining national television coverage