Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots 9789048551538

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Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia

Consumption and Sustainability in Asia Asia is the primary site of production of a myriad of commodities that circulate the globe. From cars and computer chips to brand clothing, material objects manufactured across Asia have become indispensable to people’s lives in most cultural contexts. This mega production generates huge amounts of waste and pollution that threaten the health and lifestyle of many Asians. Yet, Asia is not only a site of production, but also one of the most rapidly growing consumer markets. This series focuses on consumption – the engine propelling Asia onto the world economic stage – and its implications, from practices and ideologies to environmental sustainability, both globally and on the region itself. The series explores the interplay between the state, market economy, technologies, and everyday life, all of which have become defining facets of contemporary Asian culture. Shifts in consumption that have taken place across Asia since the 1950s onward have had a deep impact on new and emerging informal economies of material care, revealing previously invisible sites of innovation, resistance and co-option. The series will bring together studies by historians, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists that systematically document and conceptualize Asia’s engagement with consumption and sustainability in the global environment. Series Editor Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden University Editorial Board Assa Doron, Australian National University Nir Avieli, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva

Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia Endless Spots

Duncan McDuie-Ra

Amsterdam University Press

Cover photo: Thai pro-skater Joseph Sirinut frontside boardslide Photo by Janchai Montrelerdrasme; used with permission Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 313 8 e-isbn 978 90 4855 153 8 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463723138 nur 740 © Duncan McDuie-Ra / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Dedicated to Kimeri. Who has never pushed mongo. Since day 1.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

11

1 Urban Asia: Endless Spots Escaping the California Gridlock (Re)Mapping Asia Through Spots Structure of the Book

13 22 31 37

2 Shredding the Urban Fabric Spots: Urban Landscapes Below the Knees Infrastructure’s Adjacent Publics Splicing the Map Life on Video, Life Online Conclusion

41 43 46 53 57 62

3 Chasing the Concrete Dragon From Chinese Consumers to Consuming China Skateboarding at Shenzhen Speed Endless Spots, New Cartographies Communist Wonderland Conclusion

63 65 69 75 83 88

4 Spectacle Cities: The Luxury of Emptiness Central Asian Spectacles Emptying Dubai Dubai Unreal Spectacle and its Others Conclusion

91 93 100 107 111 112

5 For the Love of Soviet Planning Post-Soviet Urban Space from Below (The Knees) Independence Square (Tashkent) Ala-Too Square (Bishkek) The Outer Grid Haunted Spots Conclusion

115 118 119 123 128 130 137

6 Skateboarding’s New Frontiers Iran: Revolutionary Modernity India: Rough Cut Modern Shredding the Architecture of Occupation Conclusion

139 143 148 157 161

7 Conclusion: Another ‘Next China’ Real-time Blues Endless Spots, Endless Search

165 168 171

Bibliography Skate Videos and Media Files Published Sources

181 181 187

Index

203

List of Images Image 1.1 Jasper Dohrs in Chengdu, China in Preduce skateboard’s Supermix Montrelerdrasme, 2018; screenshot; used with permission Image 1.2 The Preduce ‘Skate Park’ Map of Bangkok Preduce, 2019; used with permission Image 2.1 Waxed marble ledges outside Vincom Center in Ho Chi Minh City, 2018 Photo: Author Image 2.2 Navigating the crowd to skate the variation in the pavement. Go Skate Day in Singapore 2018 Video by author; screenshot Image 3.1 Rodrigo Petersen’s name on the famous Deng Xiaoping billboard in Shenzhen from Give Me My Money Chico Claravall, 2010 Image 3.2 Rodrigo Petersen skating the famous wave ledge in Shenzhen in Give Me My Money Chico Claravall, 2010; screenshot; used with permission Image 3.3 Shanghai Spot Map. Note colour coded spot types and spot information at each pin Source: Thorbeck, 2020; screenshot; used with permission

27 28 45 48 71 72 77

6 Skateboarding’s New Frontiers Iran: Revolutionary Modernity India: Rough Cut Modern Shredding the Architecture of Occupation Conclusion

139 143 148 157 161

7 Conclusion: Another ‘Next China’ Real-time Blues Endless Spots, Endless Search

165 168 171

Bibliography Skate Videos and Media Files Published Sources

181 181 187

Index

203

List of Images Image 1.1 Jasper Dohrs in Chengdu, China in Preduce skateboard’s Supermix Montrelerdrasme, 2018; screenshot; used with permission Image 1.2 The Preduce ‘Skate Park’ Map of Bangkok Preduce, 2019; used with permission Image 2.1 Waxed marble ledges outside Vincom Center in Ho Chi Minh City, 2018 Photo: Author Image 2.2 Navigating the crowd to skate the variation in the pavement. Go Skate Day in Singapore 2018 Video by author; screenshot Image 3.1 Rodrigo Petersen’s name on the famous Deng Xiaoping billboard in Shenzhen from Give Me My Money Chico Claravall, 2010 Image 3.2 Rodrigo Petersen skating the famous wave ledge in Shenzhen in Give Me My Money Chico Claravall, 2010; screenshot; used with permission Image 3.3 Shanghai Spot Map. Note colour coded spot types and spot information at each pin Source: Thorbeck, 2020; screenshot; used with permission

27 28 45 48 71 72 77

Image 4.1 Gabriel Summers skates a handrail in Astana in The Kazakhstan Triangle Wallner, 2016; screenshot; used with permission Image 5.1 Ethan Loy waxing the Courage monument in Tashkent in Hotel Uzbekistan Wallner, 2020; screenshot; used with permission Image 5.2 Miki Tähtinen skates the memorial to Bagrat ­Shinkuba moments before a local intervenes in Abkhazia Lindevall, 2017; screenshot; used with permission Image 6.1 Denny Pham rolls through the arches of Azadi Tower in Tehran in preparation for a trick down the stairs in The Persian Version Wallner, 2014; screenshot; used with permission Image 6.2 Off the plywood onto the handrail in Delhi. Note the drying clothes. Sean Malto in Gurus of the Ganges Wallner, 2013; screenshot; used with permission Image 6.3 Skaters in Lal Bazar, a rare flat space amidst the vertical growth. Gangtok, Sikkim in 2018 Photo: Author Image 6.4 Showing ‘the wall’ no respect. Sylvain Tognelli in Pieces of Palestine Harris, 2017; photograph by Sam Ashley; used with permission Image 7.1 Unorganized encounters in urban Asia: Thai skater Beek Supavich frontside noseslides a ping pong table in Bangkok Photo by Janchai Montrelerdrasme; used with permission

97 122 135

147 154 157 162

177

Acknowledgements ‘Skateboarding saved my life!’ is a common claim. So common that it has almost become cliché. Except that for many people all over the world its true, or at least it feels true. This project didn’t save my life, but it feels like it. Skateboarding has been there for me again and again since I was eight years old. For the last four years it has come into my professional life, getting me through disenchantment with my craft, many of the people doing it, and with the state of things in the world after 2016. So, thank you skateboarding. Thank you Anthony Claravall. Your pioneering videos and photos brought Asia to skateboarders and skateboarders to Asia. You are always somewhere in the region shooting footage, mentoring other filmers and photographers, and pushing skateboarding forward from Manila to Mumbai. Despite this you have given me so much of your time, knowledge and patience. Humility and generosity are rare qualities and you have both in abundance. And with a sense of humour too. Thank you Anthony. We will get that Sydney trip in one day; bushfires and pandemics be damned! Thank you Patrik Wallner. Your videos and photos have brought skateboarding to places and communities that seemed impossible 20 years ago. They are such a joy to watch. The beauty of your visual archives of encounters between skateboarding and people all over Europe and Asia is inspiring; an alternative geopolitics with wax, urethane, and a soul. You have been so generous, kind, and supportive of this project. Few people are this kind to strangers. Protests and COVID halted our plans to hang out and talk about Socotra Island, but let’s do it soon. I’ll try to bring a robot. Thank you Vantte Lindevall. Abkhazia is a masterpiece and really forced me to think hard about this whole project. You have been so helpful with ideas, images and making connections with other researchers and writers. Thank you for sharing so much of your work and your ideas with me and tolerating my constant references to Aki Kaurismäki. Thank you Janchai Montrelerdrasme for your generosity in sharing your videos and images for this project. Your eye for the landscape in your skate video and photos animates Asian cities in ways that words just cannot do. Thank you too for the generous use of the photo for the book’s cover. Thank you to Roger Bagley for responding to a DM years ago about filming in China and sharing contacts and suggestions. Thank you Rog. And thank you for your show that gives our culture a social history. Thank you to the filmers and photographers who gave me permission to use their incredible visual material in the book: Sam Ashley, Anthony

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Sk ateboarding and Urban L andscapes in Asia

Claravall, Jacob Harris, Vantte Lindevall, Janchai Montrelerdrasme, Simon Perllaux, Erik Thorbeck, Patrik Wallner. Thank you for sharing your craft with a stranger. At Amsterdam University Press thank you to Saskia Gieling and Katarzyna J. Cwiertka for helping me find a home in the Consumption and Sustainability in Asia book series. This means a lot, especially as this is such different material to my other books, especially with AUP. Thanks for your faith in me. Changing research fields from borderlands and post-conflict cities to skateboarding after almost 20 years is a bit crazy, but also quite beautiful. I have many people to thank in academia for encouraging me to chase this beauty, especially when the lure to return to the known and flog the proverbial dead horse loomed large. Thank you Mona Chettri, Jason Cons and Kalervo ‘Slugger’ Gulson for taking this seriously, even when I didn’t. Thank you to Max D. Woodworth for conversations about skateboarding and urban landscapes going back to the SSRC in Seoul. Without those conversations I would have kept all of this in a hand written notebook never seeing the light of day. Thank you too for your extensive feedback on the manuscript. It is a wonderful thing to admire someone’s scholarship and also know that they can shred the carpark at lunchtime. Thank you to Bloom skateboarding, The Breakfast Club, Luke O’Donnell, Sprawlers, Gravel, Jim Turvey, Karl, Laate supply, and everyone who has included me in the local skate community in Newcastle. See you at the Ship Inn! To Yoo Kyong and Kimeri, thanks for letting me watch skate videos for hours every day. And thanks for always being kind when I hurt myself. Let’s not break any more teeth though.

1

Urban Asia: Endless Spots Abstract Chapter 1, Urban Asia: Endless Spots, invites readers to explore skate video as an archive of alternative (but widespread) urban practice and industry. Filming skateboarding needs spots: assemblages of surfaces, objects and obstacles ‘naturally’ occurring in the urban landscape. As skateboarding has globalized so too has the search for spots, enrolling more and more landscapes in a subcultural knowledge-bank of cities, towns and suburbs. From the early 2000s Asia has become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption as urban landscapes have proliferated and knowledge of these landscapes has circulated rapidly through skate video and other media. With skaters and filmers travelling further and further to find new spots, more patches of urban Asia are enrolled in an alternative cartography of the region. Keywords: skateboarding, Asia, cities, landscape, cartography, cultural topology

If you have not spent time skateboarding or watching others skateboard (aside from jumping out of the way and cursing under your breath) or watched a skate video, everything that follows will make much more sense if you watch one, or two, or 20 skate videos right now. You don’t even have to watch the whole thing; you can start by just watching a few minutes of footage. It’s easy. Open a web browser and type in the name of one of the videos listed in the back of this book. Alternatively you could start with Menikmati (Mortagne, 2000) discussed in this chapter or Lakai footwear’s Fully Flared (Evans, Jonze & Wiencheque, 2007), perhaps the most anticipated video of all time (when skate videos were sold and not streamed). You could search one of the countless ‘best-ever skate video’ lists floating around on the Internet, which might lead you to Blind skateboards’ Video Days (Jonze, 1991), H-Street’s Shackle Me Not (Magnusson & Ternasky, 1988), Plan B’s Questionable (Ternasky 1992), Toy Machine’s Welcome to Hell (Thomas, 1996),

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463723138_ch01

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Sk ateboarding and Urban L andscapes in Asia

Zero skateboards’ Misled Youth (Thomas, 1999), Transworld Skateboarding Magazine’s Modus Operandi (Evans & Holland, 2000), Alien Workshop’s Photosynthesis (Castrucci, 2000), Flip skateboards’ Sorry (Mortagne, 2002). You could try something older from when skateboarding looked and sounded so different, such as Powell Peralta’s Bones Brigade Video Show (Peralta, 1984), considered the first example of the genre, or Future Primitive (Peralta, 1985), the first skate video I ever saw and watched again and again for years in relative isolation, oblivious that the skateboarding had dated. You could also look for something recent, such as Spanish-based Sour skateboards’ The Sour Solution II (Tonnesen, 2019), DC footwear’s European team in Domino (Astleford & Ray, 2020), Thomas Campbell’s independent Ye Olde Destruction (Campbell , 2019) following celebrated skaters from different generations finding and making spots over a seven year period, the all-female Nike footwear video Gizmo (Hernandez, 2019) or the all-female Vans footwear video Credits (White, 2020) – directed by an Australian skater/filmer Shari White while in her early 20s. You might f ind videos from skate brands based in Japan, such as Evisen skateboards’ Evisen Video (Uehara, 2017), or a multi-national skate crew skating entirely in Shanghai in Head Count (Camarillo, 2019), and you may also find a group of skaters tearing through the revolutionary architecture of Tehran in the Persian Version (Wallner, 2013) or the reconstructed urban wastelands of Mazar-I-Sharif in Meet the Stans (Wallner, 2012). Among these ‘full-length’ videos you might find shorter clips posted daily on skateboard platforms featuring a single skateboarder, or a group of skateboarders travelling to a particular city or country, or even to a particular spot, an iconic plaza or accident of urban planning. In these videos you will see incredible feats of physical skill, creative reinterpretation of – even claiming of – the built environment. You will see trespassing, vandalism, and maybe a little drug and alcohol consumption. You will see skateboarders become more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, age, and gender. In these skate videos you will see fashion change, skateboarding styles evolve, skills progress, plateau, and progress again. You will witness changes in technologies of image capture, along with steadfast adherence to favoured, if antiquated technologies by some f ilmers. You will see skateboarders harassed and detained by security guards and police, confronted and threatened by residents, and rejoice with on-lookers after a landed trick, sometimes even offering a high-five or sharing a cold beer. You will see skateboarding move from California to East Coast USA, to the United Kingdom and Europe, to Brazil and Australia, and to Asia, the focus of this book. You will also see skaters from Asia travelling within

Urban Asia: Endless Spots

15

the region and beyond to generate footage. Crucially, you will see urban landscapes. Once skateboarding began to leave the skatepark behind and gain authenticity by being performed in the streets in the late 1980s and early 1990s, skateboarding as a practice, as a career, and as a culture to consume has been associated with urban landscapes: cities, towns, suburbs, connective infrastructure; what skateboarders call ‘spots’. Spots are nestled in urban landscapes all over the world, produced by urban development, decline, and regeneration. Spots are not built for skateboarders; they are accidents of urban planning, municipal land management, property development and commercial folly. Desired spots become sites for the performance of skateboarding, captured as image or video, circulation and consumption by skateboarders around the world. Skate video acts like an ethnographic vignette – a glimpse into a particular creative practice performed without permission or encouragement on otherwise forgettable patches of the city. Consuming these vignettes deepens the desire among skateboarders for the landscapes that produce and host them, even leading to pilgrimage and sacred reverence (O’Connor, 2020: 153). At famous spots that appear again and again in videos over long intervals, skate video archives urban change taking place in the background: new buildings, signs, billboards, paint jobs mark shifts in capital and political flows. Skateboarders are attuned to these changes, making them unexpected carriers of subcultural urban history. There are websites and social media accounts that track these changes: a recent photo of a famous spot is posted alongside a celebrated image from a skateboard magazine, advertisement or video. These comparisons show change over time; a spot disappearing into a new housing development, a wall built to block a skater’s roll up, an army of food trucks where there was once an empty lot. Comparisons can also show remarkable longevity; a slab of concrete still covered in wax left by skaters three decades later, a curved handrail in front of an unchanging high school façade, a stoic series of embankments in a city park. This book is about the search for spots in Asia, the performance of skateboarding at and on these spots, the capture and circulation of these performances as video (and image), and its consumption and emulation. As skateboarding has globalized, so too has the search for spots, enrolling more and more urban landscapes in a subcultural knowledge bank of cities, towns and suburbs all over the world. In this book I am primarily concerned with spots in Asia, ranging from maritime Southeast Asia to the post-Soviet Republics on the edge of Europe. So before you read any further, put on a skate video. You can also watch the videos referred to in the book as you come across them. They make a great accompaniment to the words on the

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Sk ateboarding and Urban L andscapes in Asia

page. Check out the spots as skaters roll by on screen. In some sequences there will be a clear location identifier on screen or in the title of the video. In other cases you might see a familiar splice of landscape, a bridge or plaza or public building. In other sequences you might be able to make a good guess at location based on background signs, architectural styles or licence plates on cars. Sometimes you have to make a wild guess based on the vegetation. Skateboarding in real time also offers a fascinating experience in ethnographic observation. If you live near a spot where skaters gather, go and watch for a while. You might get lucky and see a skateboarder perform a trick that seems to defy the laws of physics or that animates a tired chunk of concrete. In between these moments you will also see a lot of skateboarders falling down. Someone might even get hurt and have to stop. Other skateboarders might spend the whole time lurking at the edges of the spot. Some might be chatting, laughing, eating, and generally hanging. Someone there will probably be trying to capture what happens with a phone or a video camera. That clip will be posted somewhere before the end of the session and will be consumed by other people at some volume or another, maybe a few friends or maybe millions of followers. Iain Borden opens his landmark book Skateboarding, Space and the City (2001) outlining the ‘manifold possibilities’ skateboarding opens up for the study of the built environment (he focuses on architecture). It remains one of the best passages of scholarly writing about skateboarding. He writes: [S]kateboarding is local, being fundamentally concerned with the microspaces of streets, yet it is also a globally dispersed and proliferous practice, with tens of millions of practitioners worldwide. It addresses the physical architecture of the modern city, yet responds not with another object but with a dynamic presence […] It produces space, but also time and the self. Skateboarding is constantly repressed and legislated against, but counters not through negative destruction but through creativity and production of desires. It has a history, but is unconscious of that history, preferring the immediacy of the present […] it has a tool (the skateboard), but absorbs that tool into the body. It involves great effort but produces no commodity ready for exchange. It is highly visual, but refutes the reduction of the activity solely to the spectacle of the image. It began in the suburbs, but has come downtown to the core of urban conflict. It is seen as a child’s play activity, but for many practitioners involves nothing less than a complete and alternative way of life. It is, therefore, architecture, not as a thing, but as a production of space, time and social being (2001: 1).

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Two decades on, Borden’s opening characterization holds up remarkably well. And he has revisited it in more recent work (Borden, 2019). The tens of millions of practitioners has probably grown to four or five times that number, though it is very hard to pin these kinds of figures down. The ‘modern city’ has remained steadfast in the centre of the ways we understand urbanism and urbanity, though its form, like skateboarding, has travelled and accelerated away from the West, especially in Asia. Harassment and antiskate legislation – so powerful two decades ago – has not relented, though parallel measures like the construction of skateparks in cities and suburbs all over the world have created designated, legal spaces for skaters; part of what Ocean Howell (2005; 2008) sees as neo-liberal planning practice and John Carr (2010) relates to emerging legal and legislative demands to put skaters somewhere (and by logic take them away from where they are not wanted). By contrast Ty and Vivoni (2020) analyse the ways DIY skateparks challenge top-down processes spatial control and produce adjacent communities. In some cities skateboarding is legal year round, such as Bordeaux and Malmö, and for certain events, such as the Copenhagen Open held in June each year. Though for the most part, growing acceptance of skateboarding has meant a growing expectation that skateboarders stick to allocated space, and don’t stray into the urban wilds. As more skaters go to more spots, they encounter a greater array of enforcement, from private security to police to urban vigilantes. Proliferation of surveillance technologies helps to herd skaters to allocated space by policing ‘regular’ space. There may be more skateparks around the world than two decades ago, and these are important spaces for getting started and honing the craft, but reputations and livelihoods are still made in the streets, and the aesthetic of skate video and photography is bound to spots not skateparks. Skateboarding was already ethnically and racially diverse when Borden was writing, though there has been limited academic attention to this diversity in fields like ethnic and racial studies. As street skateboarding takes centre stage in skate culture from the late 1980s leaving the skatepark and the beachside further behind, Black, Asian and Latinx skateboarders are prominent in skate culture and skate video in the US1 and in other 1 Scholars of race in skate culture have tended to focus on the celebrity turn in the early 2000s and the crossover into youth and lifestyle television in programs on MTV and ‘extreme sports’ networks made for a broader audience outside skateboarding. Emily Chivers Yochim argues this turn presents skate culture as ‘always in the process of developing and responding to critiques of dominant masculinities that never fully challenge the power of straight, white, middle-class America men’ (2009: 4). Though such characterizations are well founded in the material analysed at the commercial end of the culture as circulated in the US and the

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multicultural settings where skateboarding has flourished such as Australia, Brazil, the UK and France. Gender diversity is a much slower change. Gender diversity in skateboarding does have a long history; however, as Becky Beal and Charlene Wilson note, women have long been marginalized from skate culture and from livelihoods in the industry (Beal and Wilson, 2004; see also Kelly et al. 2005; MacKay & Dallaire, 2012; Pomerantz et al., 2004). Outside the contest circuit there have been landmark video parts by female skaters through the 1990s and 2000s, including (among others): Elissa Steamer in Toy Machine’s Welcome to Hell (Thomas, 1996) Marisa Dal Santo in Zero skateboards’ Strange World (Thomas & Gilbert, 2009), Leiticia Bufoni in Osiris footwear’s Children of the Revolution (Magnusson, 2008) and Alexis Sablone in PJ Ladd’s Wonderful, Horrible Life (Roman & Vagianos, 2002). The past decade has witnessed increased participation of women in skateboarding and increased recognition for female skaters in the core of skate culture at different levels, including professional skateboarding and at the grassroots. In the late 2010s several prominent female pro-skaters have established and maintained a strong public profile, including the ongoing careers of Steamer, Bufoni and Sablone along with Nora Vanconcellos, Lizzie Armato, and Fabiana Delfino among others. As Fok and O’Connor argue, ‘women’s skateboarding represents the zeitgeist of the sport’s current popularity’ (2020: 2). It has been noted that in Asia where skateboarding is relatively new, female and male participation in skateboarding is common (see Chapter 6), suggesting that the gender norms are reset, to a degree, when the culture travels (Abdulhawa, 2020; Fok & O’Connor, 2020; Thorpe & Chawansky, 2017). This is evident at the grassroots level in Asia and in the visibility of professionals like Mami Tezuka (Japan), Margielyn Arda Didal (Philippines), and Orapan Tongkong (Thailand). LGBTQ+ inclusion has been even slower, though there are signs of growing acceptance in the core of the Michigan skate community at the centre of Yochim’s study, this critique seems an odd fit to the ethnic diversity of skateboarding ‘on the ground’ in different parts of the world, in the material produced and consumed within skateboarding’s smaller and commercially insignificant core (skate video), and in the uptake of skateboarding outside the US. Ethnic and racial diversity in skateboarding tends to reflect the demography of place, and indeed an alternative history of this period and its complex, though rarely addressed, racial dynamics can be found in interviews with skateboarders from ethnic and racial minorities who came of age during the 1990s and early 2000s. See episodes of The Nine Club podcast (Bagley et al. 2017-2019) with Stevie Williams (#44), Sal Barbier (#57), Jovontae Turner (#73), Jerry Hsu (#88), Tommy Guerrero (#97), Brandon Turner (#103), Antwuan Dixon (#107), Gershon Mosley (#111), Don Nuge Nguyen (#117); episodes of Mission Statement Video Interviews (Smith, 2019-2020) with RB Umali (#1), Jahmal Williams (#8), Danny Supa (#16); episodes of The Bunt podcast (Benson & Jones, 2020) with Karl Watson (#10: 8) among many others.

