The Intrinsic Value of Co-Designing Skateparks

The exclusion of skateboarders from skatepark planning, the rejection of skaters from public space and the lack of inclusive co-design methods leads to poorly designed and neglected skateparks. It is hypothesized that local skateboarders are the experts in creating sustainable skatepark design yet they are usually the last group to be consulted on these developments. Indeed, unlike every major city in Canada, Toronto does not even have a permanent indoor skatepark facility in the downtown core. After months of civil activism which prompted a city-wide Skatepark Study Report, The City of Toronto made a financial commitment in 2016 to address the need for an indoor skatepark. This emancipatory research study was created in response to that and uses co-design methods to explore the value of a DIY skatepark. Researchers engaged local skateboarders in conversations and activities around all aspects of skatepark creation. The study aims to show that skaters are the best experts to consult regarding the design, development and ongoing maintenance of skateparks. This co-design framework encourages inclusive, sustainable design principles that incorporate creative and artistic skateable obstacles into skatepark design

Moving concrete: development, deployment and consumption of skateboarding in the city

Space, often absent from kinesiological analyses, has significant impacts on how communities operationalize health (Fusco, 2007). The spatial dialogue between bodies and intentional movement directs how bodies are invited, or disinvited, to be physically active (Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2011). As communities re-imagine public spaces in the name of neoliberal health (Ayo, 2012; Fusco, 2007), the challenge becomes distinguishing which forms of physical activity and movement are or are not accepted in those spaces. Thus, as bodies claim space, some bodies are ignored, regulated, or removed, while others are celebrated and designed for (Soja, 1980). Skateboarding offers a unique look at how bodies are navigating the challenging landscape of the postmodern. Particularly, skateboarding claims public space, whether or not that space was intended for its use, placing skateboarding in conversation with the municipality and community in multiple ways. Utilizing the integration of social science frameworks (Lefebvrian Triad, edgework, publicness, and biographies) that focus on spatial relations, this project examined the regulation of human movement by municipalities through the critical reading of Seattle’s Citywide Skatepark Plan (Skatepark Advisory Taskforce, 2007) and Portland’s Skatepark System Plan (Portland Parks & Recreation, 2008). Identifying seven key themes, a description of how cities develop, deploy, and consume skateboarding and related sports (e.g., BMX, inline) and the spaces they occupy is presented. The analyses introduce five major assertions that describe how municipalities manage physical movement through “the city” in the name of the common good. These assertions serve to shape how communities define legal bodies and movement through cityscapes and what this means for the skateboarder and skateboarding. Specifically, the introduction of a Skating Commons and ideas of complacent resistance are explored as challenges facing the municipality and skateboarding in the creation of sociospatial networks within “the city.” The application of these assertions in the “lived” experiences of “the city” has the potential to impact how individuals understand, value, and engage in physical activity and movement

Spatial Ethno-geographies of ‘Sub-cultures’ in Urban Space: Skateboarders, Appropriative Performance, and Spatial Exclusion in Los Angeles

Today, street skateboarding has transformed from a subcultural pursuit to a mainstream urban endeavor, as more than 50 million people partake in the activity globally. Cities respond to skateboarders’ spatial movements by imposing contradictory legal prescriptions and physical design barriers in public and private spaces. The point of departure for this thesis is that planning reactions provide subpar public skate spaces while imposing regulations that ban/stigmatize skateboarding outside of these sanctioned skate spots. A sizable population is denied their full right to the city, proscribed from partaking in the everyday organicism of democratic spatial experience and life. These exclusionary planning/design practices/regulations warranted further investigation. The purpose of this research was to undertake an ethno-geographic inquiry into skateboarders’ performances and transgressions in two public skateparks and two privately-owned plazas in Los Angeles, CA. My research questions were: What can planners learn from a ethno-geographic analysis of a subculture in space? Are current planning practices and engagement strategies allowing skateboarders to have citizen control and dictate how spaces are designed in order to provide quality, designated skate/recreational facilities? What planning tools and policies can provide multi-use, just spaces that celebrate diverse, cultural consumption and the social production of space? I conducted mixed methods research (i.e., field observations, interviews, photography, behavior mapping) following an actor-network theory (ANT) framework, rejecting the separation of humans/nonhumans, embracing materiality, and seeing space as a heterogeneous assemblage of constituent fluid realities/forms. I analyzed my findings through Lefebvre’s trialectic conceptualization of space. Skateboarders’ artistic spatial performances provide spectacles, reinterpret the functionality of objects, and transgress planned regulatory/physical boundaries. Ubiquitous handrails, stairs, and ledges as well as challenges posed by exclusionary spaces motivate skaters to blur traditional binaries of appropriate/inappropriate users in public/private spaces. Motivated by Sandercock’s (2004) challenge for more imaginative planning and Beauregard’s (2003) call to incorporate diverse storytelling and discursive democracy to build bases for collective planning action, I encourage planners to expand their politics, be creatively audacious, and adopt therapeutic tools for planning in 21st-century cities. I recommend one strategic occupation tactic for skateboarders to performatively represent themselves and engender planning responses. Using traditional planning tools (i.e., zoning incentives, engagement workshops, programming), I recommend four policies for cities to plan, design, and celebrate equitable, vibrant spaces where diverse publics can produce social space, create spectacles for cultural consumption, and represent themselves as legitimate actors in everyday urban life

