ancient cities

frequently in areas of semicontrolled space hovering
between private and public domains. Like the
homeless, skateboarders occupy minimal developments
and office plazas without engaging in the
economic activity of the buildings and, as a result,
owners and managers have treated skateboarders
as trespassers and have cited marks caused by
skateboards as proof of criminal damage.
Skateboarders are frequently fined and banned
and have even been imprisoned—in short, they are
increasingly subjected to a form of spatial censorship
and criminalization.
Now that anti-skateboarding legislation is
becoming highly systematic, the nervousness of the
status quo when faced with skateboarders highlights
a confrontation between hegemonic and
countercultural urban social practices and shows
how urban managers and legislators are becoming
increasingly intolerant toward supposedly nonproductive
and noncommercialized activities such as
skateboarding.
Ultimately, however, for skateboarding, being
banned from the public domain becomes simply
one more obstacle to overcome, causing American
skateboarders to campaign that “Skateboarding Is
Not a Crime.” Alternatively, such repression simply
adds to the anarchist tendency within skateboarding,
reinforcing the cry of “Skate and
Destroy” (a 20-year-old slogan still highly popular
as a sticker among skateboarders). Either way,
skateboarders are part of a long process in the history
of cities: a fight by the unempowered and
disenfranchised for a distinctive social space of
their own.
See also Urban Design
Further Readings
Iain Borden
Borden, Iain. (2001). Skateboarding, Space and the City:
Architecture and the Body. Oxford, UK: Berg.
Hocking, Justin, Jeffrey Knutson, and Jared Maher, eds.
2004. Life and Limb: Skateboarders Write from the
Deep End. New York: Soft Skull Press.
Howell, Andy. 2006. Art, Skateboarding and Life.
Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.
Weyland, Jocko. 2002. The Answer Is Never: A History
and Memoir of Skateboarding. New York: Grove
Press.
So c i a l ex c l u S i o n
Social Exclusion
731
Concepts come and go. Concepts in social science
not only are influenced by academic debates, but
also react to, and are molded by, what takes place
in the policy arena. Concepts in social science are
value-laden and contested. The concept of social
exclusion is no different. First used in France,
adopted by Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and the
French government in 1974, the concept traveled
and became increasingly popular among academics,
politicians, and bureaucrats alike. In recent
years, the use of the concept by the European
Union and by the U.K. government has received a
great deal of attention. Many scholars attack the
use of social exclusion as a concept, just as many
have embraced the concept and highlighted its usefulness
in explaining and addressing inequalities.
It was René Lenoir, then Secrétaire d’État à
Sociale who in 1974 wrote Les exclus: Un français
sur dix, in which he identified up to 10 percent of
the French population as “the excluded.” They
consisted of vulnerable groups who fell through
the insurance-based social safety net, for example,
single parents, people with disabilities not fully
protected under social insurance policies at the
time, suicidal people, poor elderly, abused children,
and substance abusers. The concept of social
exclusion emanates from the French tradition of
national integration and social solidarity. Exclusion
refers to the rupture of the social bond. During the
1980s the term gained wider currency in France. It
was used to refer to various types of social disadvantage,
related to a “new” set of social problems:
large-scale unemployment, ghettoization, and fundamental
changes in family life. Whereas “old”
poverty programs focused on the basic needs of the
individual or the household, social exclusion programs
focused on society and addressed the individual’s
ties to society.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, globalization
emerged, or at least the Europeanization of the
concept of social exclusion, as the term gained use
in many European countries, among researchers of
the global South (often Europeans) as well as by
the European Union and the European Commission.
So far, the concept has hardly been popularized in
United States. Graham Room has traced the
development of the concept from EU antipoverty