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culture as discussed in an episode entitled ‘Loveletters to LGBTQ+’ in the skateboarding documentary series Jeff Grosso’s Loveletters to Skateboarding made by the footwear brand Vans (Nichols & Charnoski, 2020). Borden’s point about skate history has shifted a little, as skateboarders have aged and managed to stick around in a growing industry (see Willing et al., 2019). Digital technologies make old videos, magazines, images, and interviews searchable, and the popularity of podcasts mean skateboarders past and present regale audiences with stories of skate folklore, which often involve ‘war stories’ about certain spots. Skate trivia is active live and on social media,2 and knowing the history of the culture has become a litmus tests for younger skateboarders seeking acceptance. The point about ‘no ready commodity’ has been challenged by others (see Dinces, 2011; Lombard, 2010). Given the various waves in popularity and fluctuating corporate appetite for skateboarding there is some value to the critique. Skateboarding has gone through waves of co-option by actors considered ‘outside’ the culture, creating events and spectacles (Beal & Eberling, 2019; Lorr, 2005; Rinehart, 2008), peripheral commodities like video games (Martin, 2013), and higher value commodities such as shoes and clothing consumed beyond skateboarding communities, including in Asia where genuine footwear and apparel from trendy skate brands can readily be found, along with fakes. However, for most skateboarders around the world, Borden is right; great effort for no exchange. Except perhaps, these days, a video or photograph that can be posted to social media, shared and exchanged with other skaters, classmates, co-workers, to boost image of self, but with little value as a commodity. However, perhaps most important for me, and the reason behind writing this book, is thinking about how Borden’s characterization of skateboarding has travelled. Borden talks about the way skateboarding has moved from the suburbs to the downtown core, and he demonstrates this in examples from the US and UK throughout the book. Twenty years later, skateboarding’s mobility as a culture and set of attendant practices and desires has moved 2 There are various venues for skate trivia in person and online, such as Skate Nerd produced by Transworld Skateboarding Magazine, which pits skaters against one another in short video segments. Useless Wooden Knowledge is run by industry insiders and former pro-skaters and functions more like pub-trivia from its Los Angeles base, occasionally touring to different venues. It has also expanded to online trivia through social media during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Useless Wooden Knowledge is a play on the title of a landmark skate video from 1990, New Deal Skateboards’ Useless Wooden Toys (Douglas, 1990). Perhaps most significantly for avid followers of Useless Wooden Knowledge, such as me, their tagline is ‘Congratulations, you’ve wasted your life’.

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to downtown cores far from its lands of origin. These are skateboarding’s mobilities as a practice, an experience, a culture, and as a lens for exploring urban dynamics in Asia and between Asia and the West. These mobilities are ‘nested’; mobilities within mobilities that intersect, at certain points, with other mobilities at different volumes and scales. At a basic level skateboarding is about mobility, usually free mobility through the landscape, movement unbound by rules or laws; provided there is an adequate surface (it is hard to do on sand or mud, for instance) and until a human or object disrupts this movement. Skateboarding as a culture and practice is also mobile, in that it has travelled to different parts of the world, including to Asia, where its adherents take to it because of the free mobility it offers; the sense of freedom. Skateboarders of a certain skill level are themselves mobile, and they are sent to other parts of the world to skate, as demonstrations (demos) for local skate communities and to skate in different urban landscapes, different spots, in the hopes of compiling footage for their sponsors, whether skate brands, footwear or clothing brands. In other cases filmers gather groups of skaters together to travel and make skate videos based on journeys, and these will be discussed at length in this book. Indeed, the capacity of sponsors to provide mobility, to send skaters on trips, is an important part of the exchange of sponsorship. So too is the willingness of skaters to go on these trips. Even skateboarders without this level of support still travel, self-funded, to skate different spots around the world. Sometimes they will even shoot videos. Paul O’Connor, discussing the constant transit of skaters through Hong Kong en route to China writes: ‘many of these are solitary travellers, living a frugal existence propelled by a desire to skate some of the skateboard utopia they have seen reproduced in skateboard media’ (2020: 163). Skate trips are captured on video and in photography. Videos and photographs are themselves mobile, circulated rapidly through digital technology and as physical objects – VHS tapes or DVDs – to skaters around the world. These skaters then mimic these mobile performances in their own neighbourhoods, and might themselves embark on a journey to find some of these spots. There are additional mobilities too; wood from sources around the world, including Southeast Asia, goes to wood shops in China to be made into skateboard decks according to designs imagined and approved in Los Angeles, Portland, Barcelona, Sydney, and these are shipped to the US, Australia and Europe. Sometimes these return to China, or even Indonesia, with the skaters on trips to capture footage. Not all skate production is in China; some brands produce in the West, others in Mexico. Though that is just the wood. The urethane for wheels has complex production origins, while

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the same goes for certain brands of steel trucks (the axel), skate footwear, clothing, camera gear; some part of a skater’s tools and outfit likely depends upon the mobility of goods across global production chains (see Sedo, 2010). While the profession itself enables and often requires mobilities, there is an additional element at play here. The industry corrals skate talent in the US, drawing skaters trying to ‘make it’ from South America, Australia, Asia and Europe – though many Europeans can now have thriving careers by staying put, or moving within Europe – and from here these skaters practice their mobile craft and travel searching for spots and producing footage. The best will have their image and name on products assembled from parts around the globe and their footage consumed by aspiring skaters from Busan to Brisbane. Skateboarding’s nested mobilities depend on spots. This whole mini-universe depends on the continual production and discovery of patches of urban landscape where tricks can be performed, captured and circulated. Without spots, skateboarding stops. These mobilities grind to a halt. These nested mobilities go in multiple directions at multiple speeds. My interest in this book is the constant flow of skateboarders, filmmakers and photographers venturing into Asia throughout the year to visit established spots, discover new spots, connect with and foster local skate communities. These performances are captured and circulated as videos, short clips, as images, and arranged into parts – montages of skateboarding amassed over several years. Skate video is an immense and largely under-utilized archive of (predominantly but not exclusively) urban ‘cultural topology’, what Roger Shields calls: ‘a way of identifying a new “dimensionality” and level of precision regarding spatial and temporal relations, flows and transformations’ (2013: 159), accounting for the ‘proper and improper, the legitimate and the outof-place’ (2013: 157). For Shields, a cultural topology builds on the work of Arjun Appadurai in the 1990s, identifying ‘scapes’ to identify and analyse relations and processes at multiple scales and ‘understand mobilities in a continuous flux rather than transmission of fixed entities across static space’ (2013: 159). Skateboarding gives us starting point for a cartography of dispersed geographies of urban change; sites where spots are created, sought, and enrolled into a form of non-expert knowledge of surface, objects and obstacles gathered in Los Angeles, Barcelona, and Bangkok. Enrolling spots, and the urban landscapes that host them, gives a topological cartography to a fluid global community. If, like Shields, we seek inspiration from Appadurai’s paradigmatic explorations of various ‘scapes’ as ways of accounting for the fluid landscapes shaped by globalization in national and local spaces (1996: 33) – and we take globalization here as the globalization of skate

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culture, and more specifically the ways skateboarders see and desire the urban landscape – then the term ‘shredscape’ is worth considering. ‘Shred’ in skateboarder terminology refers to the act of skateboarding at a spot. To ‘shred the handrail outside the food co-op’ means to go and skate it, usually with determination, risk and skill. It is also used to describe a skateboarder and/or a moment: ‘Sonam shredded the loading dock last weekend’. Shred also suggests the change to the material surface of a spot; the worn edges of a marble ledge have been ‘shredded’ by skaters. Shredscape can work as a substitute for landscape when viewed by skateboarders. In other words, through the ‘skater gaze’ the landscape becomes the shredscape. As this gaze travels throughout Asia, landscapes are reanimated as skate spots, and potential skate spots and connected in a network of spaces, a topological cartography. The shredscape draws this way of seeing the landscape together with modern, yet delinquent, pastimes like skateboarding and the identities, consumerism, and knowledge that goes along with it. The shredscape is useful as an overarching idea that connects skate culture to material assemblages on the ground, and then back into skate culture. I will revisit the idea of the shredscape at different points in the following chapters to refer to the overarching cultural topology of relations and processes in motion. Urban Asia has become central to the desire, performance, production, circulation, and consumption of skateboarding. Skateboarding, that once quintessentially Californian pastime, has enrolled urban landscapes throughout Asia in its cartography of spots; in the shredscape. And there is no better example of the early period of this shift than the classic video Menikmati.

Escaping the California Gridlock Menikmati (Mortagne, 2000), a full-length skateboarding video (61 minutes) from the shoe brand éS features some of the biggest names in skateboarding from the early 2000s. In an era before instantaneous digital access to unlimited content, major skate videos like Menikmati had a long viewing life; watched, re-watched, shared, pirated, screened in skate shops and home VCRs for years. In the last decade Menikmati has been uploaded to video sharing platforms in its entirety and as individual parts viewed hundreds of thousands of times giving it a second life, a digital life. Menikmati features an hour of the most innovative skateboarding of the era by professionals from Finland, Brazil, England, Canada and the US. It also uses short narrations as voice-overs by these skateboarders to introduce their ‘parts’

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or sections. And two of these stand out – the first part featuring Finnish pro-skater Arto Saari and the last part featuring Thai/American pro-skater Eric Koston – exemplifying the themes discussed in this book. The opening titles feature a black screen with red dots arranged seemingly haphazardly. The names of the featured skateboarders appear alongside these dots followed by the title ‘Menikmati’, at which point a map fades in and the dots are revealed as points on a map of the world. This seems banal but for a culture that had been so rooted in the US up to this time, the idea of an elite global crew of skateboarders and a global map of desirable spots was a revelation. These dots become features at the start of each part; they serve as a way to introduce each skateboarder with a reference to their nationality or heritage. Directed by Fred Montagne, a French filmmaker known for his innovative filming style and unique camera angles, Menikmati is not the first video to identify skateboarding as a globalizing culture or to celebrate the diverse origins of famous skateboarders; however, it is significant for this book for two reasons. First, Menikmati presents global spots as on par with spots in the US. Spots in Asia are spliced in with spots from the US and Europe, enrolling them in a global cartography of urban landscapes worth skating. Secondly, the video provides commentary on spots in ways that express disappointment with the urban landscapes of the US, especially California’s famous spots, and surprise at the abundance of spots elsewhere; a theme that accelerates through the 2000s to the present. At the beginning of Finnish skateboarder Arto Saari’s part – the opening part in the video – the screen zooms into the map and stops at Finland. Saari’s voiceover begins and he discusses what it was like growing up in Finland over shots of Helsinki, snow, skiing, and ice swimming. Over a background of violin music, Saari speaks in Finnish during this montage with subtitles on the screen. At one point he discusses the challenge of skateboarding in an historic city in lines translated in English as: ‘Skateboarding in Finland is not always easy because the architecture is very old, the seasons are very long’. He ends his Finnish narration with a line translated as: ‘I didn’t see myself going anywhere with skateboarding by staying in Finland, that’s why I decided to move to Huntington Beach, California’. The scene shifts to California, surf music plays, waves lap the Huntington Beach Pier. Saari begins speaking in English about the warm and sunny weather. There is sunshine in every shot. Saari, a talented skateboarder, leaves his grey and cold homeland for the sunshine and freedom of California. It’s the American Dream. But Menikmati is not that predictable. The montage cuts to images of anti-skateboarding signage on walls, Saari driving a car stuck in heavy traffic

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(wearing a t-shirt that reads ‘CRAP’), security guards accosting skateboarders, and the ubiquitous skate-stopper or skate-knobs, metal objects added to make the surface of a concrete ledge or steel handrail uneven and dangerous. Saari continues in English over the top of this montage: People all around the world come to California thinking they can skate all the famous spots they see in all the videos. But they don’t know you have to stay in traffic an hour and a half every day to go to a spot. And most of the time you get kicked-out, you get hassled by cops, you get tickets, or the place is already knobbed. More and more spots get ruined everyday by skate-stoppers or some stuff they put in front of the stairs […] everything is getting skate-proofed but that’s not going to stop skateboarding because there’s always new spots to be found. Or you can just hack the knobs off, or whatever. You can make spots skate-able again; it just takes a little effort. I came to California to live the life that I dreamed of, even though it’s not the same as I thought it was [going to be], it’s still great.

Menikmati foreshadows the shift in the culture. Saari’s voice-over shatters any illusions of California as a skateboarding paradise. This theme runs through contemporary skateboarding; spots are disappearing from US cities and new spots are not emerging with the same speed as elsewhere in the world. The spots that are still skate-able are monitored by overzealous security guards, police, and a hostile public. When Menikmati was being shot two decades ago, Asia was not yet central to the global cartography of spots, but it was beginning to show up. And in the same video Eric Koston describes the appeal of Bangkok. Koston is a singular f igure in skateboarding, then and now. He has been highly influential in the culture from the 1990s to the present for his skateboarding and his personality: affable, goofy and yet incredibly gifted, and later his role in the industry. At the time of Menikmati’s release he was perhaps the most recognizable street skater in the world. It is safe to say his part in the video has been viewed hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of times making his opening narration about Bangkok worthy of detailed attention. Koston’s part begins with the dots and the map zeroing in on Thailand. Over classical Thai music the montage of images commences: temples, street food vendors, images of King Bomibol, urban waterways, and Buddha statues. Koston’s voiceover begins by mentioning that he was born in Bangkok but didn’t grow up there having moved to ‘California’ (not the US or America) when he was very young. He admits, ‘I always had this image of Bangkok

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being this sort of traditional Thai city, which is the case when you walk through the historic district where all the old temples are that are strictly dedicated to Buddha’. Then the scenery changes and cuts to long distances shots of tall buildings including the Baiyoke Tower (II), the skytrain, and close-ups of traffic and traffic police in their distinctive brown uniforms. Koston’s voice over continues over these images: But if you go to the east-side of the city there is a huge contrast. You’ve got big skyscrapers, skytrains, insane traffic – which causes so much pollution that people wear surgical masks so they don’t have to breathe in that garbage.

Koston is pictured standing with his skateboard on a grass patch by a busy roadway covering his nose and mouth with a t-shirt before swatting away fumes with his hand. The montage shifts to images of skate spots: cement, stairways, handrails, and ledges. Koston continues: With every modern city you can usually find skate-spots and the ones we found were really good. But of course there were security guards there. All we did was told them we were there to do work and gave them a little bit of money – which barely equalled two US dollars – and they let us skate. Even for beer and cigarettes.

At this point the montage cuts to a group of Thai security guards, in uniform, sitting on a staircase drinking beer from bottles and smoking cigarettes as Koston rides past and performs a backside 50-50 (grinding the right angle of two surfaces with the trucks or axel of the skateboard) down the ‘hubba’ (the ledge angled downward at a consistent angle to a staircase). He adds: ‘It’s, it’s crazy cause that would never happen in the US’. There are shots of him doing some tricks on a roadside with heavy traffic in the background. He says: Even with all the good spots we found I didn’t see that many skaters. And it makes me think that if I would have grown up in Thailand chances are I would probably have never skated. So I could have ended up doing other things like training to be a champion Thai kick-boxer or maybe even a Buddhist monk, who knows? [pause] But, nah I don’t think so.

The final few moments feature Koston attempting Muay Thai with a local trainer and then pretending to meditate in a Buddhist Kashaya (robes).

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With his closely shaved head and the dim lighting Koston looks the part, until he raises his head and smiles at the camera, shaking it gently in sync with the ‘I don’t think so’ in the voiceover. From here Koston’s part begins including footage from spots in Bangkok. Koston marvels at Bangkok’s modernity. As he notes, wherever there is a modern city there are spots. The assemblages of concrete, marble, steel and wide, open space are new, untouched, and barely policed. Revisiting his part two decades later, one can’t help asking, what exactly is being globalized here? What is travelling? Koston is travelling, along with Mortagne and other skaters and filmers. The performance of skateboarding is travelling; the skill, the flair, the creativity, the repurposing of the urban landscape. However, it is also the gaze that travels; the aesthetics, the particular ‘codes of appearance’, as Ghertner puts it, that promote a common vision of space shared by skaters (and f ilmers) delinked from ‘calculative instruments of map, census and survey’ (2015: 4). Furthermore, the gaze largely eschews the showpiece infrastructure of the city, which is usually crowded and policed. Koston is not in Bangkok to perform in front of legions of fans. He is not there to skate in front of famous temples or palaces, malls or Skytrain stations. He is there to scour the urban backstage for spots, perform tricks displaying skill and creativity, and crucially, have these captured as video or image and circulated and consumed worldwide; his livelihood depends on this. In spreading Koston’s skateboarding, videos like Menikmati spread the skater gaze. Bangkok too has a shredscape. Though it is not just the shredscapes that are a surprise; the lax attitude of security guards is a revelation, something that would ‘never happen’ in the US. In one brief flash of footage in his part, Koston is seated with the aforementioned security guards on the staircase and they all raise a toast to the camera (though Koston raises a water bottle). Koston has found spots, he has supplied the security guards with beer, and yet he has one more marvel to share; the city is almost empty of skaters. And while this may have been scripted for dramatic effect so Koston could pontificate over how his life may have turned out had he been raised in Bangkok (and so that we as viewers can breathe a sigh of relief. Phew! Lucky for us Koston is a skater and not a kickboxer!), Bangkok is certainly not empty of skaters. Though in the early 2000s they may have been hard to find given the absence of the digital tools we now take for granted. Thailand has a thriving local skate community concentrated in Bangkok. Thailand’s preeminent skate brand Preduce has released six full-length skate videos since 2005’s Smooth (James & Pannikul, 2005).

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Image 1.1 Jasper Dohrs in Chengdu, China in Preduce skateboard’s Supermix

Montrelerdrasme, 2018; screenshot; used with permission

Like the Bangkok sequences in Menikmati, these videos capture a different perspective on the city to what might be found in tourist advertisements or travel documentaries (exotic, transgressive and timeless), and to promotional material from the Bangkok Municipal Authority (orderly, hygienic and modern). Watching Preduce’s catalogue of videos is to witness Bangkok’s landscapes stripped of exotic allure; it’s all ledges, stairs and handrails; cement, asphalt, tiles and steel – the contrast between the Bangkok of the imagination and ‘Bangkok as it is’ (Batreau & Bonnet, 2019: 30). New infrastructure creates new space in Bangkok, often at great cost to residents (see Boonjubun, 2017; Moore, 2015), but desired by skateboarders. For instance, the construction of the Rama VIII suspension bridge across the Chao Phraya River completed in 2002 has created a near perfect spot underneath the bridge on the western bank of the river. This spot features in almost all skate videos from Bangkok and hosts visiting skaters and f ilmers, skate demos (demonstrations) and local contests. Preduce released a short video shot entirely under the Rama VIII bridge in 2016, Rama 8 Team Session (Montrelerdrasme & Rattanamanoch, 2016). This way of seeing the urban landscape carries to other parts of Thailand featured in Preduce videos, and in their travels to other parts of Asia such as to Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore for Selamat (Montrelerdrasme, 2016) and China, mostly Chengdu, for Supermix (Montrelerdrasme, 2018, Image 1.1). As Koston once travelled to Bangkok chasing modern urban

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Image 1.2 The Preduce ‘Skate Park’ Map of Bangkok

Preduce, 2019; used with permission

infrastructure in search of spots, Thai skaters search for spots in other parts of Asia. Preduce publish and distribute a map of Bangkok’s skate spots in English and Thai available online and as a physical map from their shop in Bangkok. The map includes official skate parks, DIY skate parks and popular street spots with cross references to landmarks and public transport. This is Bangkok’s shredscape. A noted contrast to both the surprising modernity of Menikmati and the everyday modernity of the Preduce videos, Fallen footwear’s 2013 video Road Less Travelled (Gilbert, 2013) features Bangkok as a city of struggle and adversity for the skateboarders – a physical and cultural gulf that tests the visitors. While there are standard place-based images of the mostly American and Australian skateboarders visiting temples, riding elephants, drinking coconuts, eating street food and playing around on motorbikes, the stories of the city told through a mixture of skateboard footage and on-camera anecdotes focus on rough surfaces, heat, heavy rainfall, long-distances, and – in contrast to Koston’s Bangkok a decade and half earlier – moments of hostility. In one sequence the Australian pro-skater Dane Burman recounts an incident at a spot where he was attempting a trick on a steel railing on top

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of a low concrete wall. The building appears to be abandoned or undergoing extensive renovations. On his first few attempts to 50-50 the rail his skateboard flies out into traffic or drops down over the wall into a driveway. He is accosted suddenly by a man (a watchman) brandishing what appears to be a daab – a long single-edged sword. Burman recalls: I remember looking up and there was this little old dude with a samurai sword coming up to me and pulling it out of its sheath. How did this get to a dude pulling a sword on me in like, 30 seconds? I didn’t even see the dude coming!

As footage of the incident is replayed Burman talks about another member of the crew, Thai-based skater Levi Adams, who came to his aid and stood between the sword-wielding watchman and Burman. Soon a plain-clothed man arrives and yells at Burman and Adams (inaudible), and gestures for them to leave, pointing away from the building. When Adams waves a hand in his face the second man assumes a boxing stance while the skateboarders taunt him. While the footage of the encounter rolls, Burman talks about the friendships made on the journey, the camaraderie forged at sword-point. In Road Less Travelled, Bangkok residents are reduced to sword-wielding threats, hapless security guards, local fixers, and gawking on-lookers. There’s little room for affection, little room for people outside the skate crew. The city is a backdrop for stories of bonding and perseverance, one stop on a long road of encounters between skateboarders and those who stand in their way. In this way, the different brands project their own image, and those of their featured skaters, onto Bangkok’s landscape: éS as elite, global and pioneering; Preduce as local, creative, and comprised of world-class Thai skateboarders; and Fallen as outcasts at war with society wherever they go. For Koston in the early 2000s Bangkok seemed relatively untouched: a city to explore, to seek out spots, to seek out skaters, and most importantly to capture content on video – the currency of the industry, the substance of skateboarding livelihoods. The idea of exploration, of seeking out spots in the urban landscape that can be skated and tracking down local skate communities, takes skateboarders and content creators (f ilmmakers, photographers) to new frontiers. While in retrospect the idea of Bangkok being untouched by skateboarding in the early 2000s seems dubious, the act of travelling to new frontiers has become a standard aspect of a globalizing skate culture and industry. Delhi, Tehran, and Astana are the Bangkok of the 2010s and 2020s.