Open Design, Inclusivity and the Intersections of Making

This paper presents insights from an ethnographic study with a diverse population of makers in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. By engaging individuals, groups and communities who 'make' in different contexts, we reveal under-explored perspectives on 'making' and highlight points of intersection between different kinds of making across the city. We reflect on the dynamics of these intersections and connect our observations to emerging discourses around 'open design'. In doing so, we argue for a renewed focus on 'inclusivity' and highlight a need for new infrastructure to support iterative, collaborative making within -- and across -- interconnected networks of makers

Negotiating Seamlessness in Gallery Spaces: Imagining Conflict as a Possibility in Social Participation

Seamlessness in traditional airbrush aesthetics reflects a desire to pursue technical excellence and perfection. The digital revolution has pushed airbrush practice from a popular art form to a niche discipline. Today, airbrushing survives in customization and subculture aesthetics. The retreat of airbrushing from the mainstream, poses questions of how to extend this art form into contemporary art practice: an important consideration given its potential to redefine the social and cultural meaning of seamlessness in our current digital age. My research examines the meaning of seamlessness in our contemporary, social and technological contexts. By shifting traditional airbrush practice into an interactive and installation-based platform, I use participatory strategies to investigate the social implications of relational art forms to challenge the notion of seamlessness as an idealized pursuit of perfection. Inspired by the debate between Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational art and Claire Bishop’s critique of Bourriaud’s micro-utopian concept of relational aesthetics, this paper investigates how participatory and interactive art functions within gallery spaces to gain a deeper understanding of Chantal Mouffe’s concept of radical democracy. Using art galleries as an arena to engage theory and praxis, my thesis project employs a research-creation method with a participatory approach that intends to trigger conflicts and negotiations in the domain of galleries. It investigates the blurred boundaries between consensus and conflict, controllability and unpredictability, inclusion and exclusion. Lastly, through theorizing and redefining the meaning of seamlessness from an aesthetic concept towards social agency, this research questions the inclusivity of art institutions and their role in relation to social and cultural production

Anagenesis: A framework for a gameful, playful and democratic future smart cities

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Contesting and Constructing Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Women\u27s Roller Derby

In this dissertation project I use the case of women’s roller derby to examine gender resistance in spaces produced and dominated by women. I examine the challenges and strategies roller derby participants deploy in resistance to the gender binary and its gender mandates, and whether or not these strategies and cultural expressions are oppositional or political. Through a combination of ethnography, participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and analysis of web and print media on roller derby, I explain how women’s roller derby participants construct identity, varying types of femininities, and engage in forms of cultural resistance through their sport. I analyze the political and cultural challenges skaters and the sport of roller derby pose to the gender binary, mainstream gender expectations, and understandings of femininity and sexuality, and investigate how those challenges manifest at the level of individual identity, roller derby organization, and roller derby cultural symbolism. I argue that the skaters’ embodied practices challenge and disrupt notions of gender, sexuality, body, and identity

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity

Skate Life examines how young male skateboarders use skate culture media in the production of their identities. Emily Chivers Yochim offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, skateboarding community, situating it within a larger historical examination of skateboarding's portrayal in mainstream media and a critique of mainstream, niche, and locally produced media texts (such as, for example, Jackass, Viva La Bam, and Dogtown and Z-Boys). The book uses these elements to argue that adolescent boys can both critique dominant norms of masculinity and maintain the power that white heterosexual masculinity offers. Additionally, Yochim uses these analyses to introduce the notion of ""corresponding cultures,"" conceptualizing the ways in which media audiences both argue with and incorporate mediated images into their own ideas about identity. In a strong combination of anthropological and media studies approaches, Skate Life asks important questions of the literature on youth and provides new ways of assessing how young people create their identities