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Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History
Skateboarding is both a sport and a way of life. Creative, physical, graphic, urban and controversial, it is full of contradictions – a billion-dollar global industry which still retains its vibrant, counter-cultural heart.
Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.
Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.
384 pages, Paperback
Published February 21, 2019
13 people are currently reading
180 people want to read
About the author
Iain Borden
37 books17 followersIain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, England.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 9, 2019
Iain Borden’s book; Skateboarding and the City presents a practical example of French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of Production of Space. Henri Lefebvre discusses, at length, his theory that all societies and modes of production create space; their own space. Lefebvre, like many philosophers presents his idea in a somewhat impenetrable manner to the outsider. Whilst a cursory understanding of his theory is almost essential for understanding the origins of Bordens work, Borden gives you a detailed, step by step guide to one of the best examples of this theory at play. His work expands from Lefebvres ideas into his own with discussions of phrases such as ‘super-architectural space’ and ‘zero degree architecture’ yet the roots of theory remain embedded in Lefebvres work throughout.
The book and ideas, however, never come across as derivative. Borden is unflinchingly thorough in contextually examining the origins, devices, sub-cultures and interpretations of the city that are unique to skaters and skateboarding that this remains truly his own work. Skateboarding, Space and the City performs well as not only an architectural companion, but as a history of skateboarding, a memorandum on city subcultures and a discussion on culture claiming public space. This is backed up again with Lefebvre and his theory of ‘right to the city’.
Skateboarders implicitly realize the importance of the streets and neglected architecture as a place to act. In London this has been typified by skaters’ adoption of the under croft of the South Bank, it’s angled banks at once on display yet hidden beneath the high art cultural centre, thus turning its discarded forms into a significant social space.
Borden (2001) p.188
The relevance of this work to examining cultural infrastructures in the public realm is personified by one of the most fascinating spaces in London – Southbank skate park. This once uninteresting location exists in the left over space between the south embankment that appeared during London’s clean up and sanitation programme, and the cultural arts centre that waved a monumental flag for the Festival of Britain Little more than a collection of banks and supporting structure for the building overhead this area has become one of the most significant cultural spaces in the world where we see yet a more specific example of Borden’s and by extension, Lefebvres ideas at work.
A recent planning application that proposed relocating the skate park and infilling its current location with restaurants and shops (so-called social spaces) was met with almost thirty thousand objections, making it the most unpopular planning application in history. The provision of a new skate park would have surly provided ‘better’ terrain for skaters with purpose built ramps and obstacles. Borden’s work provides us with a great window into the ideas that underpin the importance of culture embodied within space. How an objectively ‘lesser’ space from a practical point of view can become the heart and soul of a sub-culture within society.
This notion, that space (place) is not solely physical but can only exist when people (memory, culture, self) are present and perform an interactive dialogue with the physical, is not a new idea and echoes Marc Auge and his other peers.
Borden discusses three primary types of space in his work. Found Space, Constructed Space and Body Space. Found space engages the progression from surfing to skateboarding and the creative opportunities presented by the sidewalks and streets of the city. Constructed space furthers the conversation to the sculpted concrete skate parks of the 70’s and early 80’s and their significance as spaces that exist to demonstrate an art form that lies somewhere between choreographed performance and improvisation which he describes as ‘a gestural space of flow and action’ Borden (2010) p.117
Finally, and most interestingly he writes about Body-Space under three headings of super-architectural space, slices of time and projecting the self. Therefore the chapter on Body Space sets itself up to discuss the space created by the process of (not limited to physical, but also cultural) skateboarding.
He uses Lefebvres idea to strengthen and re-enforce the proposal that the ‘contribution of skateboarding to architectural space’ is not what he refers to as solely the ‘various constructed architectures of skateboarding’ but rather the ‘space’ created by the process and self-representation as discussed by Lefebvre. Note the architectures of skateboarding are not necessarily a series of physical spaces, but encompass the activity also. What makes the process unique is the injection of self. Projection of your own image into the activity creates the ‘body space’.
Borden claims that through the re-imagination of architectural space, skateboarders re-create both it, and themselves into super-architectural space.
The work goes on to compare the ‘front-back, left-right, up-down reversals and rotations’ acted out by skateboarders (which is described as ‘complex spatial actions’) to Len Lye’s short film – Particles in Space. The film in question was created by scratching a series on animated dots and lines directly onto film and compiled to give a sense of space through ‘compression, tension, eruption, repetition, pulse, stillness, humour and gravity.’ He claims that this expressive performance, coupled with the technical precision require to enact it, creates body-centric space.
Not shy to criticize and disagree Borden claims that Lye’s film title ‘particles in space’, is insufficient claiming that the particles create and are part of the space – a space which does not exist without them. He describes the skateboarder’s equivalent space as the ‘dynamic intersection of body, board and terrain’.
