Skateboarding, community and urban politics: shifting practices and challenges

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how skateboarding is impacted by the current neo-liberal economic and cultural climate of youth sport in the United States. Presently, youth sport is highly influenced by private entities and often packaged as a means to assuage parents that their children are gaining competitive life skills as well as character enhancing attributes. Skateboarding has typically been touted as an alternative to mainstream organised sport, due to its nonconformist, free-spirited, self-directed and creative elements. Yet, recent research suggests that skateboarding is evolving in several ways as it becomes an increasingly popular activity. Due to its popularity as one of the fastest growing participant sports new private stakeholders are leveraging this interest in order to synergistically market their brands. Simultaneously, these private stakeholders investing in skateboarding are now claiming that their contributions to skateboarding benefit the ‘public’ good in terms of health, youth and community development. This paper accordingly provides several case-study examples from skateboarding in Northern California in order to illustrate the proliferation of private–public skateboarding practises that become articulated through particular visions of the ‘public’ or ‘community’. We subsequently develop these various case studies to explicate how ascendant neo-liberal conditions within the United States strongly influence everyday practises of skateboarding. Specifically, we explore how notions of ‘community development’, ‘well-being’ and ‘healthy’ youth come to be re-framed and authorised by private interests working within seemingly public skate spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Skateboarding
• neo-liberalism
• youth sport
• community building
• health and well-being

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.