ancient cities

730 Skateboarding
Media Exposure and Commercialization
This new kind of urban skateboarding, relatively
free from the constraints of commercial skateparks
and organized team sports, and with its own urban
subculture and identity, has become enormously
popular. Besides famous skateboarding cities like
Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco
(where skateboard spots such as the Embarcadero
and Pier 7 have become internationally famous),
every U.S. city and town now has its own band of
skateboarders—numbers are more or less impossible
to fix, but there are probably around 5 million
to 7 million serious skateboarders in America today
and around 40 million worldwide. Urban street
skateboarding is particularly popular in United
Kingdom and Brazil, but it is also prevalent in just
about every other developed country globally.
As a result, media exposure of skateboarding
has also became increasingly common, through
Hollywood films like Back to the Future, Police
Academy 4, and Gleaming the Cube, and, most
importantly, through satellite television coverage
of the multiextreme sport “X Games,” the Dogtown
and Z-Boys film documentary, and the Hollywood
follow-up film Lords of Dogtown. In addition,
there are a multitude of manufacturers’ videos
promoting products via their team riders, as well
as a tendency on the part of other product manufacturers
for skateboarding to be included in
advertisements whenever a sense of dynamic
adventure is required (skateboarding is often featured
in car advertisements to impart a sense of
youthfulness and urban adventure). Also of significance,
Sony launched their phenomenally successful
Pro-Skater Playstation video game, endorsed
by professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, and
then further developed this into the equally popular
Tony Hawk’s Underground game series.
Internet coverage also continues to grow, offering
interviews, videos, photographs, skate locations,
and music.
Indeed, it is the commercialization and mediaization
of skateboarding that often dominates at
the start of the twenty-first century: Many seemingly
independent and small skateboard companies
are in fact often owned by a few large conglomerates,
with the whole business being estimated at up
to $1 billion per year. In addition, skateboard shoe
and clothing companies such as Vans, Airwalk,
and DC are now sold in mass-market stores worldwide,
while hundreds of professional skateboarders
reportedly earn six-figure salaries from their
product endorsements and guest appearances.
Nonetheless, despite attempts to turn skateboarding
into a commodified and media spectacle,
it remains at core a resolutely antiauthoritarian
urban practice, with many skateboard-related artists,
filmmakers, videomakers, and photographers
choosing to work outside of the more commercialized
arenas of the sport. Most importantly of all,
in its actual performative actions, street skateboarding
remains highly confrontational toward the city
environment: taking over public squares and plazas,
scratching benches and planters, gouging out the
tops of stone and brick walls, leaving traces of paint
on handrails and steps, creating noise and visual
surprise, and speeding past pedestrians. Yet, beyond
simple accusations that skateboarding causes physical
damage to persons and property, there is a
more significant dimension to this seeming aggression:
In redefining space for themselves, skateboarders
threaten accepted definitions of space,
taking over space conceptually as well as physically
and so striking at the very heart of what
everyone else understands of the city. In particular,
through their performative and largely untheorized
and uncodified actions, skateboarders make an
overtly political statement, suggesting that the city is
not just a place for work, commuting, or shopping
but also a place for play, action, and consumption
without spending money. The skateboarding world
thus offers a pleasure ground carved out of the city
and a modern-day continuous reaffirmation of the
situationist-inspired 1968 statement that beneath
the pavement lies the beach.
Anti-Skateboarding Legislation
Unsurprisingly, this kind of activity does not go
unchallenged. Because skateboarders test urban
boundaries, using city elements in ways neither
practiced nor understood by others, they face startling
amounts of repression and legislation.
Negative and heavy-handed reactions to skateboarding
have become increasingly commonplace,
and many U.S. and U.K. cities have now placed
curfews and outright bans on skateboarding.
Consequently, skateboarders now routinely encounter
experiences similar to those of the homeless,