Borden describes the origins of this space as from within the body. Then ‘centrifugally outwards’ as the body describes the minds projection through movement. He goes on to use the term ‘gestural’ which suggests interpretation and improvisation. This is important to Borden’s idea because it separates the body-space created by skateboarders from the performance art of a dancer or other choreographed display of body-centric interaction with space. The term gesture imbues this movement with the idea of self-expression – of getting a message across in a spontaneously articulated manner.
The summary, here, of this work may give the impression of a convoluted practical dissection lf Lefebvres ideas in terms of culture heavy ‘street art’. And whilst true that you will benefit from an understanding, and more so an interest, in skateboarding and the culture that surrounds it, Borden has made it easy for the reader. What exists in the final book is a comprehensive, if un-concise, examination of a social and cultural movement across over 3 decades. He brings us up to speed on the facts and figures, whilst giving the reader a first person perspective of the influences, intentions and passions that drove the movement forward. The story is wrapped up in architectural theories about the creation of body-centric space, the importance of culture in ‘place’ and the spontaneity of identity. All of these are discussed around a subject that he has made us feel familiar with, even if we never were.
The book and ideas, however, never come across as derivative. Borden is unflinchingly thorough in contextually examining the origins, devices, sub-cultures and interpretations of the city that are unique to skaters and skateboarding that this remains truly his own work. Skateboarding, Space and the City performs well as not only an architectural companion, but as a history of skateboarding, a memorandum on city subcultures and a discussion on culture claiming public space. This is backed up again with Lefebvre and his theory of ‘right to the city’.
Skateboarders implicitly realize the importance of the streets and neglected architecture as a place to act. In London this has been typified by skaters’ adoption of the under croft of the South Bank, it’s angled banks at once on display yet hidden beneath the high art cultural centre, thus turning its discarded forms into a significant social space.
Borden (2001) p.188
The relevance of this work to examining cultural infrastructures in the public realm is personified by one of the most fascinating spaces in London – Southbank skate park. This once uninteresting location exists in the left over space between the south embankment that appeared during London’s clean up and sanitation programme, and the cultural arts centre that waved a monumental flag for the Festival of Britain Little more than a collection of banks and supporting structure for the building overhead this area has become one of the most significant cultural spaces in the world where we see yet a more specific example of Borden’s and by extension, Lefebvres ideas at work.
A recent planning application that proposed relocating the skate park and infilling its current location with restaurants and shops (so-called social spaces) was met with almost thirty thousand objections, making it the most unpopular planning application in history. The provision of a new skate park would have surly provided ‘better’ terrain for skaters with purpose built ramps and obstacles. Borden’s work provides us with a great window into the ideas that underpin the importance of culture embodied within space. How an objectively ‘lesser’ space from a practical point of view can become the heart and soul of a sub-culture within society.
This notion, that space (place) is not solely physical but can only exist when people (memory, culture, self) are present and perform an interactive dialogue with the physical, is not a new idea and echoes Marc Auge and his other peers.
Borden discusses three primary types of space in his work. Found Space, Constructed Space and Body Space. Found space engages the progression from surfing to skateboarding and the creative opportunities presented by the sidewalks and streets of the city. Constructed space furthers the conversation to the sculpted concrete skate parks of the 70’s and early 80’s and their significance as spaces that exist to demonstrate an art form that lies somewhere between choreographed performance and improvisation which he describes as ‘a gestural space of flow and action’ Borden (2010) p.117
Finally, and most interestingly he writes about Body-Space under three headings of super-architectural space, slices of time and projecting the self. Therefore the chapter on Body Space sets itself up to discuss the space created by the process of (not limited to physical, but also cultural) skateboarding.
He uses Lefebvres idea to strengthen and re-enforce the proposal that the ‘contribution of skateboarding to architectural space’ is not what he refers to as solely the ‘various constructed architectures of skateboarding’ but rather the ‘space’ created by the process and self-representation as discussed by Lefebvre. Note the architectures of skateboarding are not necessarily a series of physical spaces, but encompass the activity also. What makes the process unique is the injection of self. Projection of your own image into the activity creates the ‘body space’.
Borden claims that through the re-imagination of architectural space, skateboarders re-create both it, and themselves into super-architectural space.
The work goes on to compare the ‘front-back, left-right, up-down reversals and rotations’ acted out by skateboarders (which is described as ‘complex spatial actions’) to Len Lye’s short film – Particles in Space. The film in question was created by scratching a series on animated dots and lines directly onto film and compiled to give a sense of space through ‘compression, tension, eruption, repetition, pulse, stillness, humour and gravity.’ He claims that this expressive performance, coupled with the technical precision require to enact it, creates body-centric space.
