Play space in plain sight: the disruptive alliances between street trees and skateboarders

ABSTRACT

This article is an ethnographic account of searches for play space in Newcastle, Australia, specifically for skateboarding. Street skateboarding is predicated on unstructured play at ‘found’ spots in the urban landscape assembled from surfaces, objects, and obstacles. Without access to established skateparks during COVID-19 lockdowns, the search for play space became an exciting part of lockdown life, and street trees were surprising guideposts for locating unpredictable surfaces and angles. Through these observations, this article explores the potential of street trees in generating play space through skateboarding, making three arguments. First, street trees are overlooked as potential play space compared to trees living in parks, reserves, and playgrounds. Crucially, street trees generate play space by assembling and re-assembling the urban landscape in unpredictable ways. Second, skateboarders and trees are unexpected allies in unstructured play and the disruption of urban order. Third, street trees produce skate spots by modifying the built environment, challenging ideas of mutually exclusive realms of nature vs. city, grey vs. green, play vs. passivity, and use vs. misuse. These examples may not fit idealised notions of human-tree relations, but they open new possibilities for thinking about these relations and where we seek and find play space.

KEYWORDS:

• Street trees
• skateboarding
• play space
• infrastructure
• human-tree relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Korean-American professional skater Daewon Song is the most celebrated improviser of tree spots in his prolific career. Song discusses street trees in an interview for the Chrome Ball Incident. See Swisher, (2013).

2 Board flips one revolution in the air while the skater stays in the same direction above it before catching the board with their feet and landing on the ground.

3 Board spins 360 degrees in the air while the skater turns their body 180s degrees before catching the board with their feet and landing on the ground.

4 Sliding along a surface with the front wooden end of the board. In this case ‘switch’ means leading with the opposite foot to usual or regular stance.

5 Board spins 360 degrees and flips one revolution in the air while the skater stays in the same direction above it before catching the board with their feet and landing on the ground. Davis complicates this trick by doing it backwards, or ‘fakie’.

6 A photo feature of this spot, including photos of us, appears in the Newcastle skate magazine Sprawlers. See Turvey (2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duncan McDuie-Ra

Duncan McDuie-Ra PhD is professor (full) of urban sociology at the University of Newcastle and Deputy Head of College, Research. McDuie-Ra’s main research interests are urban culture, urban play, urban media, urban technology, surveillance and memoryscapes with a primary focus on the Asia-Pacific. McDuie-Ra’s monographs include: Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2021); Skateboard Video: Archiving the City from Below (Springer, 2021); Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism and Urbanism in Dimapur (co-authored with Dolly Kikon, Oxford Univ Press, 2020); Borderland City in New India: frontier to gateway (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2016); and Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, refuge and retail (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2012). Recent work has appeared in the journals: Modern Asian Studies, Political Geography, Memory Studies, Emotion Space and Society, Area, and Development & Change. McDuie-Ra has been involved with South Asia: journal of South Asian Studies since 2010 in various roles, along with editorial roles for the Asian Borderlands book series (Amsterdam University Press), the journal Contemporary South Asia, and is a member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts (2023-25).