Skateboarding and City Branding

Skate culture is an intrinsically urban phenomenon, an embodied practice that reimagines urban public space in a creative but also subversive manner. From the iconic Z-boys of Dogtown in the early 1970s, the boom in skating ramps in the mid-1980s and the proliferation of street skating in the 1990s, skateboarding has never really gone out of fashion. Throughout, skateboarding has appealed to the public imagination as a transgressive urban counterculture of the young. Authorities struggled in their response to the use of public space for skateboarding, often criminalizing the activity or redirecting it to the peripheral, derelict spaces of the city.

From the 2000s onwards, municipal policies start to shift. A new trend evolved of municipalities constructing designated skate spaces as integrated part of the urban fabric. These free, open access facilities are chronicled as community spaces, fostering healthy and sustainable communities, facilitating the contact and collaboration between people across the lines of gender, age and socio-economic background. That’s not the whole story however. As cities venture to re-invent themselves under pressure of the financialised context of the post-industrial era, skate spaces and the social life they generate are also increasingly used as marketing tool in city branding.

This paper compares the development and governance of three skateparks in three West-European cities: Stapelbäddsparken in Malmö, Skatepark des Chatrons in Bordeaux and Skatepark Zeeburgereiland in Amsterdam. It traces how these parks came about in partnership with local skate communities and how skate culture is used to regenerate urban spaces, not just for local communities but also as tourist destinations. Building on the concepts of the new urban aesthetic (Montserrat Degen & Rose, 2023) and Wanghong urbanism (Morris e.a. 2022), it moreover investigates the role social media plays in the marketization of the social spaces arising out of skateboarding practices.