Not shy to criticize and disagree Borden claims that Lye’s film title ‘particles in space’, is insufficient claiming that the particles create and are part of the space – a space which does not exist without them. He describes the skateboarder’s equivalent space as the ‘dynamic intersection of body, board and terrain’.
Borden describes the origins of this space as from within the body. Then ‘centrifugally outwards’ as the body describes the minds projection through movement. He goes on to use the term ‘gestural’ which suggests interpretation and improvisation. This is important to Borden’s idea because it separates the body-space created by skateboarders from the performance art of a dancer or other choreographed display of body-centric interaction with space. The term gesture imbues this movement with the idea of self-expression – of getting a message across in a spontaneously articulated manner.
The summary, here, of this work may give the impression of a convoluted practical dissection lf Lefebvres ideas in terms of culture heavy ‘street art’. And whilst true that you will benefit from an understanding, and more so an interest, in skateboarding and the culture that surrounds it, Borden has made it easy for the reader. What exists in the final book is a comprehensive, if un-concise, examination of a social and cultural movement across over 3 decades. He brings us up to speed on the facts and figures, whilst giving the reader a first person perspective of the influences, intentions and passions that drove the movement forward. The story is wrapped up in architectural theories about the creation of body-centric space, the importance of culture in ‘place’ and the spontaneity of identity. All of these are discussed around a subject that he has made us feel familiar with, even if we never were.
March 3, 2024
Comprehensive, scholarly, fantastic visuals, an absolute joy to read.
August 2, 2024
Omvangrijk cultuurhistorisch plaatje van het fenomeen skateboarden. Om duidelijk te maken hoe omvangrijk hoeft er alleen maar een blik geworpen te worden op de referentielijst en index: van de 385 bladzijden behoren 100 bladzijden tot deze categorie. Oftewel zo’n 26 procent. Naar mijn mening kon dit minder en mocht het essayistische gedeelte, beargumenteerd met de sterk ontwikkelde mening van de auteur wat meer op de voorgrond springen. Ik als redelijke buitenstaander zie niet meteen waar de vorm van het boek naartoe gaat. Enerzijds maakt het formaat en de vele (grote) foto’s het een boek voor op de koffietafel, anderzijds is het een redelijk gedetailleerd referentiewerkje wat je eigenlijk liever in de boekenkast van de studiekamer hebt staan.
Het mocht van mij analytischer met originele illustraties aangevoerd door de auteur zelf om zijn verhaal duidelijker uit te werken. Het vele opsommen van figures, mensen, bedrijven, m², valuta’s et cetera waren m.i. niet van grote waarde. Dat hij een #kenner wordt wel duidelijk. Het opschepperige gedrag van ik heb hier aan bijgedragen en aan dit vind ik wat minder. Geografische bias willen verbergen met willekeurige landen als de Dominicaanse Republiek en Afghanistan noemen zien we ook gewoon. De geografische UK bias is duidelijk, maar ik kan begrijpen dat skate-o-metrie ook gewoon enkel in Anglofone landen wordt uitgevoerd. Maak het globalistische plaatje duidelijker. Al met al wilde ik dat het geheel wat kinetischer was – meer in beweging. Dat de auteur hiertoe in staat is maakt hij meerdere keren waar, dus leg ik de uiteindelijke schuld bij de uitgever. Zoals zo vaak zijn zij de boeven. Lefebvre gebruiken was goed, maar uiteindelijk redelijk beperkt als er meer in detail wordt getreden. Alle lof naar Borden. Algoeds.
Het mocht van mij analytischer met originele illustraties aangevoerd door de auteur zelf om zijn verhaal duidelijker uit te werken. Het vele opsommen van figures, mensen, bedrijven, m², valuta’s et cetera waren m.i. niet van grote waarde. Dat hij een #kenner wordt wel duidelijk. Het opschepperige gedrag van ik heb hier aan bijgedragen en aan dit vind ik wat minder. Geografische bias willen verbergen met willekeurige landen als de Dominicaanse Republiek en Afghanistan noemen zien we ook gewoon. De geografische UK bias is duidelijk, maar ik kan begrijpen dat skate-o-metrie ook gewoon enkel in Anglofone landen wordt uitgevoerd. Maak het globalistische plaatje duidelijker. Al met al wilde ik dat het geheel wat kinetischer was – meer in beweging. Dat de auteur hiertoe in staat is maakt hij meerdere keren waar, dus leg ik de uiteindelijke schuld bij de uitgever. Zoals zo vaak zijn zij de boeven. Lefebvre gebruiken was goed, maar uiteindelijk redelijk beperkt als er meer in detail wordt getreden. Alle lof naar Borden. Algoeds.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews