//Skateboarding & Community
Seven Hills Skatepark
Youth of Seven Hills
Addis Skatepark
Philadelphia Skateboards
Medium is secondary;
re-meaning is the craft.
Urban
Politics
Politics
*Politics is the careful negotiation
between interest and threat.
This transformative nature of skateboarding in the public sphere signifies an inherent alteration in the way skateboarders perceive their cities, its spaces and objects, implying a redefined relationship with their most immediate surroundings; quotidian forms and spaces -stairs and their handrails, plazas and their furniture, parking lots and their curbs- manifest in a whole new light. This shift in perception is evident in the language skateboarders use; to non-skaters objects used by the act of skateboarding are “skate obstacles”, to skaters they are “skate spots”; they are by no means obstacles that need to be overcome, rather spaces and forms that carry great potentiality for redefinition.
Using this tool of playful rebellion on preset meanings in a setting that is ever evolving; the city -the built environment; with the diversity of its spaces, and complexity of its structures- is reproduced into an enormous playground carrying the potentiality of recreation at every corner.
As has been established thus far; skateboarding is an act of redefinition -not by any means rendering the original meaning obsolete, rather expanding on it and adding to it-, disrupting the discourses of public space and engaging actively in the production of a new meaning for it, which in turn equates to an increase in value, allowing skateboarding to become a performance of claiming the right to the city.
A politician, by the standard definition is someone in charge of acts of governance; if we are to abstract and extend the definition of the act politics, then it can be defined as the careful negotiation between interest and threat. Politicians seeks interest and avoids threat for the people they represents. When interest lies in the hands of the source of threat and vice-versa, is when matters get complicated, and a careful negotiation needs be ensued.
Skateboarding as a public performance breaks the authoritative process of the production-consumption cycle of space -one in which the planner and the architect are the ones with the authority to set meanings for their ideas, and the citizen: the passive consumer-; thus turning skateboarders as a social group into urban politicians, negotiating – on behalf of their fellow city residents – new meanings for their cities and its spaces between interest and threat.