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In both Saari and Koston’s parts in Menikmati, California is still what matters in the end. It may no longer be a paradise, but for Saari it’s ‘still great’ and for Koston it is growing up in California that gave him his skate career. And while it is easy to be critical of the ways Bangkok and Thailand are portrayed in this brief section of Menikmati, Koston’s narration emphasizes the modern landscape, the rapidly developing city, and the culture of tolerance and acceptance he felt, even when breaking the law. It’s dissonant to the standard exoticization of Thailand that circulates outside specialist knowledge or domestic discourse. For Koston, Bangkok is about handrails, stairs and ledges. And there is a final point too. Thousands of skateboarders saw Bangkok either for the first time or entirely differently through this short segment and watched it over and over again – me included. When I first saw Menikmati, I had never been to Bangkok. A year or so after its release I was in Bangkok en route from Myanmar and I spent my time searching for Koston’s spots. I sought the modern city, the marble, concrete and steel. I hoped to see the brown-uniformed security guards sitting on staircases having a beer watching skateboarders. In later years I researched the relationships between the enforcement of intellectual property rights and control of street space in Bangkok (Robinson & McDuieRa 2018); work that took my colleague and I all over the city from its capitalist core to peripheral urban hubs around transport interchanges. Even during that project I couldn’t help myself. I stole away to see if Koston’s spots were still there, despite the city having grown dramatically, perhaps unrecognizably, and despite the challenges of reading its surfaces and juxtapositions (see King, 2010). To be clear about this, fifteen years after Menikmati came out I was still wandering around different parts of Bangkok sniffing out clues, cross referencing with online maps, showing screen shots from the video to bemused urban researchers. It is not simply that Koston opened a classic video part in Bangkok, it is that the images and moments of footage of the city, of the urban landscape, of the spots that he skated, travelled to skaters all over the world, and I/we watched again and again and again. Even for Saari, his knowledge of California’s urban landscapes, its spots, came from skate video he saw in Finland. Only upon arriving in California did he realise that these landscapes were compromised, the spots were at risk. As skateboarders spend more and more time generating footage in Asia and as these images circulate further and faster through digital platforms and social media, a form of knowledge about urban landscapes is created, shared, and consumed by hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – of people, to skate and non-skate audiences. Also created is non-expert

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knowledge generated about the places that produce these urban landscapes, the people that experience them, and the cultures entangled in them.

(Re)Mapping Asia Through Spots Amin and Thrift task us with thinking of the ‘overlapping socio-technical systems’ that undergird cities. Socio-technical systems are not just the material backdrop to a city, the infrastructure upon which life is performed, but the ways these systems ‘insatiate and sustain life’ by: ‘allocating resource and reward, enabling collective action, shaping social dispositions and affects, marking time, space and map, maintaining order and discipline, sustaining transactions, moulding the environmental footprint’ (2017: 3). This is an invitation to think beyond the urban landscape as simply an arena or stage, but, as they argue, a machine. Skaters generate a unique form of system knowledge and circulate this, re-mapping urban space (within cities) and regional space (putting entire cities ‘on the map’ because of their spots). Further, there is something magical in their ‘dispositions and affects’, and this magic draws people across the world to the activity as participants, consumers, and spectators, what Paul O’Connor has called the ‘spectacular urban festivity’ of skateboarding (2020: 194). Skateboarding taunts these sociotechnical systems by searching for glitches – the spots that pop up without intention – and the machine responds to these taunts through electronic surveillance, policing, skate-stoppers, and spot demolition and desecration. The game is to beat the machine; to get to the glitches before the machine responds. Spots demonstrate the ‘plasticity’ of publicness, an ‘expressive machine and construct of social engagement with material and immaterial components of the world’ (Buser, 2018: 781). Asia’s urban landscapes are central to the global practice and industry of skateboarding, and Asia has become a crucial market for skate brands. This centrality, I claim, offers an alternative lens to explore urbanization in Asia, within Asia, and between the Global North and Global South. In New Urban Worlds (2017) Simone and Pieterse advance a research agenda for urbanization in Asia and Africa that pays little heed to established approaches imported from the Global North. One of their key arguments is that urban knowledge and practice needs to be considered as ‘a permanent site of experimentation’ (2017: 154). They identify initiatives by artists, writers and non-academics to capture urban worlds and urge scholars to ‘remain committed to an epistemological adventurism that can take in numerous forms of representation, critique, proposition and, especially, provocation’

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(2017: 174). Skaters, filmers, and consumers of skate video capture urban worlds in unique but widely understood forms, engaging in ‘epistemological adventurism’ that experiments in ways of engaging and knowing urban landscapes free of established approaches. To embark on this journey, and for readers to come along, depends upon accepting that a particular group, an urban subculture can – in the words of Gordon Douglas in his study of DIY urbanism – ‘open bright windows of insight into larger questions of social behaviour, systems, and processes’ (2018: 5). Skateboarders and filmers access different urban worlds to other actors and actants. There are interactions, but overall skateboarding offers a different form of place attachment, banding people from across the world together in space, but also through networks of capture, consumption and replication (Shields, 2013: 153). All of this depends on spots. This book analyses skate spots – and the urban landscapes that produce, host, and threaten them – as they are captured and consumed in film/video, image, online and ‘on the ground’ in Asia and makes four inter-linked arguments. First, spots produce an alternative cartography of urban Asia. This cartography has multiple representations at varied scales. These representations can be conceived with conventional terminology of scale: (i) local – such as Preduce’s map of Bangkok’s spots above; (ii) regional – such as ways of mapping Asia and routes through it according to the kinds of spots desired; (iii) global – the parts of the world where the best and most varied spots are and where the performance of skateboarding, especially for livelihoods, can be done with ease and minimal surveillance. They can also be conceived with more critical and relational logics of scale that flatten, though not completely, different cities into networks of spots with similar attributes according to the shared gaze of skateboarders and filmers. In this cartography, scale can be re-built as tiers based on (perceived) volume of spots or skaters, suggesting rapid fluctuations as new spots get discovered, known spots draw more skaters, and others drop out suddenly following new laws or crackdowns, or fade gradually as the urban landscape hosting the spots ages or is remodelled, altering or destroying the assemblage that drew skaters in the first place. Thus the skaters cartography does not simply ‘jump’ scale (Smith, 1992; 1996) over set scalar divides, the ‘oft-critiqued but still-convenient tiers of macro, meso, and micro’ (Carr & Lempert, 2016: 8), but re-sets relational and comparative hierarchies of urbanization in Asia and between Asia and the West. To confess, the skater’s approach to scale is rarely consistent or sophisticated. The ‘local’ seems firmly pegged as a distinct space of activity and people, including urban dwellers, authorities and local skaters communities. The nation-state is paramount at times.

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China, for instance, is more commonly used in the skate cartography than Shenzhen or Shanghai, as will be seen in Chapter 3. Sometimes it’s the city that contains the spots, and at others it is a vague regional term such as ‘the ‘Stans’ or the ‘Silk Road’ (Central Asia). The cartography is, however, reliant on the existence of spots for these other units to show up, to be ‘on the map’. Thus a city like Nanjing shows up on the map because of 20-30 spots, assemblages in the urban landscapes that can be extracted and compared to one another but also to spots in Shanghai and to say, Bangkok or Seoul, or even Los Angeles. In other words, Nanjing’s spots can be enrolled in the shredscape regardless of any other attributes of place. It is the presence of spots that puts the city on the map. Desimi and Waldheim argue that the trajectory of representation in mapping has ‘moved from the material and physical description of the ground towards the depiction of unseen and often immaterial fields, forces and flows’ (2009: 9). Such an approach ‘merges spatial precision and cultural imagination’ and sits between the ‘purely geographic and the freely abstract’ (2009: 9). Skateboarding’s cartography of Asia sits somewhere in this gap. Locating spots within a city is crucial but rarely precise. It is topological by ‘mapping out how such objects change and how they relate, in this process, to other changing objects in multiple, relational spaces […]’ while also providing ‘the mental hand-holds for working with situations where relationships are changed, distanciated, collapsed or distorted, reshaping the “diagram” one might draw of the situation’ (Shields, 2013: 140-141). Crucial to this kind of mapping is detailing the particular three-dimensional assemblage beyond a two-dimensional depiction of a street or plaza by gathering information about the surface, the arrangement of obstacles, the foot traffic, the best time of the day and year to skate the spot, and the prospects of being harassed or evicted. Cartographic and topologic knowledge of spots and the urban landscapes that host them is circulated, rapidly, to millions of people through personal and digital exchanges, while also being amended, improved, and sometimes withheld to protect spots from becoming over-used. Skate spots re-map Asia through the skater gaze. I label this way of looking at the landscape as a ‘gaze’ because it ‘orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects’ through ‘a particular filter of ideas, skills and expectations’ (Urry & Larsen, 2011: 1). The skater gaze is not aimed at the usual trappings of place: people, wilderness, cultural artefacts, landmark buildings, sanctioned performances or spectacles. The skater gaze is directed downwards, focused on the urban backstage, scouring the landscape for good skate spots. It evokes desire, creativity and intimacy. And while intimacy may be a strange way to describe a cultural activity built on phrases like ‘skate and destroy’,

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‘shredding’ and ‘grinding’, skaters spend hours, sometimes days at spots attempting tricks. They imagine the motions, they calculate the timing, they fall, they leave behind skin, teeth, and blood. It is difficult to sketch this imaginary cartography of spots in Asia. I have tried. I began like this: imagine in front of us a two-dimensional map of Asia, printed out on a large sheet of A1-sized white paper, or something even bigger, with towns and cities marked and named. We introduce volume of skateboarding activity and video/image capture to this cartography with a marker pen. Cities like Bangkok, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Osaka, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo would show up as enormous blobs of ink the size of a ping-pong ball. Cities like Busan (South Korea), Chengdu, Beijing, Nanjing, Ordos (China), Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Batu Pahat (Malaysia), Jakarta, Serembang, Yogyakarta, Makassar (Indonesia), Singapore would be smaller blobs, half to a quarter of the size of the first ones. These cities have local skate scenes and host visiting skaters, which ensures progression, plenty of footage, and constant searching for spots. Then there are cities with small local scenes and only occasional visitors, but the visitors who have come have captured landmark footage, and sometimes helped spur the local scene, as in Yangon, Mandalay (Myanmar), Ulan Bator (Mongolia), Bangalore (India), Kabul and Mazir-i-Sharif (Afghanistan), Tehran (Iran), Kathmandu (Nepal) and Ramallah (Palestine). These would be smaller marks again. And then there would be small ink dots in cities where skaters have been sighted, like rare species here and there, or where there is a small skate shop or networks of skaters using social media, such as Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan or Gangtok in India (see Chapters 5 and 6). And finally there would be barely legible specs of ink for places where there is footage in the archive of skate video, but no local skaters to speak of such as Sana’a in Yemen. In these last places, spots have been enrolled, but not revisited. I can imagine this map in my head. And I am sure many others can too. Digital mapping tools would make it even easier. Take the basic twodimensional map and then imagine adding volume; three-dimensional images of the spots themselves, or images detailing the obstacles: marble ledges, kinked handrails, painted concrete hubbas, and their size, length, and the quality of the roll up and roll away. Spots can be linked by their similarities: the curved hubba outside the Thai National Bank building is similar but a little longer than the curved hubba outside the unnamed government building in Putrajaya. Information on how busy the spot gets, how wet, how hot, how polluted. Add in directions, local names and transport routes. Information on security and surveillance is also needed. The data needs to be continually updated as new spots appear from a new housing

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development, a municipal project to widen pavements, a new mall. Longterm tenants may have left. A spot might just have become abandoned. Spots also disappear, they are demolished, concreted over, rendered un-skateable by defensive architecture. Some spots get worn down, weathered. They might not be as desirable as before, though for some skaters this might make them more desirable. New surveillance regimes come into force. Governments change policies about what is and isn’t permissible and where. Details on encounters with hostile people, crime or robbery, the affective properties of a spot; feelings of danger, trepidation, calm. Add this in too. Link spots to local skate shops, the contacts of local skate crews, accommodation, places to eat, costs. The difficulty with categorizing these tiers is data. There are so many videos ranging from big budget productions with millions of views to small edits or Instagram posts by skaters. Add images, decades of magazine photos, social media posts, and private collections to track, identify, and analyse. All of these feature spots, but tracking them down, taming this popular archive, is almost impossible. The map exists. Just not in one place, not in one form. It is scattered in different corners of the internet, on social media accounts, in the memories of skaters, in the knowledge of filmers, and fixers, and translators. There are smaller maps that provide almost all of this for a single city, such as Shanghai featured in Chapter 3. On a pan-Asia scale the map is still in fragments. Maybe a ‘total archive’ is not necessary, or even desirable. Yet the knowledge that underpins it, that opens the spaces of possibility for its materialization, is in the public domain, if you know where to look and are willing to stitch together some of the fragments. Second, the search for new spots is constant. As a mobile assemblage, the particular configurations that make up spots are fluid and change as the urban landscape transforms and as the public, property owners and authorities claim or re-claim control over spots. Spots disappear from one landscape and are produced and/or discovered in another. Asia is the most productive region for spots as urban landscapes proliferate so rapidly. Along with the ‘ludic’ aspects of skateboarding, the playfulness (see Woodyer, 2012), livelihoods for skateboarders and filmmakers – as well as the brands that profit from their labour – depend upon footage captured at spots. Footage captured and compiled is circulated to promote individual skateboarders and the brands they represent. More and more skateboarders, both professional and aspiring to be professional, require more and more spots. Skateboarders travel further and further to enrol new spots in global and regional cartographies. Some spots become well known and are almost constantly utilized such as famed spots in Shenzhen (China),

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while in other cases the search continues into new frontiers – lands both ‘in relation to’ and ‘at a distance from’ heartlands (Cons & Eilenberg, 2019: 13) – into lands previously untouched by skateboarding such as in Delhi (India) or Tehran (Iran) or Ramallah (Palestine) discussed in Chapter 6. The search and enrolment of spots generates a trail, or set of trails, across Asia, connecting those hypothetical blobs discussed above. This is back-roads globalization, what Christine Knowles terms an ‘alternative set of routes’ that depart from the ‘main roads’ of hegemonic globalization (2014: 191). She adds that journeys along these backroads, these trails, ‘expose the missing urban geographies of globalization’ (2014: 193). These trails across Asia enmesh spots; the urban landscapes they are nestled within; the cities that provide the airports, train/bus stations and hotels to host skaters; the bodies in motion on skateboards as well as watching them, policing them and getting out of their way; the objects that make skateboarding possible like wooden decks, urethane wheels, steel trucks and bearings, clothes and shoes (some of which are manufactured in Asia before returning via the US or Europe). The trail also leads to local skate communities. These communities act as hosts for visiting skaters; they provide fixers, translators and interlocutors, and share knowledge of spots. They are also, gradually, becoming a market for skate goods. Some of these communities feature in skateboarding media produced in Asia, some produce media of their own, and some remain completely out of the frame. These communities animate a shared perspective on urban landscapes, the so-called skater gaze. Third, the search for spots, their production and their enrolment in regional and global cartographies index urban development. The urban landscapes that make Asian cities attractive for skateboarders are produced through conventional drivers of economic development and the associated pull factors drawing capital, migrants, and necessitating planning, infrastructure, and showpiece architecture. At the top of the index is China, discussed in Chapter 3, a land of apparently infinite urban growth, a factory for spots constantly being created as urban landscapes are remodelled, appear from nowhere, are recalibrated by new infrastructure, and are abandoned or bypassed leaving them empty to be claimed by skaters. Spectacle cities – the lavish displays of state power through showpiece urban landscapes – offer dreamlike spots, but can come with their own limitations, especially without connections to authorities that govern them, as discussed in Chapter 4. Past eras of highly planned urban development also appeal, as in the grids and expansive public spaces of post-Soviet Asia, discussed in Chapter 5. In between are new frontiers, spots nestled in urban landscapes in emerging cities, emerging economies, polities emerging from

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isolation and/or armed conflict, or simply places uncharted by skaters, as explored in Chapter 6. Fourth, spots create encounters between skaters and authority, skaters and the public and skaters with each other. Helen Liggett describes urban encounters as ‘encounters […] based in urban experience without pretending to tell the truth or even to construct a narrative about the city’ (2003: ix). She adds, ‘[r]ather than assessing the city as a site of economic production or as an object of governance’ encounters present ‘cities as places of life’, of ‘irony and beauty’ (2003: xi). The city produces constant encounters, and these are ‘moments that sidestep the dominance of the abstract spaces of late capitalism’ (2003: xiii). Skateboarding produces unintended and unorganized encounters in urban space bringing the city to life. In Asia these relationships are noted for their relative tolerance, curiosity and nonchalance, especially when compared to the US (which they always are). Encounters are also moments of inter-cultural exchange, and these produce a vernacular cosmopolitanism enveloping skaters who travel to Asia from elsewhere, skaters who travel within Asia and local skaters too; the latter drawing elements of their own identity and even livelihoods from a (hegemonic) global skate culture. This vernacular cosmopolitanism may be replete with cultural stereotypes, inappropriate behaviour (most skaters are engaging in trespassing and property damage through their primary activity to begin with), and misunderstanding, yet at the same time it can be open, curious, and even reflective. And because skateboarding is captured and circulated over and over through digital media this cosmopolitanism is viewed, consumed, absorbed and even re-enacted by thousands of skateboarders the world over. For many skateboarders the bulk of their knowledge of Asia is transmitted through these digital circulations.

Structure of the Book The book has f ive substantive chapters and a concluding chapter. The chapters are organized thematically. The following chapter, Shredding the Urban Fabric discusses ways of conceptualizing skate spots. I advocate for Francisco Vivoni’s ‘below the knees’ method (2009) to understand the ways skaters, filmers and consumers of skate footage see the landscape – the skater gaze. I use the skater gaze to discuss the relationships between spots and infrastructure using observations from 2018 Go Skate Day in Singapore. I argue that skaters are adjacent publics for infrastructure, they are invested in its provision and maintenance, but are never its intended

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benef iciaries. A flyover doesn’t get built with skaters in mind, yet they f ind a spot underneath. I introduce rolling ethnography, an extension of walking ethnography, as both a way of engaging the landscape for the researcher and as way of understanding the ways skaters engage the landscape in situ and in skate video. The chapter closes by explaining the value of skate video within skate culture; as the main cultural artefact and as an underutilized archive of urban dynamics spanning four decades. From here the next four chapters spread from the thick blobs of ink on the imaginary map discussed above outwards to the small dots of ink in skateboarding’s new frontiers. Chapter 3, Chasing the Concrete Dragon, focuses on the centrality of China’s cities in skate culture. China’s rapid urban growth has produced ‘endless spots’, and its urban landscapes are desired by skaters and filmers from all over the world. Many of its spots are iconic, and skaters travel from near and far to attempt particular tricks at these spots. Like many other ways of understanding contemporary China, China’s cities are sites of miraculous productivity for skaters. Part of this desire is also the perceived tolerance of street skateboarding by authorities and the public. Thus China’s cities are places for concentrated skateboarding activity, amassing or ‘stacking’ footage to be edited into skate videos and consumed worldwide. China has emerged as an important market for skate goods, footwear and apparel, bringing skate teams to different cities in a constant cycle and creating opportunities for Chinese nationals to have skate careers. While China’s endless spots are a routine part of skate culture, less routine are the opportunities to skate the ‘perfect spots’ assembled in Asia’s spectacle cities, discussed in Chapter 4, Spectacle Cities: The Luxury of Emptiness. Spectacular urbanization refers to the convergence of hyper-modern landscapes in different parts of the region in attempts to project authoritarian power (Koch, 2018). Cities such as Astana, Baku, and Dubai produce beautiful spots to skate nestled around, between, and underneath the futuristic architecture. The chapter begins with analysis of skate video from Astana and Baku, before an in-depth analysis of skate video shot in Dubai focusing on the epic We Are Blood (Evans, 2015). Skaters and filmers work with the narratives of spectacle, revelling in the fantastic landscapes on the urban frontstage (Mohammad & Sidaway, 2012). Working with the narratives of spectacle is also tactical, giving skaters and filmers privileged access to these cities. There is something askew about this; spots are supposed to be hard fought, not gifted. Privileged access to a city grates with the ethos of skate culture, and some skaters end up seeking out the more mundane backstage of the spectacle city in response.

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China’s urban growth of the late 20th and early 21st centuries produces endless spots, but the remnants of the Soviet Union’s extraordinary urbanization in the early to mid-20th century is a reliable source of spots in post-Soviet Asia. In Chapter 5, For the Love of Soviet Planning, I discuss the search for spots in post-Soviet Asia, landscapes of surprising, if dated, modernity. Even in sites where post-Soviet symbols and objects have assumed the frontstage, the undergirding infrastructure of Soviet modernity ensures spots. Skate videos from post-Soviet Asia emphasize a shift from performance to place, from simply capturing skateboarding to narrating a journey to lands untouched by skateboarding. The chapter focuses on the large scale public squares and monuments of Tashkent and Bishkek and their replicants in smaller towns and cities. In some cases, as in an ill-fated trip by a group of skaters to Abkhazia, the post-Soviet landscapes are not machinic but repositories of fresh and traumatic memory, and the haunted landscape of recent conflict forces skaters to reconsider the limits of the shredscape. The journey narrative continues in skate videos shot in new frontiers, the focus of Chapter 6, Skateboarding’s New Frontiers. The chapter analyses skate video shot in Iran, India and Palestine, and categorizes these as frontiers within the skate cartography of the region. In the cultural vocabulary of skateboarding, lands with no known spots, few skaters, and slim prospects of capturing footage are frontiers. This does not mean these cities and polities are frontiers in other aspects of their social-cultural, political, or economic existence. Far from it. They are simply frontiers for skateboarding. Frontiers promise discovery, challenge, and, ultimately, a prize. The prize is new spots and the capacity to find more. To find spots in these landscapes makes it possible to find them anywhere. Once spots can be found in any landscape, anywhere, there is no limit to the trail, to the spaces of possibility discoverable on the backroads. The final Chapter, Conclusion: Another ‘Next China’, explores the ‘next China’ label. The label is thrown around regularly and there are many ‘next Chinas’ in the regional skate cartography. I use a brief discussion of Taiwan in skate video and in real-time to revisit some of the main arguments of the book, namely: the ways urban landscapes are enrolled into the cartography of spots, the different ways in which place is configured in skate video, and the value of skate video as an archive. I close by revisiting the arguments of the book and consider what these might suggest for the study of skateboarding, mobilities, consumption and cities in the future. This is not a comprehensive or even definitive account of skate spots in Asia, but it’s a starting point. Plenty of room exists for additions and improvements. There are places that are underdone, especially Japan and

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Korea, which have iconic spots, are captured in footage, have diverse skate communities and are major consumers of skate video, goods, and associated commodities. Japan and Korea have long-established skate communities analysed in existing literature on skate culture (Cho & Son, 2016; Dinces, 2011; Dixon, 2011; 2015; Hölsgens, 2018; 2019; Park, 2011), which is some consolation for their minor presence in the following chapters for limitations of space. There are places I visited for ethnographic research for this book that for whatever reason, didn’t fit the structure of the final version, Ho Chi Minh City, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Seoul, Tokyo and Osaka. However, these sites informed the ideas of the book and the skaters in these cities were welcoming in taking me to their spots. As fragments on the map, pieces of the archive, hopefully they can be part of future projects.

2

Shredding the Urban Fabric Abstract Chapter 2, Shredding the Urban Fabric, discusses spots and the hybrid methodology used in the book. I begin by discussing what makes a spot, the characteristics that make certain spots desirable, and the ‘skater gaze’ – a shared way of looking at urban landscapes with desire, creativity and intimacy. I move on to the idea of ‘rolling ethnography’, a way of approaching the city on wheels revealing the intricacies of surface, tension, topography, and encounters between actants both human and non-human. The final section discusses skate video as an archive of spots, landscapes, and unsanctioned performance. Once skate video is captured and edited, it circulates rapidly through digital technology, spreading skate culture and skate spots for consumption around the world. Keywords: skateboarding, Asia, skate spots, assemblage, skate video, rolling ethnography, infrastructure

This book revolves around spots – as assemblages, even compositions, and the urban landscapes that produce them – and the ways images, footage and knowledge of these spots circulates digitally. This chapter discusses spots and different methods of approaching them, with a particular emphasis on spatial ethnography done on wheels, what I call rolling ethnography, and skate video, a rich archive of almost 40 years of skateboarding in cities all over the world. Throughout the book I keep spots – and the urban landscapes that produce them – firmly at the centre of analysis. This discipline is hard. As a decades-long consumer of skate culture, there is a strong temptation to digress into the depths of skate culture itself (for discussions of skate culture/subculture see Beal, 1995; Borden, 2019; Dinces, 2011; Dupont, 2014; Lombard, 2010; Snyder, 2012; Stratford, 2016; Willing

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463723138_ch02

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et al., 2019).1 The culture matters to the story being told in this book for obvious reasons, particularly given the mutually constitutive relationships between the practice of skateboarding and social/cultural identity as a skateboarder. As skateboarders – and scholars of skateboarding – go to pains to point out, skateboarding is not something you just do, it is something you are. Pinpointing exactly what skateboarding is, or was and might become, is challenging as the culture evolves, diversifying communities of skateboarders and creating new ways of being part of skateboarding, whilst simultaneously producing anxieties about the threats to the soul of the culture. It is difficult to completely disentangle skate culture from skate spots. I also like to think that the search for spots in Asia discussed in this book – including all the wonder and all the flaws – sits in the more open and tolerant domain of skateboarding, rather than the insular and regressive pockets. Even at a basic level, the culture produces and reinforces the ethos and value of spots; skating patches of the urban landscapes intended for other uses. Without the ethos of finding spots, Asia would not be enrolled in skateboarding in such profound ways. My approach here is to focus on spots and let the culture reverberate through them, travelling along the trails connecting spots and cities in parts of Asia. I approach spots through a hybrid and, at times, experimental methodology (see Last, 2012). This chapter sketches this approach by first discussing what makes a spot, the characteristics that make certain spots desirable, and the skater gaze, which scours urban landscapes from ‘below the knees’ (Vivoni, 2009) with desire, creativity and intimacy. The following section uses an account from Go Skate Day 2018 in Singapore to demonstrate the relationships between skateboarding and infrastructure, and the ways the skater gaze can find assemblages in even the most carefully and painstakingly planned urban landscapes. I move on to the idea of ‘rolling ethnography’, a way of approaching the city on wheels uncovering surface, tension, topography, and encounters between actants both human and non-human. Rolling ethnography is a method to research skate spots and a method on display in skate video, which function like ethnographic vignettes of space-time. Rolling ethnography is an extension of walking ethnography, and I discuss these approaches in tandem, using two accounts of Los Angeles; one on foot, one on wheels; one written as text, the other captured as skate video. 1 It is also tempting to focus on the political economy, and ecology, of skateboarding, including its global production chain, waste and environment impact, and industrial history. However, these themes are beyond the scope of this particular book.

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While LA is, obviously, not Asia, it is one of the central nodes of the skate industry and of the western popular imagination, so it provides a helpful example to demonstrate the intersections and overlaps between different forms of urban knowledge, different maps of a famous city. The final section discusses skate video as an archive of spots, landscapes, and performance, that is captured, edited, circulated digitally and consumed. I make the case for skate video as a vital archive capturing skateboarding’s nested mobilities and the spread of the act and the culture around the world, all of which depends on the production, gathering, discovery, and utilization of spots.

Spots: Urban Landscapes Below the Knees It can be difficult for those outside the culture to appreciate the necessity of skateboarding in the streets, in spots intended for other uses. Why not just skate in a designated skatepark? Chihsin Chiu argues that skateboarders prefer ‘naturally afforded environments rather than purposely built ones’ (2009: 35), in part because of the draw of reinterpreting urban landscapes built for entirely different purposes, and in part because streetscapes are imbricated in the visual and symbolic aspects of the culture. Skatepark specialists can be maligned in the culture as ‘park robots’, lacking creativity and adaptability. Skateparks are vital places for learning, practicing, and safety, but despite their proliferation the draw of the streets remains powerful. Crucially, most contemporary skateparks include elements that mimic street spots; stairs, handrails, embankments, ledges and hubbas. The purpose-built space is designed to simulate the accidental space ‘naturally’ occurring in urban landscapes. In Skateboarding LA, Gregory Snyder (2017) makes a number of crucial points about the centrality of the spot in skateboarding and provides an excellent set up for the remaining chapters. Snyder states simply: ‘[S]kateboarding at the highest level requires spots to skate’. Spots themselves have become famous, they ‘evolve and develop their own history according to the feats performed; therefore to lean about famous spots is also to learn about the history of skateboarding’ (2017: 63, see also O’Connor, 2020). Snyder defines a spot as any place or obstacle that is ‘skateable’; though these are not as ubiquitous as it may seem. For highly skilled skateboarders, whether professional or not, the best skate spots enable what Snyder calls ‘the ethos of progression’ (2017: 70), the opportunity to ‘increase the degree of difficulty at existing spots or by finding new spots that meet a specific criteria for a specific trick’ (2017: 70). Therefore, skaters as well

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as f ilmers are ‘constantly scrutinising public space and imagining how it could be skated’ (2017: 71). Skaters scrutinize this space with a specific gaze, a gaze shared by skaters across the world and the most skilled and most creative will go even further, discovering a spot where few other skaters could comprehend performing a particular trick. This gaze is what Francisco Vivoni calls the ‘below the knees method’ of reading urban space; a way to witness and experience ‘ordinary acts of spatial appropriation’ by skateboarders on their skateboards and the traces they leave behind (2009: 133). For Vivoni, it is below the knees, on the ground surfaces of urban space where skateboarders appropriate space, contest control and seek ‘spatial justice’. While conscious of the circulation of other media where skateboarding’s images and advertising is produced and consumed, Vivoni argues that it is the scuffed surfaces, the waxed ledges below knee height that ‘represent an alternative vision of the city in which the market value of built forms is contested by the emergence of new urban experiences’ (2009: 133). Even when skaters are not present at the spot their claims can be seen in the chips, wax, and paint marks. As Image 2.1 shows, these ledges outside Vincom Center in Ho Chi Minh City can only be skated after hours. However the marks left behind by skaters materialize the skater gaze, the alternative vision Vivoni writes about, especially when juxtaposed to the high-end retail shops on the lower floors of the building. Snyder notes, ‘[a] skater sees urban architecture in aesthetic terms, which are completely different from those of the general public’ (2017: 79). Indeed the public can be entirely oblivious to the double life of a mundane urban space; even when marked by skateboarders or covered with skate-stoppers. Snyder reduces this difference to a binary, spots that are ‘skateable and unskateable’ (2017: 79). As Snyder notes: ‘[s]katers tend to focus on specific sets of obstacles, which include flat ground, ledges, bumps, banks, stairs, gaps, manual pads, flat bars and handrails’ (2017: 64). Not all spots have to be perfectly smooth, but a smooth surface makes it easier for speed, for timing, and for landing. Smooth surfaces are associated with particular cities and countries and serve as a way of indexing their level of urban development and skateability. The point is not the form but the gaze that enlivens it, that turns ‘something mundane into something beautiful […] unwanted space into useable public art’ (2017: 80). It is not just the act of skateboarding that bring spots to life; it is their circulation in video, their value to the culture, and their place in the imagination of skateboarders and filmers. Skaters are constantly scanning the urban landscape for spots, ‘constantly scrutinizing public space and

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Image 2.1 Waxed marble ledges outside Vincom Center in Ho Chi Minh City, 2018

Photo: Author

imagining how it could be skated’ (2017: 70). The spread of skateboarding to Asia dramatically increases the number and scale of landscapes that can be scrutinized for spots. Snyder too notes this in talking about the crackdown on skateboarding in LA. He writes, [S]katers seek out new spots because so many spots in LA have been made unskateable, and because they have a tacit desire to explore urban space. It is also the case that many obstacles on the West Coast (of the US) have accrued so much subcultural history that it is difficult to do anything new (2017: 208).

New spots may not have the cultural capital that famous spots have, however, [n]ew spots are places of enormous creative possibility because no one has yet to do any tricks on them. Finding them is tricky not only because of skaters’ specific architectural requirements, but also because of cops, skate stoppers, sidewalk cracks and pedestrians (2017: 68).

Spots are increasingly rendered unskateable by security guards, surveillance cameras, and defensive architecture to prevent skateboarders from utilizing the spots (Smith & Walters, 2018; Woolley & Simpkins, 2011). Snyder refers to this as ‘the crisis of diminishing spots’ in LA and other large US cities, and adds skaters contend with this by travelling the world in search of

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spots, and ‘now skateboarders are intensely exploring the new built cities in China and Dubai’ (2017: 184). Enter Asia.

Infrastructure’s Adjacent Publics Singapore’s Downtown Core is busy on weekends. The precinct features almost all of the iconic monuments that have come to characterize the imagination and experience of the city, especially for visitors, materializing the transformation of this part of Singapore from ‘slums to global business hub’ (Wong, 2001). The area is a dramatic demonstration of ‘volumetric urbanism’, the accelerated expansion of territory through land reclamation, vertical growth in skyscrapers, and subterranean growth in underground walkways and transit systems (McNeill, 2019). At the opening of the humanmade bay, a new footbridge spans the mouth of the Singapore River. The footbridge was built to commemorate 50 years of Singapore’s statehood (1965-2015) and connects the relocated Merlion statue – a mythical figure created by the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board in 1977 ‘to lend mystique to the island’s history’ (Bishop et al., 2004: 4) – to the Theatres on the Bay, two striking domes resembling the infamous durian; the fruit’s spiky skin reproduced in steel and glass as part of the government’s ‘economistic’ attitude towards the arts (Chang, 2000). The footbridge runs adjacent to Esplanade Drive, a raised roadway with separate overpasses for each direction of traffic. Perched where the footbridge and overpass meet you can see a stage floating in the bay to the north while to the east is the Marina Bay Sands complex of hotels and luxury shops, the flower-shaped Art Science Museum, and the 165 metre high Singapore Flyer, the world’s highest observation wheel (Yap, 2012). There is a glimpse of the futuristic ecology of Gardens by the Bay through the buildings. To the southwest is the Fullerton Hotel and the skyscrapers of the financial district, and to the west and northwest the remnants of colonial Singapore including the Padang backed by what is now the Singapore National Gallery (formerly the city hall), St. Andrew’s Cathedral, a cluster of colonial administrative buildings now all repurposed. Behind these is the last of the now unfashionable 1980s buildings, the Peninsula Plaza, where the lower five floors house a tired shopping centre that has been revived in the last fifteen years as a hub for Singapore’s growing population of migrant workers from Myanmar. Between the Padang and the footbridge is Connaught Drive, where tour buses stop adjacent to the Cenotaph to release passengers into the pedestrian-only precinct around the bay. This is the epicentre of Singapore as produced for

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consumption. The spectacular frontstage of ‘urban planning under state capitalism’ (Shatkin, 2014: 117). As the heat dipped on a June Saturday afternoon in 2018, the pedestrian bridge was crammed with visitors jostling each other with selfie-sticks, posing for photographs with relatives, and seeking out the exact spot to pose where it appears the Merlion is spitting water into a raised hand, open mouth, or water bottle. An air-show began over the bay with parachutists careering down to small rafts positioned in the water below. Music carried across the bay from the floating stage. This is the Singapore that visitors come to see, that captures the synchrony between national planning an urban planning, tourism and high-finance, the arts and technocracy (Soh & Yuen, 2011; Yeoh & Chang, 2001). And all these elements seem to gather together, or collide, in this small patch of the city, carefully designed and painstakingly raised from the sea. On this day, however, beneath the surface of the planned landscape, the built environment was being utilized for an entirely different purpose, for activities unplanned, damaging, and potentially dangerous; for skateboarding. And it was playful, thrilling, and beautiful. The thoroughfare from Connaught Drive takes pedestrians through a small park with grass and children’s play equipment to the Theatres by the Bay and around the foreshore heading east as well as providing access to the footbridge and the Merlion. Paved with large square slabs of smooth granite, sloped ground, pathways, planters, stairways, handrails – not to mention the lack of cars – the landscape is irresistible for skateboarders. On this Saturday, June 23, the nearest Saturday to Go Skateboarding Day2 (June 21), a group of 30 or so female and male skateboarders rolled past the Asian Civilizations Museum, over the site where Raffles landed in Singapore, and along Queen Elizabeth Walk setting up for the afternoon on a low marble ledge fronting the thoroughfare. Clearly familiar with the landscape, a few skaters focused on trying tricks down a set of stairs, others took it in turns to launch flat-ground tricks over a wedge of pavement where the flat meets the slope down and under the overpasses (see Image 2.2), while others followed on their skateboards attempting to film their friends with small video cameras and mobile phones. 2 Go Skateboarding Day is a global event held on June 21 each year. On this day, or near to it, skaters from all over the world organise events, sometimes with sponsorship and/or the permission of authorities, sometimes without. A common Go Skate Day practice is a mass gathering of skaters converging on a city centre, similar to the bicycling event Critical Mass. Go Skate Day is credited to Don Brown, a former professional skateboarder and creator of several influential skate shoe brands since the 1990s. See The Nine Club Episode 23, Don Brown, 14 November 2016.

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Image 2.2 Navigating the crowd to skate the variation in the pavement. The Theatres by the Bay ‘durian spikes’ feature in the right-hand corner of the frame. Go Skate Day in Singapore, 2018

Video by author; screenshot

The skaters were all wearing long pants, despite the heat, a common choice given the number of times skaters fall onto hard surfaces during a skate session. Most of the group wore matching t-shirts of their skate crew, supported by a local shop, and the latest skate footwear. A few of the skaters clustered near to where I sat were speaking to each other in Bahasa, and the majority of the skaters appeared to be ethnically Malay or Indonesian; the black jeans, long hair, earrings and tattoos a contrast to the appearance of similarly aged youth out in other parts of the city cycling, running or playing ball games. Half an hour into the session four European skaters joined, sharing the camaraderie though without the matching t-shirts or need for verbal communication. After a while the group moved beneath the overpass where a steep banked wall, at about a 45-degree angle, provides a near-perfect skate spot. Skaters push towards it, ride up the banked wall, attempt a trick, land (hopefully) and ride back down. The area under the overpass is an echo chamber. The roar of hard urethane wheels on granite, the cheers and howls of the skaters, and the drone of cars passing overhead bounced around off the concrete surfaces. Then things went quiet. At first, I thought that the police or security guards had come. Then I saw that one of the skaters, we can call him Nat, was climbing to the top of the bank and

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scaling a cement block that separated the two lanes of the overpass. Nat was going to drop from the cement block at the height of the overpass, onto the 45-degree banked wall and ride down it into the thoroughfare. The rest of the skaters moved into position to ensure Nat had a safe landing area. This was diff icult because of the crowds streaming through the underpass from tour buses to the waterfront. While some skaters cleared a path in the flow of pedestrians, others found the best vantage point to film the trick, while others picked Nat up after each fall and did a quick injury inspection before encouraging him to climb up and try again. These are the moments outside the frame of most skate video; the impromptu management of bodies and flows through public space for just long enough for the skater to land the trick. The spectacle attracted plenty of attention from passers-by. Couples in matching polo tops and dress short combinations, elderly South Asian women in saris being shepherded by younger relatives, western tourists in singlet tops, dads with curious kids in tow all stopped and mingled with the skateboarders and shared in the anticipation, even if they weren’t exactly sure what they were anticipating. Some seemed unsure if this was a sanctioned performance or even what they should be looking at. Skateboarding can be difficult to watch for outsiders, as landing a single trick can take hours of trying, especially when the degree of difficulty is high, while the trick itself may only last a few seconds. After an unsuccessful try Nat would take a few minutes to climb back up, set himself and attempt the trick again. During these intervals it was difficult to see him, and many passers-by were confused at this crowd looking up into the bright sunlight from the dark beneath the overpass, though I noticed that a few took a photograph or video from their phones anyway, just in case. At one point a busload of tourists wearing sun visors and sun protection sleeves on their arms passed through in formation, headed by a tour guide with a raised flag with the name of a Korean tour agency. The group were not able to pass through the crowd and one of the skaters had to start directing pedestrian traffic to ensure they passed through to the other side and there was sufficient space for Nat to try again. Then the moment came. On probably his seventh or eighth try, Nat dropped-in from between the overpass lanes, down onto the banked wall, and rode away into the thoroughfare. He made it. The skateboarders went wild, jumping up and down in celebration, holding their boards at one end and smacking them into the ground – a sound that echoed off the raw concrete like hailstones, and jostling through the stream of passers-by to congratulate Nat, who was completely non-plussed; the correct reaction to

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landing a difficult trick in skate culture that transcends place, nationality or gender. Land something difficult and play it cool. By now it was an hour or so from dusk, and space in the underpass was filling up with more and more pedestrians, so the session moved back to the outside part of the Esplanade where skaters attempted more tame tricks and sat around on the ledge talking, sharing snacks, and buying and trading product. As dusk set in the session wound down and skaters began to peel off and go their separate ways. The footbridge between the theatres and the Merlion remained packed with visitors, tourists moved back and forth between the bay and their buses, the city lights reflected off the water, outdoors restaurants and cafes filled up, a public address system started to play music for an outdoor performance somewhere nearby, and the skateboarders disappeared from the carefully cultivated environment without a trace. Well, almost without a trace. The banked wall wears the black lines of urethane wheels marks, the ledges and benches along the edges of the pathways bare chips and layers of wax where they have been worn down by skaters grinding and sliding along them. Even when skaters aren’t there, their claims to the space, the objects, the surfaces, are marked. Similar traces can be found at skate spots throughout the city and especially all around the bay – all around Singapore’s showpiece precinct, including along Marina Boulevard and outside the Marina Bay Convention Centre. For Singapore’s skaters, the showpiece infrastructure is a playground of smooth surfaces, perfect ledges and banks. Despite scores of small public skate-parks built across the city, the thrill of skateboarding the city’s landmarks, the wide open spaces, moving through the crowds, and landing a dangerous drop between two lanes of overpass cannot be matched or muted, even in the city characterized by surveillance, rules and strict spatial obedience. Singapore has dream skate spots because of the continual creation and improvement of civilian infrastructure, especially infrastructure to enable vehicular and pedestrian mobility. Attention to infrastructure in the humanities and social sciences is flourishing, and there is a rich literature offering a signif icant theoretical lens to understand hopes, anxieties, disrepair, citizenship, autonomy and governance (Anand, 2016; Barry, 2013; Chu, 2014; Harvey and Knox, 2015; Larkin, 2008; Joyce, 2003; Reeves, 2017). Brian Larkin urges us to consider infrastructures as ‘matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things’ (2013: 329). Infrastructures go beyond their immediate functionality and, as Larkin argues, ‘need to be

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analysed as concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees’ (2013: 329). Infrastructure draws our attention to the providers and to the intended beneficiaries, the addressees, the public or publics. As Collier et al. argue, ‘it is not only the things extracted, transformed, and circulated through infrastructures that are today being reshaped, but the public – or publics – of infrastructure’ (2016: n.p.). Skateboarding offers an interesting intervention into this literature. It is conceivable to think of skateboarders as addressees, publics whose experience of space is shaped by the provision, upgradation, decline and removal of infrastructure. Though it is less conceivable to imagine skateboarders as stakeholders in the provision of infrastructure, nor subjects of its success or failure. Skateboarders engage in Larkin’s ‘semiotic and aesthetic’ embrace of materials used to create infrastructure, yet they are invested in the creation of infrastructure projects addressed to others. They chase the creation of new infrastructure, assess its policing, its surveillance, but are rarely the intended subjects of the project and sometimes are not even citizens of the polity in question. In this sense skaters are not members of the intended public, or alternatively the absent publics, they are members of an adjacent public. The adjacent public of skaters also covet infrastructure that holds its form but may no longer hold its use value, or never realized its use value to begin with. The plaza in front of a stadium created for a sporting event with ledges and rails, stairs and hubbas is valuable to skaters whether or not the stadium still functions. As long as the spot remains the infrastructure lives on with this adjacent public. If, as Madeline Reeves (2017) argues, infrastructures are manifestations of hope and desire, this holds for skaters too. In chasing infrastructure around the world, the use value of infrastructure – whether it addresses political promises or fixes problems – doesn’t matter to skaters. They care only about whether it produces spots; the form, the obstacles, the lines, the surfaces. For filmers and photographers the aesthetics matter too; what will this look like when captured and circulated? In this way the relationship between skaters and infrastructure is closer to adoration, even love. Nat and the skaters who skate the spot under the overpass along the foreshore in Singapore probably never use the overpass for its intended purpose; they probably don’t even have cars. They are privileged addressees in this way, able to move on from infrastructure when it no longer produces a desirable spot, when it no longer fits the shredscape. At the same time they take otherwise unremarkable elements of infrastructure and animate them through ‘lively’ acts (Amin, 2014); taking the urban backstage to the frontstage through performance, capture and rapid circulation of skateboarding.

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Richard Ingersoll offers a provocative take on infrastructure as ‘cathedrals of mobility’; as modern art that ‘incite[s] a painful beauty’ (2006: 101). This pain comes from the violence and destruction done by infrastructure and by the things it brings into our daily lives. He asks, ‘[a]side from their functionality as public works, dare one find them beautiful’? To take up this dare means to evoke the sublime, the ‘contradictory sentiments of fascination and repulsion’ (2006: 103). Art as infrastructure, infrastructure as art. Ingersoll explains this further: Infrastructures as utilitarian responses to the pressing problems of mobility invariably cause environmental and social problems. To approach infrastructure as art can provide a way of dealing with the violence it interjects into the urban system and become a means of creating civic meaning. (2006: 124)

This gets closest to the ways infrastructure appears in skate video and photography. Skateboarding on, against, through, under, over, past infrastructure and its fragments is a way to make meaning to a particular, yet globally dispersed (and rapidly growing) community; an adjacent public to the intended addressees, the intended beneficiaries. Infrastructure’s ‘painful beauty’ is a consistent aesthetic in skate video and photography. Ingersoll goes into detail on the transformation of Barcelona, a city that emerged as a global skate mecca in the 1990s, playing a central role for over decade in much the same way as cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai played through the 2010s. To be sure, Barcelona is still a popular skate city for skaters seeking out iconic spots like MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), Plaça del Fòrum, Para-ll Metro Station, and the plaza in front of Sants station. Ingersoll writes of Sants: ‘[i]t meets the major intersection with skeletal shading devices and is solidly paved in smooth granite (much-loved by the international skateboarders who come like pilgrims to scoot about the site)’ (2006: 118 – brackets in original). We can forgive Ingersoll using ‘scoot’ to describe the ways skaters move, because the fact he notices them in Sants and can understand why they love it is impressive considering so many scholars either don’t register skaters in the urban landscapes they study or ignore them. Ingersoll even captions a photo of Sants as ‘the hard plaza loved by skateboarders’ (2006: 118) referring to the juxtaposition of hard and soft elements in the plaza’s design. Sants is indeed loved by skateboarders. Spots are loved, desired, discovered, captured, circulated, consumed. A crucial way of experiencing this is to roll through it, to take the central tenets of walking ethnography and perform them on wheels.

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Splicing the Map Walking ethnography has become an established approach for reading the flows of everyday life, for finding a different perspective on place and space, landscape and power, bringing relational moments to the fore. As Tim Edensor argues, walking reveals rhythms that intersect, ‘adding to the complex polyrhythmy of place’ (2010: 69). A mobile sense of place can be produced (and identified) ‘through longer immersion by the walking body across a more extended space’ (Edensor, 2010: 70). As Yi’En Cheng notes, the practice of walking itself is a ‘mobile and embodied practice’ and ‘inherently a rhythmic experience and potentially offer[s] insights to the multiple splices of time-space narratives’ (2014: 212). Walking brings relational moments of ethnographic practice to the fore. It also brings researchers into incidental contact with people, sounds, smells, objects, texts, and ‘inter-ocular references’ (Freitag, 2014: 401), as well as multiple ‘affective attunements’, namely the ‘the ways our attention is drawn to certain things, while other things go without notice […] or are taken for granted by its occupants’ (McDuie-Ra, et al., 2020: 8). In his short book Sidewalking Los Angeles, David Ulin reorients LA by stepping out of the car in an urban landscape ‘where the very notion of the street as public space remains alien somehow’ (2015: 2). By walking the city (daily), Ulin’s perspective on the landscape alters. His pace slows. Ulin writes, ‘I could make connections, or fail to make connections, could assess the city on my own terms, contemplate how my impressions (such as they were) did, or did not, cohere’ (2015: 25 – brackets in original). Through walking, Ulin, recalling a time when he was new to the city, finds a sense of place. More than that, walking translates the landscape into something intelligible. He writes, ‘I could speak a language in which I was fluent – that of the sidewalk, of the walker in the city – and apply it to a territory written in a different tongue’ (2015: 25). Ulin keeps this idea of translation going through the book. Walking offers ‘a way of keeping the city bounded, of making it small […] I needed a mechanism to rewrite the landscape in terms I could understand’ (2015: 41). LA keeps people in traffic for hours to travel short distances. It is an endless frustration for skateboarders; being stuck in traffic instead of being out in the streets, typified in Arto Saari’s opening narration from Menikmati discussed in Chapter 1. Hours in traffic, spots are a bust – you move to LA to skate and yet you seem to do so little of it. Ulin’s response to the gridlock is to walk past it, adjacently, on the sidewalk. In his walking he discovers assemblages that are difficult to explain, though he doesn’t use the term itself (2015: 89). This is LA encountered from the ground, in

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the fabric of the city, when proximate to its surfaces, angles, its spots. This is not hidden LA, but the city laid bare waiting to be experienced rather than driven past. LA’s sidewalks have featured hundreds of times in skate video, as a route between spots – Michel de Certeau’s ‘intertwined paths’ that ‘weave places together’ (1984: 97) – but most commonly as a launching and landing pad for tricks performed on the assemblages in the landscape, the spots. The ledges outside West LA Court House, the deep concrete banked wall into the LA River, J-Kwon (named after an orthodontist’s practice visible in footage of the spot, a.k.a Radio Korea for an older sign that used to adorn the building), the stairs and handrails at Hollywood High School, along with countless other school yards, Santa Monica triple (stair) set, the Sunset Carwash, the list is long and glorious. Reading Ulin’s rich details of LA’s sidewalks alongside Snyder’s Skateboarding LA (2017) maps versions of the city that overlap and diverge, demonstrating the ways spots hide in plain sight, and demonstrating the differences between walking and rolling through landscapes (on a skateboard). As such, the skater’s map of a city is diffuse with routes that are difficult to follow by any other logic. Whereas Ulin’s map of LA unravels slowly on foot in incremental steps, Snyder’s jumps all over the city, chasing its spots. He writes: [s]skateboarding places are an interpretive by-product of the built environment and therefore do not confirm to spatial logic. Yes, there are some spots Downtown, which tends to have newer architecture but there are spots everywhere, at schools, at parks and other random places. For skaters this means their city map is a vast array of unintentional acts of beauty that exist across an entire region…when seen from the perspective of a skater, the spatial logic of the city becomes one where there is no centre, only points of extreme interest […] (2017: 55).

In a city of boundaries: economic, social, racial, surveilled, public-private, skaters ‘actively cross urban boundaries in search of spots and in doing so understand their city in an entirely different way […] [i]n this sense skaters are postmodern explorers of the contemporary city unbound by country, continent or hemisphere’ (2017: 55). Like Ulin, Snyder demonstrates that a change of perspective, a view from below the knees, gives an alternative geography and cartography of the urban landscape. The points of overlap, such as Wilshire Boulevard, are narrated from different non-automotive gazes, one experienced on foot, one on wheels; one written as text (Ulin), the other captured in skate video. Ulin’s focus

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along Wilshire is the transformation from wastelands and corner preachers to food trucks and art installations. Snyder’s is on the Wilshire Gap to Ledge, site of US pro-skater Guy Mariano’s ‘switch, back tailslide, to shove it, out’ from Girl Skateboard’s 1996 video Mouse (Jonze, 1996). Snyder describes the spot (2017: 45): ‘[t]here are two ledges, about waist high, with an approximate six-foot gap between them’, which forces the skater to ride across one ledge, ollie the gap between them, land on the other ledge and then pop ‘off’ onto the ground with tricks added at some or all of these stages. Snyder shifts between how the spots looks on video, ‘relatively unassuming’, how it looks in person, ‘incredibly difficult and dangerous’, and the connection between spots, visual documentation, and linguistics. He writes, ‘[a]ll you have to do is tell skaters that “Guy Mariano did a switch, back tail, to shove it out, at the Wilshire Gap to Ledge” and they will visualize exactly what happened… and where’ (2017: 45-46). Skaters can visualize the trick even if they have never seen the footage, in part because this spot is iconic, its dimensions conjurable. Ulin, observant as he is about the urban fabric along this very street doesn’t see the gap-to-ledge, it doesn’t register for him, his gaze is not below the knees, nor has he consumed footage of the spot hundreds of times in skate video.3 He traverses the landscape, not the shredscape. Skateboarders roll through the urban landscape on wheels, extending the basic tenets of walking ethnography and opening up cities in different ways, splicing the skater’s map with other (official and alternative) ways of seeing and knowing. Rolling ethnography is not just a practice in real-time, it is also on display in skate video. Sarah Pink has urged ethnographers to walk ‘with video’ allowing engagement ‘with a world in progress, as it is continuously reshaped, not only in the imagination and by human action’ creating an historical text, an archive of these moments (2007: 249). Skaters and f ilmers are doing rolling ethnography with video, in the footage captured and in the lead up; the countless hours searching for spots by scouring the landscape in person, in consultation with other skaters and filmers, and online. In 2019, US pro-skater Walker Ryan released a standalone skate video part entitled Wilshire Wonderland (Bowman, 2019). The part features almost five minutes of Ryan skating spots all along Wilshire’s f ifteen-mile stretch from Santa Monica to Downtown LA. A skate video focused on one street is rare, and the footage substitutes for a written text. Ryan’s rolling route traverses Ulin’s walking route in parts, 3 Skate nerds will appreciate that at the start of Ulin’s second chapter ‘Los Angeles Plays Itself’ he quotes lyrics from Frank Black’s song ‘Los Angeles’, the same song used in Eric Koston’s celebrated part in Girl Skateboard’s Yeah Right (Evans, 2003).

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though the camera eschews landmarks for spots: on the sidewalk, the road, around the back of buildings, at a loading dock, a tall ledge angled down an underground carpark entrance. Ryan is limited by the spots produced along and adjacent to Wilshire, but then again, this limitation highlights his skill and creativity in finding so many spots along the way. Even though shot in daylight, it’s as if the long boulevard is closed to pedestrians. Perhaps everyone is in cars. From time to time the camera pans up to a statue, a spire, a recognizable façade, a signboard, at others a named building or building number will be caught in the frame, but for the most part Ryan’s reinterpretation of this famous boulevard is a reinterpretation of its surfaces, its back blocks, its side passages. And of course he skates the Wilshire Gap to Ledge. He begins with a nollie heelflip on the narrow cement edge of the ledge, a frontside 180 ollie across the six-foot gap to the second ledge, and a then a switch 360 kickflip off the ledge down into the street, to the joy of a watching pedestrian. Ryan doesn’t dwell, he weaves the famous spot into his mission to skate the whole street, following some technical flip and manual tricks and an ollie off a tall ledge to nose bonk (touching the front part of the skateboard on an object in the air) onto steel payphone housing, he soon arrives at the One Wilshire building, the end of his journey from Santa Monica. By rolling, Ryan is using a ‘mechanism to rewrite the landscape’ (to return to Ulin, 2015: 41) in terms he can understand, and that are legible to consumers of the footage, other rolling ethnographers, other skaters. Along Wilshire Boulevard, Ulin’s walk and Ryan’s skate take different paths, and pause at different patches for different purposes. Ulin’s gaze is raised, the buildings, the trees; Ryan’s gaze is down, the sidewalk, the stairs, the ledges, the oncoming traffic. When rolling the topography of the city is felt immediately. What may appear as a manageable uphill rise on foot can be a strenuous push on a board; a large crack or missing slab of pavement easy to step over must be cleared by jumping over it (an ollie), avoiding it, or dismounting and stepping across it; rain, thick sand, dust and dirt make skateboarding difficult if not impossible; crowds are difficult to squeeze through and there is always a chance of a collision, as with cars and other vehicles if using a road or bike path. Though perhaps what is most noticeable about learning a city on wheels is that skateboarding requires constant surveillance of the ground, scanning for obstructions and obstacles. There is little time to look up, to see buildings, or trees or monuments. The below the knees view reveals an entirely different city, of surfaces, cracks, inclines and decline big and small. The motion of rolling ethnography can be rapid, but once at a spot everything slows

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down. Skateboarders take turns to try tricks and might stay for hours and this is where video, as edited slices of time-space comes into its own as a research tool.

Life on Video, Life Online Skateboarding happens in the moment of execution, when the skateboarder executes a trick or series of tricks (line) at a spot. There is no set time, no schedule. This moment is also – more often than not given the proliferation of recording devices – captured and circulated digitally. As a bodily performance, skateboarding gives preference to the non-representational aspects of the urban experience. In other words, it privileges the ways the body, on a wooden deck and urethane wheels, moves through the urban landscape. In the case of spots, the body halts at a particular urban assemblage for hours, sometimes over many days, to capture a trick or line. However, capturing this movement is an exercise in representation, in turning that bodily experience into an aesthetic experience to be circulated and consumed as video clips and still images. In this book I draw heavily on skate video for the material analysed. This book started out as a more conventional spatial ethnography of skate spots in Asia. Between 2014-2019, I researched spots in cities throughout Asia, including several repeat journeys to particular cities and spots, and some opportunist ethnography on the side lines of other projects. I skated, took photos, chatted to skaters, made short videos, toyed around with digital maps. I shared these with other skaters, filmers and photographers as conversation starters about different spots. Frequently, when asking questions I would be directed back to skate videos. It became difficult to ignore the wealth of material already in skate video that was capturing, more or less, exactly what I was seeking. Skate video is ‘a language in which I am fluent’, to evoke Ulin once again (2015: 25) through 30 plus years of my own consumption, emulation, and celebration of the form. As research for the book went on, skate video moved to the forefront of analysis by offering scale. It was clear that in-person observation of skate spots has its limits, especially beyond a single city. There is too much ground to cover. Too many urban landscapes. I wanted to be able to explore more of the map than I could reach in person. In the end the ethnographic content I generated myself eased into the background, it helps verify and redirect, and it will appear from time to time in the rest of the book.

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Unlike many other mediums, what is captured on skate video is, more or less, what one observes at a skate session. Granted, it is edited and curated, and there is much activity that remains outside the frame. However, activity outside the frame can be gleaned from my time spent in-person in skate spots from Kathmandu to Tokyo and by the fact that skate sessions don’t vary a great deal across time and space. Furthermore, unlike ethnographic notes (or photographs and videos) these vignettes are almost all in the public domain. To put it blandly, the data is open access. It is also shared, rapidly and constantly. Skate videos maintain a strong sense of authenticity in skate culture (Borden 2019; O’Connor, 2020: ch 6; Wheaton & Beal, 2003). As such, video constitutes skateboarding’s currency. Video footage is compiled into ‘parts’ and remain the standard mechanism for most skateboarders, filmers, editors, and marketing personnel to earn a living. Livelihoods depend on this; on seconds and – if skaters get lucky – minutes of footage that can be circulated and consumed by skaters all over the world. Retuning to Snyder: [t]he act itself, in the moment, is def iant and illegal, while the document of the performance is a commodity that can be purchased by other members of the subculture. As a result, products […] and large sums of money, for subculturalists and corporatists alike, are generated from this performance of illegal activity in public space (2017: 204-205).

Skate video is thus both authentic but also generative of profit, usually indirectly given most video is no longer sold but available for free. I agree with Sean Dinces’ two arguments in favour of the use of video in analysing skateboarding. One, skate videos ‘have a high level of relevance for skateboarders themselves, and thus that they offer historians an archive of material that has enjoyed a high level of circulation within skateboarding subcultures’, and two, ‘skateboarding is not always easy to watch in spontaneous, realtime environments’ (2011: 1516). Video, therefore, ‘has considerable power in crafting a cultural identity for the activity’ and ‘provide(s) an especially vibrant historical record of how the range of these identities has changed over time’ (2011: 1516). Furthermore, as Dwayne Dixon notes, skate videos have an ethnographic quality. He writes, ‘skaters carefully accumulate a folio of visual documents that will continue to do particular kinds of definitive and signifying work once put into circulation; much like ethnographic writing, they hope to express the ineffable through the concrete’ (2011, n.p). Videos are objects amenable to ethnographic analysis while also being exercises in an ethnography of sorts, likely unintended, by the skaters, filmers and

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fixers. 4 Skate video, behind the scenes footage or rough cuts, photographs and clips are like ethnographic vignettes of space-time. While Instagram and other social media is challenging the cultural primary of video parts (Dupont, 2020), video parts still hold the strongest cultural capital. Brazilian pro-skater Carlos Ribeiro expresses this from a skater’s perspective in a 2019 interview published in Thrasher Magazine: I think [video] parts are really, really important and I think that’s why I dedicate myself to film parts […] I feel like one or two parts a year is good. It’s amazing if you can put out more […] If you can keep going and putting out parts every few years that’s good. A good example is [Brazilian pro-skater] Rodrigo Tx [Teixeira]. He for sure has more than 20 parts and is still putting out stuff! Putting out parts every year makes you progress. It makes you skate better or think different, like, In this part I want to do this or do different tricks. I feel like that’s part of your progression and if you stop doing that you’re gonna [sic] get stuck. I dedicate my life to video parts. (Bowman, 2019, n.p.)

Skate video is the consumable commodity of skateboarding, and this drives Ribeiro to produce one or two in a year. With an absence of dialogue or plot, consumption of skate video transcends ethnic, gender and linguistic boundaries. Sound is also deeply evocative; urethane wheels on cement and tiles, steel trucks grinding along a concrete ledge, the distinctive ‘pop’ of the tail of the skateboard hitting solid ground before the skater and board launch into the air (see Maier, 2016). Most videos have music soundtracks; however, the noise of skateboarding is always audible. Every week scores of professional and amateur videos of skateboarding filmed in Asia are uploaded online, while thousands more short clips are posted on Instagram and other social media platforms. Older footage from DVDs and VHS tapes are available online. This visual archive records infrastructure, investment, property booms and busts, the endless draw of Asia’s cities for skateboarders and the local uptake of skateboarding. With emerging consumer markets in Asia also being targeted for the sale of skate products and products endorsed by well-known skateboarders, the search for spots in Asia propels – and is propelled by – multiple drivers of 4 The language of ethnography is rarely used in the culture itself, however Russian skater, photographer and translator Kiril Korobov, who features in Chapters 5 and 6, has spoken of skateboarding and skate video as an ethnographic practice. See for example, Down the Volga (Wallner, 2019).

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the skate industry. Consumers of skate culture may never have set foot in the featured cities, but they have seen these urban landscapes thousands of times as the setting for skateboarders to perform manoeuvres (tricks) or a series of manoeuvres (lines) followed by a filmer and/or photographer. The archive of skate video is enormous and underutilized. It is striking to read laments by scholars of Asian cities on the insufficient scholarly attention to alternative ways of imagining or utilizing urban space, yet to see no mention of skateboarding in their analysis. This is even more striking in cities crammed with skaters for much of the year. For instance, in their introduction to the edited collection Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture, Kloet and Scheen call for scholars to ‘seriously engage with the rapid circulation of imaginations of the Chinese city’, imaginations they contend ‘are not just mere reflections of a material reality, mirroring the assumed actual cityscape; rather, they are forces that both display and construct’ (2013: 13). De Kloet and Scheen urge for a focus on art and popular culture (graffiti features in the collection, for example, but not skateboarding). Despite this, scholars interested in the ways cities in China – and Asia more generally – appear in art and popular culture have paid limited attention to skate video. While certainly not high art, skate video reflects and constructs imaginaries about contemporary Asian cities and direct the ways millions of skateboarders ‘construct’ Asia more generally. It is ethnographic in feel, subjective in authorship, voyeuristic at times. Skate video also has an audience within Asia among the burgeoning community of skateboarders in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. Skate videos depicting Asia’s cities can be arranged into three broad types. First is the conventional video ‘part’, usually focused on footage of one skater accumulated over time. A three- to four-minute video part can contain 20 to 50 tricks or lines and might span 15 or 25 locations. This may be released as a stand-alone part (more common in a streaming era) or compiled with parts from other skateboarders and released a ‘full length’ video (more common in a VHS and DVD era). Asia’s urban landscapes could feature as 5 or 10 or 15 of those locations. These video parts are not framed as trips to a particular Asian country or city; they are framed as the best skateboarding by a particular skateboarder or team. And the best skateboarding needs the best spots. Second are the ‘rough cuts’ and behind-the-scenes footage of conventional parts. Rough cuts show skate parts with less editing than the final version, often without music, and it is in these longer parts that encounters with authorities and the public are given much more screen time. Third are videos featuring skateboarders travelling to cities, countries and

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regions in Asia to discover spots or skate already known spots. In these videos the city is a feature, there are place-based images of urban life, inter-cultural encounters and usually narration by the travelling skateboarders. The latter feature heavily in this book, especially in Chapters 4-6. For such bodily practice, skateboarding has an extraordinarily rich digital existence, partly because skateboarding has no fixed arena or central organization, no association or league owns footage or broadcast rights. Further, as video and image are the outcome of the act, digital technology has transformed the ways skateboarding is created, consumed, and the ways knowledge of spots is shared. Spots are represented visually on websites, mapping software, mobile phone apps and other forms of peer-to-peer circulation. Segah Sak points out the mutually constitutive relationships between the digital and the spatial, arguing that: […] there is social production within the digital realm with respect to relationships among people, and between people and their physical and digital environment. The digital realm, involving collective experiences and being precisely socially produced, inherits the attributes of space (2016: 62).

Crucial here is blurring the binaries between real and virtual, online and offline. Similar is Joshua Bluteau’s ‘immersive cohabitation’ approach, which does not try to separate online and offline worlds but rather conceptualizes space ‘as a single blended postdigital field’ enabling ‘the researcher to exist within this landscape as their informants do’ (2019: 3-4). In this way, digital space is bound up in social, material and political space; in social life (Duggan, 2017). Samuel Kinsley argues that the split between the real and the virtual ‘hide the material bases of contemporary sociotechnical forms of life’ (2013: 550). Crucially, the digital is not limited to what takes place ‘on screen’ and is embedded in all kinds of objects from banking to motion sensors to surveillance equipment to messaging through cell phones (Bratton, 2016; Kirschenbaum, 2008). In discussing the relationships between the digital and the geographic, Ash et al. (2018) suggest that ‘spatial media mediate social encounters within spaces and provide different ways to know and navigate locales […] Importantly, they do so in situ, on-the-move and in real-time, augmenting a whole series of activities such as shopping, wayfinding, sightseeing, and protesting’ (2018: 32). To this I would add skateboarding. They add that spatial media ‘alter the traditional basis of knowledge politics because they transform the nature of expertise in terms of who can generate spatial data’ (2018: 33). This last point epitomizes the

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digital cartographies of skate spots. Knowledge of skate spots narrate urban landscapes and entire cities from the skater gaze. Digital tools enable in-situ access to spots, including mobile phone apps that locate spots as skaters move through space and maps that include images of spots, information about security, and best times of the day to skate, discussed further in Chapter 3.

Conclusion Spots are essential to skateboarding at all levels. Spots are unintended – glitches in the machine. Progression and livelihoods in skateboarding depend upon the ability to find and utilize spots in the ‘natural’ urban landscape, as opposed to the artificial landscape of the designated skatepark. Spots flaunt attempts to control the mobility of skateboarders and thus reproduce the ethos of the culture. Skate video is a vital, rich and underutilized archive of skateboarding as a performance, of the search for spots, and of the urban landscapes that skaters desire, covet, and in many cases, conquer. Spots are always in the frame. Consuming hours of skate video also means consuming hours of urban landscapes, generating knowledge of cities and their spots – their surfaces and objects – in the process. As skateboarding’s popularity has grown and the mechanisms for capturing and consuming skateboarding have proliferated rapidly through digital technology, more spots need to be found. The search for spots is connected to the growth of urban and transport infrastructure. Cities investing in new infrastructure produce new spots, and this has brought skateboarders and filmers to Asia in a constant flow for the last two decades. When viewed over time, skate video documents urban change as growth, decline and revival, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in China.

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Chasing the Concrete Dragon Abstract Chapter 3, Chasing the Concrete Dragon, focuses on the centrality of China’s cities in skate culture. China’s rapid urban growth has produced ‘endless spots’ and are considered sites of miraculous productivity for skaters and filmers. Desire for China’s urban landscapes goes beyond the material assemblages to the tolerance of street skateboarding by authorities and the public. Thus China’s cities are places for concentrated skateboarding activity, amassing or ‘stacking’ footage to be edited into skate videos and consumed worldwide. China has emerged as an important market for skate goods, footwear and apparel, bringing skate teams to different cities in a constant cycle and creating opportunities for Chinese nationals to have careers in skateboarding. Keywords: skateboarding, China, skate video, encounters, cities, consumption

This chapter is about the centrality of China’s cities to skateboarding as a performance, a culture, and an industry as seen through skate video. As discussed in Chapter 2, spots don’t last forever. They disappear in the degeneration and regeneration of urban space. Spots are rendered un-skateable by defensive architecture, surveillance technology, security guards and police, property owners and even vigilante citizens. At the same time, new spots are constantly created. More skateboarders, more livelihood opportunities, more desire for exposure means more spots need to be found. Enter China, the land of ‘endless spots’. The speed of China’s urban development, the ceaseless ‘Concrete Dragon’ (Campanella, 2008) astounds and confounds. This speed generates anxiety and wonder. For skateboarders it produces hundreds of spots, assemblages of surfaces and objects in the urban landscape. Taking skate video as an alternative urban archive, I explore the centrality of China’s cities to skateboarding and make four arguments. First, China’s cities are

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463723138_ch03

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widely perceived to have the best spots to skate anywhere, driven by the ‘discovery’ of Shenzhen by skateboarders and filmers in the early 2000s. China’s urban landscapes proliferate so rapidly that there is a sense of infinite spots, infinite urban growth, infinite development. Some spots may disappear or are rendered unskateable, but there are thousands more waiting to be discovered, particularly as urban landscapes are churned out at breath-taking speeds (Chien & Woodworth, 2018). As more skateboarders come to China to produce footage, this footage – captured and circulated digitally – draws more skateboarders and filmers. At the same time local skate communities continue to grow in China, global brands have established China-based skate teams, and China has become a key market for skate goods. While some skate trips to China focus on branding and marketing, most trips are focused on accumulating footage, enrolling China’s urban landscapes (though perhaps not China itself) into skate culture. Second, skate videos re-map China’s cities through the skater gaze, the ‘below the knees method’ (Vivoni, 2009) discussed in Chapter 2. This non-expert knowledge of urban landscapes is circulated, rapidly, to millions of people. Every week scores of professional and amateur videos of skateboarding filmed in China’s cities are uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo (as well as Weibo and Tencent) and dedicated skateboarding platforms including the bilingual Skate Here which re-posts videos from other platforms and produces its own content, including instructional videos in Mandarin. There are external, non-Chinese, audiences for these images in the heartlands of skate culture: the US, Europe, Australia, Brazil. At the same time, the gaze is also inward. Chinese fixers, guides, translators, brand distributors, and skateboarders maintain knowledge of the best spots for themselves and for visitors. Chinese skaters are becoming more mobile, travelling to different cities within China and other countries too. For brands with a foothold in the China market, having a skate team that travels and produces footage helps push genuine products over fakes in the domestic market (shanzhai, see Yang, 2016). Third, the search for spots indexes urban development within China. The best-planned landscapes, almost all in so-called ‘entrepreneurial cities’ (Shin, 2009), sit atop the index: Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Shenzhen. Emerging cities that provide new opportunities to skate are located a little further down: Changsha, Forshan, Qingdao, Xi’an. These are followed by new frontiers: Lhasa, Ordos, even Urumqi. Spots are produced through conventional drivers of economic development and the associated pull factors that draw capital, migrants, and necessitate master-planning, new

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infrastructure, showpiece architecture and demolition and displacement (Tynen, 2019). Fourth, the convergence of skateboarders in China’s cities create encounters between skateboarders and authority, skateboarders and the public, and skateboarders with each other. Performing bodies (on wheels) encounter spectating bodies, hostile bodies, bodies trying to get out of the way, and other performing bodies, other skateboarders. As skateboarders roll through the urban landscape and stop at spots, they generate encounters captured on film. In spots popular with foreign skateboarders these encounters may be replete with cultural stereotypes, inappropriate behaviour (most skateboarders are trespassing and damaging property to begin with) and misunderstandings, yet at the same time they can be mutually playful, enjoyable. This chapter has four sections. The following section discusses early appearances of China in skate video. The second section explores the ‘discovery’ of China’s urban landscapes by foreign skate filmers in the early 2000s through Shenzhen. The third section follows the skateboarding trails to other cities that are well-known, such as Shanghai, and lesser known, such as Ordos. The final section discusses the perception of China’s urban culture as permissive and tolerant towards skateboarding, especially when compared to the US.

From Chinese Consumers to Consuming China China first appears in skateboarding video in the early 1990s. There is a short section in the 1994 Powell Skateboards video Suburban Diners (Caballero/ Powell, 1994), documenting pro-skaters Steve Caballero (US) and Danny Wainwright (UK) in China. The footage captures the first visit to China by a pro-skater, Caballero, with Wainwright, an amateur at the time. Powell had set up a small distribution centre in Qinhuangdao in Hebei Province, a port city east of Beijing, in 1991. As Powell founder George Powell recalls in a recent interview: We were the only game in town, but there was no game. China was an opportunity that came up in the late 1980s […] our team was at the peak of its fame – the Bones Brigade – in 1987, 1988…skateboarding was booming. It had spread to Europe, and to South America, Mexico, Canada, so we fully expected the Chinese to be interested in it too (in Nichols & Charnoski, 2019; see also Sedo, 2010).

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By the time Powell sent Caballero in 1994 he was the last member of the famed Bones Brigade still with the brand, which had been hollowed out as street skating took off and smaller brands emerged in the industry, some of which – such as Blind, Plan B and World Industries – aggressively mocked Powell (then Powell Peralta) (see Hill, 2007). In 1994, when the Powell team toured China, the brand was no longer cool and was trying to find new consumers. The demo footage in Suburban Diners captures Caballero, Wainwright and some local skaters in an open concrete plaza with some wooden launch ramps. Wooden launch ramps were considered passé in street skateboarding by that point but are useful for constructing a makeshift skatepark. There were also a few wooden boxes with steel rails attached. At one point Caballero does a backside crooked grind on what looks like a ping-pong table. The purpose-built spot is meagre but the crowd is huge. The footage includes Caballero and Wainwright sightseeing in Tiananmen Square, shots of temples, fleets of citizens riding bicycles, and local Chinese skateboarders. This visit to China was to promote skateboarding and not, as in later decades, to find spots. The point at that time was promoting consumption of skateboarding in China, rather than consumption of (urban) China as spots and in skate video. Suburban Diners doesn’t feature street skating outside the demo. It’s as if it doesn’t even cross the skaters’ minds to step out into the city, to cross an invisible line dividing the space where skating is permissible from where it might get them into trouble. The urban landscape is a separate space ‘out there’ and inaccessible. The only glimpses of the streets come in the additional footage edited into the segment, much of which looks like it is shot from a moving car. Though there seems to be more to it than this. The invisible line was also a line in time. In these sequences shot outside the demo, China’s urban landscape looks worn, the concrete rough, the ground dusty, the cars old, the equipment and fashion behind. It is unlikely to yield worthwhile spots because it is at some earlier stage of urban development, or perhaps the urban landscape is just unfathomable, unrecognizable. Within a decade, China’s urban landscapes would be imagined and circulated as dreamscapes; heaven on earth for skateboarders. Plazas in Shenzhen would be known across the world by improvised nicknames such as ‘Horse Park’ and ‘Deng Xiaoping’, a skate spot in Shanghai would be named after one in Philadelphia (‘LP’ short for Love Park’. Notably the Chinese LP would eventually get shut down for skateboarding just as with its namesake Love Park), and cities like Guangzhou would be described as an ‘El-dorado’

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for skateboarders (Francisco, 2016). The desire, the dreamscape, is typified by Canadian pro-skater Jordan Hoffart in a 2019 interview about his career: Around that time [2013] was the time I discovered China. It’s the best, slash, worst thing that can ever happen to you, because coming back from China you are not motivated […] you don’t want to skate anything. China is too fucking good! You don’t get kicked out anywhere, marble heaven, ledges, manny pads for days […] hubbas. I skated a lot of hubbas […] I’d love to go back. During [filming for] both those [video] parts I went to China multiple times (in Bagley et al., 2019a).

China’s cities have become central to the performance, capture, circulation and consumption of skateboarding across the globe. Consumers of skate culture may have never been to China, but they have watched, visualized, and dreamt of China’s urban landscapes thousands of times. Indeed, so common are the images of skate spots in China that many filmers/photographers are traveling greater distances within China to find new spots or searching for the ‘next’ China in hyper-modern urban landscapes such as Dubai (Evans, 2015, see Chapter 4) or Taiwan (see Chapter 7) or by returning with fresh eyes to Europe (see Alv and Ström, 2018; Tonnesen, 2018). In 2018, pro-skaters from Etnies footwear travelled to China for a series of demos and to capture some footage. They documented the trip in the 15-minute Ride the Tao video (Sherman, 2018). The tour came following the release of their acclaimed full-length skate video Album (Manzoori, 2018), which also featured footage from China. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about a skate team visiting China for a mixture of promotion and capturing footage in 2018. I mention Ride the Tao here to show the ways a tour to China is presented on screen 24 years after Powell’s Suburban Diners. All the skaters, four Americans and one English (Chris Joslin, Trevor McClung, Nick Garcia, Ryan Lay (all US), Barney Page (UK)), have been to China multiple times. There is no wide-eyed wonder on this trip. This is routine, uneventful. The skaters travel to Nanjing, Xi’an and Changsha. These cities were enrolled in the skaters’ map of China later than Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen but are now big enough blobs in the imaginary map to constitute an entire China trip. In each city the skaters are received by local skate shops. These shops host autograph signings and demos at skateparks and at makeshift setups. Crowds at the demos are decked out in the latest skate fashion. They hold cell phones to capture the skaters as they throw themselves off obstacles. The final demo in Changsha is set up on flat ground in front of a shopping mall.

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In the background an enormous screen hovers on the side of the building, playing what look like advertisements for luxury goods. This is, obviously, a dramatically different urban aesthetic to the bare concrete plaza where the Powell skaters performed in 1994. Unlike Suburban Diners wherein the streets seemed bounded by an invisible line preventing the skaters from rolling into the urban landscape proper, the Etnies team relish the chance to explore the shredscape. Most of the spots they find are expansive parks and plazas, with few people to be seen and seemingly endless marble and wooden ledges, embankments and stairs. There are exceptions, such as a night session at a 10-stair in Nanjing – during which Chris Joslin effortlessly switch frontside kickflips and then fakie kickflips a set of ten stairs – and a glass pyramid sculpture outside yet another mall, which Nick Garcia manages to run up and ride down before the police arrive. There are plenty of encounters. In Nanjing the skaters begin skating at a series of black marble banks angled around raised garden beds in a plaza fronting a mall and residential complex. After a while, a security guard comes to evict them. One of the team, Trevor McClung, narrates the encounter over footage of the session. McClung says, ‘the security guard came to kick us out 5 or 6 times, maybe…He would leave and come back, leave and come back. I think they tried to pay him one time’. At this point a few of the local skaters/fixers can be seen trying to press money into the security guard’s hands, though he refuses holding up empty palms. McClung continues, ‘he was actually a really cool security guard though’, and as the session ends several of the skaters give him a high-five, a handshake and even a bow as they leave. There are other moments too. Barney Page challenges a female store clerk to a fencing bout with wooden souvenir swords, which she accepts. The skaters eat street food, give watching kids a high-five, Joslin crowd surfs after kickflipping a huge obstacle at the Changsha demo. In one of their hotels, Page puts on a shower cap and skates through the hall in his underwear. He does a wallie on the hotel corridor wall (riding along the surface of the wall), ollies a fire blanket capsule and finishes with a nollie kickflip before running back up the hall. The skaters seem comfortable in China. They are comfortable with the streets, the spots, the food, even the police and security guards. Throughout McClung’s narration several references are made to a mysterious ‘they’. For instance, ‘they told us there was this sick spot on the other side of this bridge’, ‘we just ate some big meal and they said there was a gap down the street’, ‘they had these BMX ramps over a car’. The ‘they’ are likely local distributors, skate shop owners, translators and fixers, who don’t

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appear in the video except on the edges of the frame and in the credits. This is common, but I mention this here to suggest that for skaters visiting China in the late 2010s, the experience is one of being led. The spots are scouted, transport is arranged, restaurants are picked, demos and signings arranged. For the skaters it is routine. They show up, skate, drink, eat. This is different to skaters seeking out new frontiers, spots in lands untouched by skateboarding in Chapters 5 and 6, which demands much more independence. Trips to China are just a regular part of being a pro-skater. This is not to suggest that these trips are a blur of marble, steel and dumplings, rather I want to suggest that in 25 years, China’s urban landscapes are central to the lives of skateboarders, filmers and photographers and to the material produced and circulated in the culture. They have become routine. Changsha and Nanjing would not be part of an Etnies tour, however, if it weren’t for Shenzhen, the gateway to China’s cities for skateboarders.

Skateboarding at Shenzhen Speed In a China-focused episode of the documentary series Loveletters to Skateboarding (Nichols & Charnoski, 2019), Chinese skateboarder Yuan Fei divides the history of skateboarding in China into two distinct periods, pre-2000 and post-2000. Pre-2000 Chinese skateboarders struggled to buy equipment, to access high-quality skateboarding in video and magazines, and to shake the perception among peers and parents that it was a childish pastime. Post-2000 signalled an entirely new era during which international skateboard teams began to descend on China to produce footage. Almost all this initial traffic was through Shenzhen. Shenzhen’s plazas, ledges, and parks are recognizable by skateboarders across the world. Not only that, they can usually be named, located on maps, and related to the scores, possibly hundreds, of skate videos with footage of the city. (A third era appears to be well underway, characterized by intensive state involvement in skateboarding in the lead up to the postponed 2020 Olympics). Anthony Claravall, a filmer and photographer from New York, is widely credited with connecting international skateboarders with China. In the early 2000s Claravall worked for 411 Video Magazine, a monthly magazinestyle video of skateboard footage that lasted from 1993-2005, when it was surpassed by online streaming. In its heyday, 411 was extremely influential on skateboarding culture around the world. Monthly output required a lot of footage. With a reputation as a ‘nomad filmer’ (Michna, 2019), Claravall began to organise trips to Asia to find new spots to meet the increasing

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demand. In Loveletters he describes first visiting China through connections in Hong Kong: Hong Kong has always been the same. That’s where I went first. Shenzhen right across the border was a fishing village […] with the changes Deng Xiaoping affected, Shenzhen became the gateway to the West, it became a hub […] it ended up having really good ledges and plazas and that’s why we went. And from there I got to see Beijing and Shanghai radically transform from, you know, really low buildings – dusty streets, nothing to skate – to the skate mecca that it is today.

Eric Lai, a writer for the pan-Asian skateboard magazine, Wandering, offers his own take on this period. In the same documentary he talks about Claravall bringing skateboarders to Shenzhen in the early 2000s, [T]he only thing they [foreign skateboarders] said was, “we’ve never seen that many marble spots before, or ever”. Maybe two years later teams started to come. Team after team, you know, every week. You can name every major skateboard company they all have been to Shenzhen.

Just as Shenzhen began the experiment of opening China after being founded as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1980 – China’s ‘window to the world’ (O’Donnell et al., 2017: 4) – by the early 2000s it served as the gateway for skateboarders and filmers. In the introduction to the collection Learning from Shenzhen, O’Donnell, Wong and Bach note that 30 years after being declared an SEZ, ‘Shenzhen had become a poster city for the success of official planning and policies. Model leaders, model workers, model villages, model industries, and model governance are evident everywhere in Shenzhen today’ (2017: 3). These model developments produce ‘perfect’ skate spots. While spots were disappearing from US cities, spots were being created all the time in Shenzhen, especially in the central business district, ‘a veritable museum of futuristic and outlandish skyscraper styles’ (Bach, 2011: 110). The landscape transformed year-to-year, month-to-month and the city’s spots seem impossible to exhaust. The popular concept of ‘Shenzhen Speed’ to refer to the pace of construction feeds the mythology of endless spots. Weiwen Huang writes that ‘Shenzhen Speed’ comes from an intensification of space-time compression, the idea of a city exploding from nothing, that ‘has not only influenced the scale and pace of urbanization throughout China but also been promoted as a model for other developing cities to emulate’ (2017: 66). The city’s growth is mythical, miraculous. Jonathan Bach writes, ‘[t]he

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Image 3.1 Rodrigo Petersen’s name on the famous Deng Xiaoping billboard in Shenzhen from Give Me My Money Chico

Claravall, 2010; used with permission

city’s mythic quality lies in its meteoric ascent from villages and fields to a top-ranked world city in size and infrastructure, high technology and skilled manufacturing, airfreight and container ports’ (2010: 422). The imaginary of a city driven by a miraculous productivity that draws investors, migrants, and start-ups also draws skateboarders and filmers. This transformation is attributed to Deng Xiaoping; even Claravall identifies Deng in the quote above. In a perfect spatial alignment, one of Shenzhen’s most popular skate spots is a plaza underneath a huge billboard of Deng transposed on an image of the city’s skyline. The plaza flows in an L-shape into another famous spot, Wave Ledge Park with iconic marble ledges shaped like waves that have appeared in hundreds of skate videos. For skateboarders the spot is nicknamed ‘Deng Xiaoping’ or just ‘Xiaoping’. As a gesture to how famous this spot is in the skateboarding world, the introduction to Brazilian skateboarder Rodrigo Petersen’s part in the LRG Clothing video Give Me My Money Chico (Claravall, 2010) features the billboard and Deng’s face, though the writing is altered to read ‘Rodrigo Petersen’ (see Image 3.1). Deng, Rodrigo, the marble ledges, Shenzhen, are all part of the same assemblage; all gathered together (MacFarlane, 2011) at the

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Image 3.2 Rodrigo Petersen skating the famous wave ledge in Shenzhen in Give Me My Money Chico

Claravall, 2010; screenshot; used with permission

spot, captured on video and circulated around the world as a morphology of images moored to this space (see Image 3.2). It is not just the landscape, but the miraculous productivity of the city itself, and China more generally, that draws skateboarders. It is a way to speed up the process of accumulating clips and making video parts. US professional skateboarder Chris Joslin filmed an entire three-minute part in twelve days, entitled 12 Days in China (Camarillo, Hannon & Zhao, 2015). A three-minute part of such quality would usually be compiled over a year or two. The idea that Joslin, a skilled and prolific skateboarder to be sure, could gather such a volume of high-quality footage in just twelve days evokes this miraculous productivity, this speed. Claravall expands the phenomenon in Loveletters: All those videos over the last ten years have all had clips in China because [skateboarders] are like: I need to film, let’s go to China. We can come here, I can bring a skater, we can go for a week and a half or ten days, people can come home with two minutes of footage. That’s really what it is. The whole thing [China] is a skateboard bootcamp. You come out

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here and, you know what I’m saying, you can’t talk to the girls, there’s no corner bar, all there was [were] ledge plazas; so that’s what you did.

This sentiment is echoed in a post on the Quarter Snacks blog; a US site devoted to local skate spots around the word. The post, entitled ‘Skate Spot Porn: Shenzhen, China’ (Quarter Snacks, 2012) features photographs of the best-known spots in Shenzhen and their names/skateboarding nicknames; the Children’s Museum, Horse Park, Wave Park, and comments: Shenzhen looks like a real-life Blade Runner version of Los Angeles, and its sprawl has left a plaza below every single building. Apparently, marble and granite are cheap and abundant for Chinese developers (a few sources claimed they were even less expensive than plywood), and there’s no shortage of cranes in the sky, so Shenzhen’s collection of spots does not seem even close to being finished. Sidewalks in Shenzhen are marble. And when they’re not marble, they’re made from something equally smooth. If you’re a team manager, or generally responsible for the production of a skate video, Shenzhen is the perfect beast of a skate trip city. There is nothing to do there besides skate. (brackets in original).

Shenzhen encourages monasticism for the degenerate athlete. Skateboarding is portrayed (self-portrayed and externally portrayed) as a hard-charging, fast-food-eating, heavy-drinking, hard-partying culture. Skate video emphases these aspects; they are a crucial part of the culture’s appeal. Until recently, clean-cut skateboarders who trained, observed good nutritional habits, or adopted sobriety were marginalized (unless sobriety came following years of self-abuse). Indeed, once skateboarding was included in the Olympics a popular joke was that there would be no eligible skateboarders that could pass recreational drug-testing. For skateboarders who have had periods away from producing footage – attributed to the fast life, injuries, aging – Shenzhen (and China more generally) has become a place to re-focus, launch a comeback, reclaim a career away from the distractions of home. The exemplar being Guy Mariano’s parts in Lakai’s Fully Flared (Evans, Jonze & Wiencheque, 2007) and Girl/Chocolate’s Pretty Sweet (Evans, Jonze & Wiencheque, 2012) (see Pelling, 2012). In a 2014 interview cataloguing Mariano’s career through his appearances in skate videos as part of the series Life on Video (Berrics, 2014), Mariano discusses this period, ‘you get to China and everything’s open, marble ledges going up and down and all this stuff. It’s like a playground, man. And it really brings you back to [being] a kid again’. As Claravall noted above, there are few ‘adult’ distractions.

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The monasticism of Shenzhen helps skaters to rediscover the love for their craft, their ludic child selves. Nothing but the joy of skateboarding again in an out-of-scale playground, an unintended dreamscape, that is growing (still) and morphing at rapid speed, at Shenzhen speed, leaving spots by their hundreds in its wake. Vice Media’s Vice International Series features an episode on skateboarding hosted by Chinese pro-skater and Shenzhen local Wang Huifeng, who guides viewers around Shenzhen’s spots (Yu, 2017). The episode is notable as it is all in Mandarin, with subtitles, and Chinese skaters are at the centre of the story. He starts at Deng Xiaoping, and on arrival sees two skaters, men in their 20s, and approaches them. They look like beginners, their stance on the board is awkward and they stop skating once the camera rolls. They ask Wang about the camera following him, and Wang turns to the camera and playfully teases their newness to skate culture (translated in the subtitles as ‘he’s a rookie’). The spots that drew skaters from across the world are also woven into local skate culture, and as more and more Chinese take up skateboarding, they know to come to its famous plazas, even if their skill level means they just utilize the smooth, flat ground rather than the ledges and other obstacles. For them it is important to be where the scene is, in the spots that matter to the culture. Later in the video, Wang is meticulously rubbing wax onto one of the famous marble wave ledges so that it will slide even better. He then attempts a frontside boardslide along the ledge, riding the wave up and down, trying to maintain speed. The video shows several attempts. Wang waxes it again. Passers-by stop to look at what he is doing. In a voice-over Wang explains that he is not a competition skater, but a street skater who shoots videos and shares them online. These have to be shot in the streets, not the skatepark, he adds. Wang keeps moving around the city. The same cultural ethos discussed in Chapter 2 is mirrored in Wang’s description of his skateboarding life, reputations are made at spots naturally occurring in the urban landscape. He repeats this later in the video, expressing frustration with the government pushing skateboarders to skateparks and competitions, and turning it into an organized activity. He skates in the streets, even if he has to do it alone. The final scenes are shot at a skate demo at Taigucang wharf in Guangzhou, an industrial heritage precinct (misidentified as Shenzhen in the video). The demo features skaters from China and Hong Kong sponsored by the footwear company Vans, whose logo and checkboard motif plaster the converted warehouses on the riverfront and the temporary skatepark, along with graffiti murals (pieces) on some of the ramps created for the

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event. There is a large crowd, mostly young, female and male, many in skate fashion; Thrasher t-shirts are ubiquitous. The skate demo appears here in its standard form, though this version is domesticated featuring Chinese and China-based skaters rather than visiting professionals. There is a large market for skateboard and skate-affiliated brands in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, and plenty of skaters too, ranging from professionals like Wang and the other demo participants, to (at least some) the crowd at Taigucang, to the beginners at Deng Xiaoping. This miraculous city, where productivity is assured because of the proliferation of spots and minimal distractions, also has a community of skilled skaters, often bypassed in the clamour to stack footage. Shenzhen (and Guangzhou and Forshan) draw skaters from around the world for its shredscape, the spots produced and assembled in the built environment growing at a remarkable speed; at Shenzhen speed.

Endless Spots, New Cartographies The 2015 skate video We Are Blood (Evans, 2015) chronicles the travels of a group of professional skateboarders and the bonds they form along the way. Over 90 minutes long with an additional hour of extras, We Are Blood traverses the global reach of skateboarding and has a long section dedicated to China (twelve minutes). At the start of the section, US professional skateboarder Paul Rodriguez speaks over shots of construction cranes, scaffolding, gleaming skyscrapers, showpiece architecture, concrete apartment blocks, busy laneways, street vendors and crowded streets. Rodriguez’s voiceover begins: ‘[Hu]man’s appetite for expansion is unstoppable. And in this part of the world they are showing no sign of slowing down. For skateboarders that means one thing: a never-ending supply of skatespots’. In the Extras section, Australian professional skateboarder Shane O’Neill says, ‘there is never going to be a point where there’s no new spots anymore here in China’. This is the urban revolution that leaves scholars and journalists peddling awe-inspiring statistics; just viewed from a different angle, from below the knees. From the gateway of Shenzhen, the search for endless spots has brought skateboarders to different cities in China; to perfect urban landscapes such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Forshan, and Beijing to new urban frontiers, such as Ordos in Inner Mongolia and Lhasa in the Tibet SAR. In contrast to Shenzhen’s limited cultural and social attractions, Shanghai draws skaters for the spots but also for the lifestyle, and many end up staying on as long

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term ex-pats and/or returnees from the Chinese diaspora, in line with bigger trends of short and long term settlement in the city (Farrer, 2010; Xu & Wu, 2016). In Cities Surround the Countryside, Robin Visser argues that the cultural identity of Shanghai ‘eschews the national’ (in contrast to Beijing, which performs the national), and ‘it is produced for consumption by world citizens with whom Shanghai urbanites fully identify’ (2010: 175). She adds, ‘[p]ostsocialist Shanghai image-making, however, tends to reject its socialist history, remaining far more enamoured of the capitalist modernity that contaminated Shanghai’s treaty-port past’ (2010: 176-177). Consuming the city necessitates landscapes of dreams and desire, including creative and cultural industry (CCI) zones, repurposing former industrial sites (Zheng, 2011). These zones are often converted into commercial and consumer spaces, while retaining official classification as creative spaces. As Shenjing He writes: Under the rhetoric of creative city making, property-led redevelopment and culture-led redevelopment are tactically intertwined and widely practiced in Shanghai following the development of CCIs zones. Burgeoning CCIs zones not only stimulate the development of the ‘new economy’, but also prevalently trigger gentrif ication in the central city […] the creative city discourse subjoins the cultural and creative elements to the package and thus effectively attracts investors and gentrifiers. During this process, creativity and culture are commodified and capitalized by investors and developers in the property market (2019: 315).

While many of these zones produce social exclusions (Wang, 2009), the transformations to Shanghai’s urban landscape through these redevelopments produce endless spots. These spots are mapped on the website Shanghai Spots (Thorbeck, 2020). There are two elements of this website that deserve attention. The first is the map itself. Spots are continually added and updated, digitally mapping urban knowledge from below the knees. The map allows users to zoom into a part of the city and explore the spots – as numbered pins – categorized and colour coded by type: ledges, manuals, plazas, stars/ rail, bank/wallride, and other. There are almost 90 pins, in other words 90 spots. Users can then have the spatial data to a mapping app on their phone so they can find their way to the spot. Clicking on a pin gives an official or improvised name ‘Fuxing Park Ledge’ or ‘Wuyi Road long mellow curve down rail’; a photo of the spot usually without skaters; and information on the best time of the day to skate the spot, security information, and even

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Image 3.3 Shanghai Spot Map; note colour coded spot types and spot information at each pin

Source: Thorbeck, 2020; screenshot; used with permission

behavioural tips, all deepening the topology of place. Some examples from the site accessed in early 2020 include: 10: Mercedes Benz Ledges. Weekdays probably better, more security now. 20: Hongqiao Park. Weekdays when not crowded – be polite. 22: Wulumuqi Road Bump to Ledge. Nights, needs wax though. 26: The Center. The plaza is a bust but the ledge on the sidewalk is still skate-able. 35: Black Banks. Rumored to be gone now. 41: Pudong Black Ledge. By a restaurant so not during meal times. 49: Joy City Down Manual Pad. Weekdays. 58: Jing’An Sculpture Park. Quick bust anytime. 67: Zhongxing Road Out Ledges. Anytime.

These short labels contain knowledge of the built environment, the quality of the surfaces, the habits of human dwellers and protectors, and the changes to these interactions; the temporalities of these assemblages. There is loss too, the famous black banks are rumoured to be gone. The labels also suggest more straightforward spatial dynamics. For instance, the further away from main commercial, tourist and business areas, the more common the label ‘anytime’. At these spots there are no limitations on skating, no security guards and fewer people.

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The second element is the ‘spot feed’ where recent images of spots from social media accounts tagged with #shanghaiskatespot appear on the page (there are even instructions about getting around Chinese web restrictions for uploading photos). The feed is a fascinating real time hack of Shanghai. It has the kinds of images you might expect, such as a wide set of stairs, four high, with an expansive roll-up and roll-away underneath what looks like a brand-new building. The caption is simply: ‘new spot’. Another shows a large flat area with a marble pyramid around a monument. In the photo there is a worker cleaning it. The caption reads: ‘marble ground, marble hip’. In this way new parts of the city are discovered and enrolled. At some point they may make it onto the main map, likely when the site operators have a chance to inspect and verify the location. Most of these photos do not show skateboarding. They are simply the spots, the assemblages. It’s a kind of urban prospecting. It is different to say, mapping restaurants or markets. Restaurants are intended to be restaurants; markets are intended to be markets. It takes a specific gaze that cuts through the intended uses of the objects, obstacles and/or landscape to see their potential as spots, much like a prospector for precious metal might gaze at a desert or a bio prospector at a forest. There are unexpected photos too, promoting local skate brands and fashion brands. Nestled among the images showing a cement bump in the pavement or a new curved handrail are models with skateboards and expensive clothing, their boards unmarked, their wheels still white. Clearly skateboarding is on trend for those with the financial means. One of Shanghai’s most famous skate spots is a plaza nicknamed LP, after Love Park, an iconic skate spot in Philadelphia that was a mecca for skateboarders in the 1990s and early 2000s before being closed (Howell, 2005; Németh, 2006). Shanghai’s LP was the epicentre of the local skate scene, where Chinese nationals, overseas Chinese returnees, ex-pat skateboarders, and visiting skateboarders and filmers gathered to skate, connect, and fan out across the city. With the original Love Park no longer skateable, its physical form, an approximate assemblage, is reborn in China. To be clear, neither the original Love Park nor LP were built with the intention to be skated. Yet both have been appropriated by skateboarders for their similar assemblage of desirable surfaces and obstacles. LP and Shanghai feature heavily in skate videos, including Shanghai 5 (Lanceplaine, 2011), Something Sinister (Zhao, 2014) and Shen City Peaks (Frank, 2018), Head Count (Camarillo, 2019), and the Primitive skateboards’ Never (Hannon, 2018) and Encore (Hannon, 2019). In 2019 LP had become difficult to skate. Even Shanghai Spots declares it ‘officially a bust’. It still functions as a meeting place, but with scores of

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other spots around the city there are so many more spots, shutting down LP is a symbolic loss, but doesn’t reduce the appeal of Shanghai. Shanghai’s spots have become iconic too, circulated further and faster within the culture. For skaters, they are worth revisiting and battling to get footage, especially of what is known in skate culture as an ‘NBD’, a ‘never been done’. NBDs at/on iconic spots allow for easier comparison because the dimensions and attributes of the spot, the material components of the assemblage, are known within the culture; even for those who may not have visited the spot in person and stood next to it, rolled towards it, or felt the surface with their hands. Returning to the arguments made in the book, spots enrol particular urban landscapes and sometimes entire cites and even countries in a cartography that remaps Asia from below the knees. An iconic spot, or spots, in a particular city enrols that place, that patch of landscape deeper, with a greater volume and frequency of circulation. Skaters, especially skilled professional skaters, want to leave their mark at iconic spots. To illustrate I will discuss a ‘rough cut’ (or behind-the-scenes style) video, featuring Brazilian pro-skater Carlos Ribeiro in the series for Thrasher Magazine called Magnified (Hannon & Zhao, 2019). The video goes behind the scenes of a single image, Ribeiro’s switch backside tailslide on the long, tall, hubba (an angled ledge that follows the downward trajectory of a staircase) at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum (number 34 on the Shanghai Spot Map). The Science and Technology hubba has appeared in scores, possibly hundreds of skate videos. Ribeiro starts the segment in front of the museum building, towering in steel and glass, and in the background visitors to the museum come and go. He mentions that three years prior while filming for the LRG Clothing video 1947 (Camarillo, 2015), he attempted the same trick but was badly injured and was unable to skate for the rest of the trip. Returning determined to perform the trick and have it captured, Ribeiro rolls up a few times to the edge of the stairs and stops, admitting in the voiceover that, ‘I was scared as shit. I was shitting my pants for real’. The video shows his various attempts with only the ambient sound, no music, limited voiceover. He manages to get onto the hubba on the tail (the back part of the board) and jumps off. Then, a young boy, probably 7 or 8 years old, runs into the frame to see what Ribeiro is doing, oblivious to the filmers, the lighting set up, and the pack of skaters milling around the bottom of the staircase. He calls out something inaudible, no doubt curious about what is going on, it is a science museum after all. An adult (possibly his mother) runs into the frame to grab him and lead him away, saying ‘sorry, sorry’ in English. After a few more attempts a second boy wanders over and

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stops at the top of the stairs and gives Ribeiro a contemplative look. On the next attempt Ribeiro gets all the way to the bottom, almost landing it, and a cry of excitement rises off camera; suggesting a gallery of spectators have gathered to watch his attempt, some unexpected urban theatre. Another boy climbs onto the hubba itself from the bottom and starts to crawl up it. One of the skaters in the group, Trent McClung, runs over and picks him up and carries him off camera, to audible laughs and even some light applause. A few more attempts, another kid in the way, McClung leads this kid away gently by the hand. Ribeiro gets closer and the off-camera crowd rising in a single voice, cheering as he ollies onto the hubba and slides to the bottom, frustration as he falls off at the last second. A few more attempts. McClung applies more wax to the surface to help Ribeiro slide. Then he makes it. He rolls away and the other skaters run from off camera to celebrate and embrace Ribeiro. The crowd cheer and clap. Back on camera Ribeiro is relieved, he talks about redemption, and the clip ends. Ribiero is an incredible skater and in recent years has produced an extraordinary amount of footage. He could have tried that same trick on a similar spot, a similar assemblage somewhere else, in Lisbon or Barcelona or Los Angeles. The point, however, is to do it here, at this iconic spot, on this precise arrangement of surface, height, angle, and backdrop. A spot other skaters will instantly recognize when they see it on video and as still image. The trick also features in Ribeiro’s solo All For You video (Hannon, 2019), where it is shown twice, for a total of thirteen seconds. The rough-cut version extends the moment, it brings in the interactions with the public, the playful battle for use of the spot between Ribeiro and curious children, the impromptu viewing gallery that appeared for the session. For visitors to the museum, and other famous spots in Shanghai, these moments are common yet also random. On any given day there might be a filming session going on, usually unsanctioned, the result of which beams the little patch of landscape around the world for an entirely different audience – one uninterested in what is actually inside the museum. With so many spots in Shanghai and other eastern cities there is little need to travel further, however there is a desire to discover new urban frontiers for skateboarding; new shredscapes. Perhaps most evocative is Ordos in Inner Mongolia. Max Woodworth describes Ordos as a ‘space of the gigantic’, produced out of Inner Mongolia’s radical transformation from ‘a space of marginality and under-development to one of spectacular, yet precarious centrality and economic dynamics as well as ecological crisis’ (2019: 155). The scale of Ordos is staggering, and as Woodworth notes, almost always empty. In traversing the mammoth Khan Square in Kangbashi New District,

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a walk that takes him almost two hours, he writes, ‘on every occasion I have traversed the square […] other visitors are nowhere to be found. The space is entirely devoid of people’ (2019: 164). Later he speaks of ‘forests of residential skyscrapers’, some of which are only 10% occupied (2019: 167). Popularly referred to as one of China’s ‘ghost cities’, Ordos is a mega-scale city of smooth surfaces, modern infrastructure, stairs, ledges, handrails, embankments; spots. And Ordos has been the setting for several spectacular skate videos, as Woodworth notes (2019: 167). In Ordos (Lanceplaine, 2012) the opening shots show the sand dunes of Inner Mongolia then a skateboard drops into a close-up of the sand. The next shot shows a crew of seven skateboarders walking through the dunes. Barefoot, they reach the top of a dune and the next moment they are in Ordos rolling through its vast squares, as if the city were a secret world hidden by sand. An early sequence takes place in front of the Ordos Museum, an amorphous shell-like structure sitting atop an angled embankment with a thick glass barrier at the top. Skaters roll up the embankment and perform tricks on the glass barrier before rolling back down. In one sequence the crew of skateboarders skate down the middle of the road, passing a traffic policeman who simply watches them roll by, embodying the impossibility of policing the vast landscape. In Lost in Ordos: Skating through China’s Ghost City (Hughes, 2013) skateboarders roll through long expanses of road, the ‘forest of skyscrapers’ in the distance. Unlike most skate video in China where clips of skateboarding are interspersed with shots of streetscapes, onlookers and security guards, Ordos is always empty giving the sense of the gigantic. In his book The Concrete Dragon Thomas Campanella writes: ‘to write about China’s urban revolution is to traff ic in superlatives’ (2008: 14). He offers a staggering array of statistics demonstrating the speed, volume and proliferation of urban landscapes since the 1980s. He writes, ‘in terms of speed and scale and sheer audacity, China’s urban revolution is off the charts of western or even global experience. China is in the midst of a wholesale reinvention of the city as we know it […]’ (2008: 15). This is the so-called ‘grey wall’ of China, the world’s ‘concrete superpower’ that has ‘poured more cement every two years than the US managed in the entire 20th century’ (Hawkins, 2019). China continues to pour concrete, to produce urban landscapes out of nothing, to reassemble existing ones, and each new development has the potential for scores of spots. Property developers and planners have no idea they are producing skate spots by the thousands through the coproduction of ‘luxury and rubble’, to use Erik Harms’ (2016) terms for analysing the transformation of Ho Chi Minh City.

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In Chapter 2, I discussed the relationship between infrastructure and skate spots, arguing that skateboarders are an adjacent public chasing the production of infrastructure around the world. Skaters use infrastructure for play and for livelihoods derived from play. They need infrastructure, but only if its skateable. That is difficult to lobby for or plan for. It is difficult to know how infrastructure development will play out in material space. Some elements will produce spots, some will not, and this is contingent on the form, shapes, material and adjoining objects. It cannot be anticipated. The best way to assure more spots is to focus on the parts of the world where infrastructure development proliferates at high speeds, increasing the odds of new spots. This relationship is so evident in China because it has become the ‘paradigmatic infrastructure state’ (Bach, 2016: n.p.). As Jonathan Bach argues: [I]nfrastructure appears as an ultimate fix in its multiple senses: as a form of repair for the humiliations of the past, as a solution for the economic problems of the present, as an addictive form of power and revenue generation, as a remedy to overaccumulation especially in foreign reserves, and, in the colloquial sense, as a difficult or awkward situation. It is through infrastructural fixes that the relationship between the Chinese state, its people qua publics, and the role and function of law is being formed and reformed in the context of new narratives of the nation. (2016: n.p.)

With such a powerful entanglement of drivers, investments in infrastructure throughout China produce more and more spots to skate and connects more and more landscapes with one another. As Bach points out, showcase projects may draw attention, especially from foreign commentators, but the majority of infrastructure projects (75%) are financed by local governments (2016: n.p.). These investments produce the bridges, pathways, plazas, gardens, parks, shopping precincts, and the ledges, handrails, stairs, and smooth surfaces that draw skaters. As Sorace and Hurst argue, much of this development is ‘in name and morphology only’, and ‘China’s urbanisation of land and creation of infrastructure often far outpace the urbanisation of its people’ (2015: 305). Even when the economic costs outweigh the benefits, urban infrastructure continues apace. They label this ‘phantom urbanisation’, ‘the process whereby constructing the aesthetic form of the urban is even more important to local state actors than economic, demographic or environmental repercussions’ (2015: 305). This pathology is what produces areas like Kangbashi New District in Ordos, or vast empty plazas on the edges of Changsha.

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For skateboarders there is nothing ominous about the concrete dragon or phantom urbanization. So-called ghost cities are landscapes of desire, an asset to the culture, a series of spots to be found and claimed. The ecological, social, and human costs of this transformation are ignored. Missing too is any sense of the ambivalence towards urban modernity in local urban aesthetics, especially in Beijing and Shanghai (Visser, 2010). Returning to Iain Borden, skateboarding ‘involves a critique of the processes of exchange and consumption in the modern city, and […] purposes a reassertion of use values as opposed to exchange values’ (2001: 237). Skateboarders and filmers care about how the objects and surfaces in the landscape are arranged, their use value. They care about obstructions; physical, human, and electronic. Everything else is tangential, barely noticed, barely remembered. Skateboarding is a middle-finger to complex causality. Who cares how the spot got here; what matters is whether it can be skated, for how long, and what the risks are of getting busted? Getting busted is rarely a problem in China.

Communist Wonderland Skate video, in general, casts authority as unreasonable, hostile, and overbearing. Encounters and confrontations between skateboarders and property owners, security guards or the police are an important element to skate videos, particularly since the 1990s when skateboarding left the skatepark for the streets. Some of these encounters can be violent or contain verbal abuse and threats. In contrast, skate videos depict Chinese authorities as curious, harmless, polite and open to reason. Skate-stoppers and other defensive architecture is barely used in China vis-à-vis the West. Potential obstacles for skateboarders come from police and security guards, as well as haze and rain (see Zhou, 2019). Footage from China shows authorities watching skateboarders, applauding from time to time, clearing people out of the way. They may ask skateboarders to move on, but they are rarely shown making threats. In videos skateboarders will beg security guards for another try at a trick. To give a typical example, in The Way to Everest (Wahl, 2017) the Latvian pro-skater Madars Apse gets on his knees on a Chengdu pavement and begs the security guard to let him try to grind a handrail one more time. He leaps up and shows the guard that damage to the rail can be wiped off as he scrubs frantically with his hand. At first inscrutable, the security guard begins to relent as Apse grabs onto his ankles and the guard holds up three

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fingers. Apse leaps up, ‘three more tries!’ he interprets to the camera. When he lands the trick, he gives the smiling security guard a fist bump before riding away. The encounter is full of inter-cultural miscues and potentially offensive behaviour, but it is also full of playfulness, humour and gratitude. The language barrier seems to work in Apse’s favour. If they could actually understand one another things may have turned out differently. Instead the exchange gets too difficult so the easiest thing to do is just let Apse keep trying. In the extras for We Are Blood, the Australian pro-skater Shane O’Neill attempts a trick (big-spin front boardslide) onto a handrail in Shenzhen and it collapses. The camera cuts to a uniformed security guard staring at the fallen rail while poised to talk on his walkie-talkie. Director Ty Evans appears on camera and says, ‘get your money together boys, it looks like we’re payin’’. The next sequences show the skateboarders counting money on their bus (one is overheard saying: ‘how do you say “sorry”’), fixers and bystanders negotiate, and Evans hands a pile of cash to a one of the security guards, followed by handshakes and smiles all-round. Evans says: ‘rail got knocked down, came back with 500 RMB; about 60 bucks’, and walks back onto the bus. Evans seems pleased that knocking down a handrail in China ended up costing so little to fix; all cash, no documents, no entanglements. Race is a likely element in these responses by local authorities. The main objective of being at the spot – performing the trick and capturing it – might have a better chance if the foreigner bumbles their way through a negotiation. Like Apse in Chengdu, if he cannot, or pretends not, to understand when told he cannot skate the rail, there is little else to do but allow him to keep playing, provided there is some kind of understanding that he will stop in a short while. In many of these encounters, fixers and translators are vital go-betweens with authorities, but they can also disappear into the background or pretend not to understand Chinese if the encounter warrants it. Writing in a completely different context, the Darjeeling Hills of India, Townsend Middleton recalls being teased by his research assistant, Eklavya Pradhan, and called ‘white mischief’ – also the name of a local vodka – for being able to get away with things that a local person would not be able to (Middleton & Pradhan, 2015: 366-369). It seems that in urban China, white mischief carries with certain authorities at certain times. Part of this is the confidence and audacity of skaters to see a spot in the urban landscape and roll right up to it and try something. Skaters are honed over many years, decades even, with this approach to space. When you have a chance you

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have to take it. They usually don’t pause to find out if it is allowed or not. A local, with a deep sense of surroundings beyond the material objects, may pause; they should, and do, know better. With the idea of ‘white mischief’ in mind I re-watched skate videos captured in China. It does seem to matter. Visiting skaters do seem to get away with a lot. A visiting skate team is not going to be all – or even majority – white. Skateboarding has a diverse ethnic and racial history (despite popular stereotypes). African-American, Latinx, and AsianAmericans have been prominent in street skating since the 1980s and as figureheads in the industry. Furthermore, skaters from other parts of the world, especially South America, themselves of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, relocate to the US for much of their careers. The skaters that end up in China to skate the spots are not white as skin colour, but ‘white as foreign’, and despite poverty and struggle in the personal lives of some skaters, they are ‘white as privileged’ in their mobility and access to cities all over the world; at least during this phase of their lives. Consider too that skate teams from Japan and Thailand, for example, also visit these same spots to skate. Local skaters have a tougher time with authorities. Indeed in Wang Huifeng’s guided tour of Shenzhen discussed in the previous section, he mentions that it is becoming very difficult to skate in downtown Shenzhen (Yu, 2017). He says (translated in English as subtitles): ‘as soon as you put your wheels down, they’ll say: “you can’t skate here. Pick up your skateboard!”’. In the following sequence, Wang and his friends are skating a plaza at night and are interrupted by security guard. Snippets of their conversation appear in the video, and one of the police tells Wang (translated in English as subtitles): ‘you must obey the government’s rules. Different areas, different rules’. Wang turns to the camera and repeats this, smirking. However, there are contrasting examples for visiting skaters too. In Fully Flared (Evans, Jonze & Wiencheque, 2007) the closing credits feature a minute of footage showing security guards and police at different spots in China stopping skateboarders, blocking their access to spots, inspecting damage, and pointing off camera, suggesting skaters go and do this somewhere else. In one shot from the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, three uniformed security guards block the famous hubba discussed above, by standing in a row along its edge, the surface that the skaters slide or grind along. There are certainly authorities that operate outside the frame, never seen in footage and never recounted in stories of skateboarding in China. However the apparently permissive approach to skateboarding by Chinese authorities is constant in skate

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video; the permissiveness is a marvel, a feature as important as the spots themselves. An article on (pre-bust) LP in Shanghai in the subculture magazine Huck observes: The first thing that hits you when you arrive at LP, Shanghai’s legendary skate spot, is the lack of government presence. A solitary security guard snoozes in the distance, one eye half open. The architecture is European colonial meets retro-futuristic skyscrapers, imposing but not brutal, the way it is in Beijing. Old folks are exercising, poodles bark. In a few hours up to thirty skaters will descend on this tranquil scene, and will largely be left alone (Middlehurst, 2015, n.p).

In an interview with Shenzhen expatriate magazine That’s Shenzhen (Plafker, 2018), Jason Guadalajara, a US skate filmmaker based in China, explains the perception: ‘In LA if you wanted to skateboard in the street you’ve got like five or 10 minutes to land your trick or the cops are gonna come and move you along. Whereas in China, you have total freedom’. He adds, I call it a Communist Wonderland […]. This is supposedly a country with limited freedoms but in a lot of respects it’s completely the opposite to the United States. Even if you get kicked out of one place you can just skate for five minutes and you’ll find another ledge plaza or some cool thing. It’s littered with spots.

The ‘Communist Wonderland’ narrative is perhaps naïve and counterintuitive in a state where censorship, surveillance, policing and punishment for dissent are pervasive (Creemers, 2017; Griffiths, 2019; Han, 2018; Qiang, 2011). Order is imposed on the streetscape through the control of vendors, garbage and pollution (Huang, Zhu & Wang, 2019; Tomba, 2017). The mechanisms for enforcing state control are embedded in the built environment, from cameras to facial recognition technology; the same urban landscapes utilized by skateboarders. Yet skateboarding doesn’t seem to register as a major threat to order, property or public safety. In Understanding the Chinese City, Li Shiqiao argues that understanding space in China’s cities requires understanding ranked ‘degrees of care’, ‘originating from corporeal preservation regimens, familial bonds, and concentrically cared spaces’ (2014: 98). These notions of care and safety prioritize ‘concealment and the privileges and pleasures within that enclosure’ (2014: 98). Thus deep-rooted ideas about interior and exterior space

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have major implications for how outdoor space, or public space, are built, modified, viewed and policed in China (2014: 102). He writes: Within this immense and complex network of space of intensive and regular care, there is an equally immense and complex network of spaces without care. The incessant differentiations of spatial inside and outside in Chinese cities also map two distinct categories of people: the “cooked people” (shouren) of the inside and the “raw people” (shengren) of the outside. If the protected home is the archetype of protective care and the village is the archetype of regular care, then jianghu – literally meaning “rivers and lakes” but by analogy meaning an absolute outside – is the archetype of carelessness (2014: 111).

This may explain the lack of public hostility to skateboarding, it takes place almost exclusively in the ‘absolute outside’. No one appears to be calling the cops, as it were, because what takes place in this category of space is of limited significance, a limited threat to other spaces; spaces of care. Skateboarding may not be a threat, but it is a curiosity. And public curiosity for skateboarding adds to the idea of ‘wonderland’. In We Are Blood, US pro-skater Justin Brock faces the camera and says, ‘we just landed from the states and now we’re on the streets. I don’t think they know quite how to deal with us yet’. The camera cuts to curious onlookers. Fellow American Jordan Markham adds, ‘it’s nuts the size of the crowds we get. These people around us have never seen a skateboard’. The last claim is unlikely. Most major cities in China have had a stream of skateboard tourists for over a decade, skateboarding’s public profile is changing driven by state interest in cultivating skate talent with the Olympics looming (Dobija-Nootens, 2018; Sedo, 2010), cities like Shanghai and Nanjing have hosted international skate competitions, several cities have their own thriving skate scenes (Casari, 2019; Li, 2018) and China is an important consumer market for skateboarding goods (O’Connor, 2018). Yet the curious crowd of awe-struck Chinese on-lookers is a standard motif in skate videos. Crowds are depicted staring, clapping, cheering, taking photographs with cell phones, posing with skateboarders, even sharing a beer with sweaty skateboarders. There is a certain orientalism to this, the urban public reduced to a gallery of startled onlookers unsure of the wizardry they are witnessing. Though such a take undervalues the two-way curiosity in many of these encounters. Encounters may not be executed with the careful cultural knowledge of the business ex-pat, college graduate or China-expert, but then again, cultural experts are unlikely to be throwing themselves down

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stairways or spending several hours trying a technical skateboarding manoeuvre along a ledge in front of the Shenzhen Children’s Museum to the amusement of local bystanders. Encounters between skateboarders and urban dwellers are playful, ludic. There is mutual curiosity, mutual wonder. These encounters are a dramatic contrast to the empty landscapes in skate videos filmed in US cities, or Europe and Australia – here skateboarders seek spots or times of the day/night away from people who might call the police, or abuse, threaten or assault them (Carr, 2010) – and in contrast to reputed ‘skater-unfriendly’ cities in Asia, such as Hong Kong (O’Connor, 2018), Hanoi (Geertman et al., 2016) or Tokyo. Skaters don’t need to find empty landscapes in China. The appeal of China’s endless spots goes beyond the material assemblage, the encounters with urban dwellers are part of the draw, even if the main intention is to accumulate footage.

Conclusion Calls by scholars to explore the ways China’s urban landscapes are imagined and consumed away from mainstream social and cultural arenas would do well to view skatevideo. Skateboarders, filmers and fixers see China’s urban landscapes in ways that are unique but by no means limited to small numbers of people, especially once the performance is captured, circulated and consumed. Through skate video, patches of Chinese cities are recognizable the world over, generating a shared history that catalogues extraordinary feats by skateboarders at these spots. Spots are also spaces of encounter between skateboarders and urban dwellers, authorities, and other skateboarders; bodies in the streets sharing moments through unplanned and unsanctioned performances. Like many other incursions from the West in the last four decades, skateboarding gained a foothold in China through Shenzhen, via Hong Kong, and since then it has chased Campanella’s ‘concrete dragon’ all the way to cities like Ordos and Lhasa. China’s urban landscapes have moved from a few clips within longer video parts, to constituting the majority of a full-length part (3-6 minutes) or an entire video (40-90 minutes). In Primitive Skateboard’s Never (Hannon, 2018) and the follow-up Encore (Hannon/Bills, 2019), China’s urban landscapes feature as tightly framed assemblages where tricks are performed by the skateboarders, but also in a series of aerial shots of the urban expanse using drones. The shots of Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou capture landscapes familiar to the intended audiences, and some spots are immediately recognizable and locatable in the same way as iconic spots in Los

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Angeles, New York or Barcelona. These spots are not introduced on screen. There are no captions reading ‘Shanghai’, no narration. Knowledge of these landscapes is assumed, part of skateboarding’s global urban cartography. Though there is a growing sense among some skaters and f ilmers that these landscapes are almost too perfect, trips to China too easy, footage of China’s urban landscapes too repetitive. The search for spots is also a search for new frontiers, to push the cartography further, to add new ink blobs, to find the next China.

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Spectacle Cities: The Luxury of Emptiness Abstract Chapter 4, Spectacle Cities: The Luxury of Emptiness, follows the search for spots to the hyper-modern landscapes produced for spectacle in different parts of Asia. Cities such as Astana, Baku, and Dubai produce perfect spots to skate nestled around, between, and underneath the futuristic architecture. Access to these landscapes is uneven; some spectacle cities are easy to skate, some impossible, and some require connections to authorities. In the case of Dubai, when skaters and filmers work with the narratives of spectacle they can be granted privileged access to spots. However, privileged access to a city grates with the ethos of skate culture, and some skaters end up seeking out the more mundane backstage of the spectacle city in response. Keywords: skateboarding, skate video, spectacular urbanism, spectacle cities, Dubai, Astana, Baku

Asia is home to variants of ‘spectacular urbanisation’ or ‘spectacle cities’. This chapter explores the search for spots in spectacle cities. Spectacle cites attract skateboarders for the materials used in their construction (especially all the marble), the scale, and their relative emptiness making them ideal for street skating. I focus on skate video from the spectacle cities in post-Soviet Asia, including Astana, now Nur Sultan (Kazakhstan), Baku (Azerbaijan) and Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), before moving on to a detailed discussion of Dubai. These hyper-modern landscapes produce beautiful spots to skate nestled around, between, underneath, and atop the futuristic architecture projecting authoritarian power. If Shenzhen, and later Shanghai, were the urban playgrounds of the early 2000s, they have now matured; some of the original spots are gone, constant visits by skateboarders from all over the world has saturated consumers, and authorities are becoming more

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463723138_ch04

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attuned to skateboarding and want it herded into designated skate parks. As discussed in Chapter 3, China’s cities are still central, perhaps even fundamental to skate culture, livelihoods, and the capture and consumption of image and video that fuels the industry. However, among skaters and filmers there is also a drive to find the ‘next China’, to find perfect spots that have not been skated. I make three arguments in this chapter. First, at a very basic level, spectacular urbanization produces beautiful urban landscapes nestled with potential spots to skate, though they can be very difficult to access. As an index of urban development, spectacle cities look and feel unreal, as if playing by different rules: hyper-modern rather than modern, singular rather than paradigmatic, built by an invisible labour force rather than by inhabitants, ordered rather than organic. Second, skaters and filmers granted access work with the narratives of spectacle, revelling in their fantastic landscapes, perfect spots, and impressive scale and speed. To skate in these landscapes is to marvel at them, to join in the shared amazement at what Mohammad and Sidaway (2012) refer to as the frontstage of urban spectacle. However, skaters also covet the ‘the city’s mundane “back stage”, inhabited by those whose labour enables the spectacle and supports the lifestyles of the elite’ (2012: 610). The backstage is hidden from view and authorities go to pains to keep it poorly lit. For skaters it’s the spots that matter. Thus while they work with the narrative of spectacle when they perform at spots on the frontstage, they work against it when they skate the backstage. As will be seen below in contrasting examples, skate video illuminates both the front and backstage. Third, access to spectacle cities is erratic. In Astana and Baku skaters seem to have few difficulties skating the urban landscape without official sanction. In Ashgabat, by contrast, skaters are denied visas. Whereas in Dubai, a city of heavily surveillance and security presence, a group of skaters gain privileged access to the front stage as featured in We Are Blood (Evans, 2015). Indeed, as will be argued below, their presence is coveted by the authorities. Like almost anything from architects to planners to entertainers, talent can be brought to Dubai and rolled out onto the frontstage to support a message, in this case promoting Dubai as an extreme sports destination. However, this is not replicable. The spots are perfect, but they have not been won. They have not been fought for. It’s a one-off, an elite skate playground existing for a single moment. In Baker in Dubai (Ewing, 2017) the skaters do not have this kind of access, and their experience of the city, and the ways the city is captured and circulated in video, is far more mundane, with a focus on the surface; below the knees, rather than up in the sky.

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I begin the chapter with a discussion of spectacle cities in post-Soviet Asia and the luxury of expansive, empty landscapes. The second and third sections focus on Dubai as presented in We are Blood. I begin by discussing the skateboarding itself and the ways in which the urban landscape was emptied and curated for the video. I then turn to analysing the ways the video re-tells the public narrative about Dubai and the limits of replicating the skateboarding featured. The fourth section contrasts this frontstage of Dubai with its more mundane backstage as seen in Baker in Dubai, which presents the city as breathtakingly ordinary.

Central Asian Spectacles In her work on spectacular urbanism in Asia’s new capitals – including post-Soviet republics in Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, along with Naypyidaw in Myanmar and Bandar Seri Begawan in Brunei – Natalie Koch identifies a convergence of similar urban landscapes throughout the region. This convergence is characterized by rapid construction, lavish projections of prosperity and/or benevolence, and heavy state intervention in aesthetics (2018: 2). Koch is quick to point out that spectacular urban development is not a new phenomenon. She writes, ‘[u]rban landscapes, and those of capital cities in particular, have long been privileged places for political leaders to express the state’s power and their nation’s unity, promise, and modernity’ (2018: 2). Spectacle is also ‘temporally exceptional’. It takes place ‘sporadically, occasionally, or only once’ (Koch, 2018: 6). Producing spectacular urban landscapes is a large-scale display of power, authority, and authoritarianism, yet ‘it is staged at one particular location, such as a city as a whole or a public square within a city’ (Koch, 2018: 6). These landscapes produce stunning spots, their dream-like infrastructure animated by the skater gaze. Though owing to their role as political spectacles and their presence in authoritarian polities, access for skateboarders can be limited, with exceptions discussed later in this chapter. Exploring spectacular urban landscapes as skate spots is certainly a contingent experience that de-contextualizes the political dynamics undergirding the built environment. As argued throughout this book, skaters care little about the complex causality that produces a landscape; they care about the assemblage, the spots. However, this doesn’t mean skateboarders and filmers are completely oblivious to the political contexts that produce these landscapes, or the contrast between landscapes of spectacle and their anti-thesis – landscapes of decay, neglect, poverty, and ecological

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devastation. It is just that these observations rarely fit in the montage of tricks that make up a video part. Though observations are more common in skate videos that emphasize the journey. Abdoumaliq Simone’s (2014) idea of the ‘near-South’, drawn from his study of Jakarta, is useful here. While not interested in the spectacle city per se, Simone argues that the growth of cities in the Global South has challenged the binaries of North and South, particularly when we consider specific patches of the urban landscape. Cities in what he calls the ‘near-South’ are notable not only for the speed of spatial and demographic growth, but also for ‘their ability to mirror cities of the North in terms of infrastructure, wealth, amenities, cultural assets, urban vibe, and social and economic dynamism’ (2014: 32). Cities in North and South are thus ‘moving together’ (2014: 32); cities in the South have patches that resemble cities in the Global North (hence the ‘near-South’), and vice-versa. If the near-South is an ‘interstitial space’, an ‘instrument of translation’ of urban form and experience (2014: 34), then the assemblages that draw skateboarders and filmers, the spots, offer what Simone seeks, namely ‘a more sensory-filled engagement with these cities’ to overcome the insufficient labels of urban and social theory: modernity, colonialism, postcolonialism, neo-colonialism, informality, translocality, development or underdevelopment’ (2014: 35). The search for spots is a search for ‘like’ patches of urban landscape. Different enough to make the search worthwhile – to find new spots and to feel a sense of the otherworldly – yet similar enough to enable the performance of skateboarding. The spectacle might best be realized looking up to the sky, or from the sky down – a viewing tower or aerial imagery – yet for skaters the spectacle city is approached from below the knees; the ledges, handrails, hubbas and stairways. The shredscape is configured differently in the spectacle cities in Central Asia. In Astana the shredscape is the very heart of the spectacle city. In Baku it is the old Soviet grid that attracts skaters. The excessive vertical spectacle of the city’s attempt to model Dubai is mostly bypassed by skaters as it offers few ground-level spots. Ashgabat, by contrast, offers a stunning array of spots. However it is completely off limits to skaters. Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019 after longserving President Nursultan Nazarbayev stepped down from power, is synonymous with the spectacular modernization of Kazakhstan (Koch, 2018: 45). Koch writes of former President Nazarbayev’s personal push to create the city, persevere despite political challenges, and ‘position himself as a fatherly guardian […] with an aura of paternal magnanimity and unparalleled visionary prowess’ (2018: 58). The city and the man ‘frequently slip into each other in official discourse’ (2018: 58). For skaters, the symbolism

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bemuses and beguiles, but it doesn’t get in the way of skating the spots. Nor do people. Photographer Jonathan Mehring writes of taking a group of skateboarders to Astana in 2008: Astana, with its brand-new construction, turned out to be a gold mine of skate spots. Buildings seemed to pop up out of the flat landscapes like an architect’s dream. We saw huge pyramids made of metal and glass, and a bizarre tower made of white spines that jutted skyward, holding a massive golden sphere hundreds of feet off the ground. In the plentiful marble plazas surrounding the buildings, skate spots were everywhere. Not only was Astana’s architecture perfect for a creative skater, but also the city was nearly a ghost town. It was built for a population that had yet to arrive. Coming from the States, it was a rare luxury to have relaxed sessions without pedestrians wandering into the shot or security guards hassling us (2015: 134-135).

Astana is packed with spots produced by ‘perfect’ architecture, but it is the absence of people that Mehring labels a ‘luxury’. Empty cities, ghost cities, techno-dystopias are criticized for their ‘phantom urbanisation’ (Sorace & Hurst, 2016) discussed in the previous chapter. The empty city mocked as planning folly, market distortion, or authoritarian excess has become a worn journalistic cliché, often with limited data or analysis of larger national and transnational dynamics (Woodworth & Wallace, 2017). As Gökçe Günel argues in the case of Masdar city in the United Arab Emirates, depictions of the city as a ghost town ‘serve as a corrective for overly sanguine representations’ of spectacular urban landscapes (2019: 184). At the same time, these ‘narrative[s] of failure’ contribute to a ‘dichotomous understanding of the future – as utopia or dystopia’ (2019: 184). For skateboarders and filmers, empty landscapes are utopic because they are empty; the inverse of the popular lament. In most other cities, crowds are an obstacle, a risk. Emptiness is desired, a luxury. Filmmaker Patrik Wallner took a group of skaters on the train from Astana to Almaty in Kazakhstan Triangle (2016). The video opens in Astana, and the skaters offer their impressions of the city on camera and as voiceover interspersed with shots of the spectacular landscape. US pro-skater Nestor Judkins, a frequent traveller in the search for spots, offers his take: The [then] President had a vision for the city. At one point he said that by 2020 it would be the future Paris, which he later changed to 2050. But the

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architecture is unbelievable. It’s all these gold, shiny, modern buildings that have a closer aesthetic feel to that of Dubai or some kind of modern Arab state, which is pretty amazing.

Australian pro-skater Gabriel Summers offers a more sardonic take, I thought it was like an unfinished game of SIMS or something like that. They wanted the best architecture and they, you know, made it happen. I feel like they didn’t have much of a plan and just kind of rushed it.

In the early sequences of the video, skaters are captured wandering around looking for spots. They come to an unusual golden sculpture in the middle of a fountain. They try to work out what it might be. Judkins says, ‘It’s just a golden dish with a hole in it…it’s like a broken teacup’. The dish is on its side, making a curved ramp at an unusual angle. Another American, Rob Wootten, takes off his shoes and socks and wades into the foundation and climbs up into the golden dish. As he dries off his feet and puts his shoes back on he says: ‘f irst day, pretty much the f irst spot […] probably the most insane thing I have ever skated’. Wootten rides up and down the dish, getting higher and higher before popping an ollie to fakie and riding back down backwards. No one seems to care that Wootten is skating a fountain. Skate video is a counter-narrative to Astana as an elite-serving spectacle of Nazarbayev’s munificence. It is an invitation for reinterpretation, even right in the heart of spectacle. Summers skates right across a central roadway and does a 50-50 (grind on both trucks) down a shining steel handrail and into the ornate square along Nurzhol Boulevard. The alternative angle from the bottom of the handrail shows the Baiterek Tower behind Summers as he rolls at high speed towards the obstacle (Image 4.1). The tower houses President Nazarbayev’s golden handprint in its golden orb; a popular spot for tourists to pose with their hands touching Nazarbayev’s. As Summers lands the grind down the handrail, he rolls into the mostly empty square where he is met by his fellow skaters who congratulate him. At this moment, the camera catches the twin golden towers of the House of Ministries with the Presidential Palace looming behind. The skaters find spots all over the city, including around the Kaz Munay Gaz headquarters, the national gas company, the Kazakh Eli monument, and the expansive plaza abutting the Palace of Independence. Here the skaters move in and out of the archways, perform tricks on the marble ledges, and on various monuments and memorials, with the stunning Hazrat Sultan

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Image 4.1 Gabriel Summers skates a handrail in Astana in The Kazakhstan Triangle

Wallner, 2016; screenshot; used with permission

Mosque and the blue glass of the Shabyrt Arts Palace/National University of the Arts in the background. The scale, the surfaces, the edifices, the sky, the emptiness make for beautiful sequences in the video. It’s also a novelty. There is no local skate scene to speak of (though there is in Almaty). There are no demos performed for potential consumers of skate brands and skate products. Most of these skaters won’t come back again. However, the city is now part of the cartography of spots, the skaters’ map of Asia, a small ink blob. In The Persian Version (Wallner, 2014) a group of pro-skaters from the US and Europe travel to Iran, which will be discussed in Chapter 6, then cross the border to Azerbaijan and make their way to Baku, a city being dramatically remade through ‘gentrification by demolition’ (Valiyev & Wallwork, 2019). Baku’s remake mimics Dubai’s form and strategy manifest in new venues to host major events (Gogishvili, 2018), greenfield business and education ‘satellite cities’, transportation infrastructure (port and airport hubs), and showpiece architecture, including: the Zoroastrianinspired Flame Towers, the Heydar Aliyev Centre (named after the former President and father of current President Ilham Aliyev), the Carpet Museum, the Crystal Hall, and the artificial Kazar Islands built in the sea south of the city (Valiyev, 2013). Unlike in Astana, skaters eschew these patches of spectacular landscape (at least those that were completed at the time of filming). There is a glimpse of the wacky Carpet Museum, designed to look

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like a rolled-up carpet, lurking in the background of footage captured in surrounding parks and plazas by the waterfront. But that’s it. There are not even location shots of the spectacular architecture, no attempts to use spectacle to identify location, place. The skaters focus on the ground, below the knees, the streets, the grid. Skating in Baku is about flow, lines, rather than battling single tricks at a particular spot. The wide streets, parks and plazas of central Baku are made for lines. Every building, rail, ledge and hubba seems to be connected to the next or to a smooth open space by wide pavements; a legacy of Soviet planning in the 1920s and 1930s rather than recent spectacle (Valiyev, 2013: 628-629). Lines refer to skaters performing multiple tricks one after another as they move through the landscape. The more distance a skater covers, the more tricks they perform in the line. Lines can be difficult to film because the filmer has to keep pace with the skater by skating along themselves following the same line, while avoiding pedestrians, pavement cracks, drops; all while keeping the skater in the centre of the frame. In a memorable line, Russian pro-skater Gosha Konyshev rolls fast towards a long, narrow, ornate ledge abutting a park, he ollies onto the ledge and manuals (rides on only the back wheels – requiring incredible balance) along the full length of the ledge, coping with a drop in height from one part of the ledge to another, and then he pops off the end clearing a lower tier of the ledge topped with a big flower pot. Konyshev keeps rolling, downhill now, he lands a tre-flip at high speed then has to veer around a group of pedestrians walking four abreast. Wallner, filming and also riding at high speed, has no choice but to go around the other side of the pedestrians, so they momentarily come between filmer and skater. Baku is not empty. Konyshev is going so fast now that he slides on his wheels a few times to drop speed, and then performs a kickflip, landing perfectly and continuing to roll out of shot. One of the most recognizable buildings that they do skate is Government House, completed in the mid 20th century, and adjacent Azadliq Square. However, the buildings themselves, even shot from below the knees, look clean and new, remnants of what Bruce Grant identifies as the city’s ‘edifice complex’ (2014). In addition to spectacular constructions produced in this period of ‘hyper building’, Baku’s transformation of existing buildings has focused on exterior surfaces rather than interior structures, ‘another anachronism for a city whose new public faces alternately looked forward and back’ (2014: 509). In Baku, it’s the city’s old, pre-spectacle aesthetic that ensures smooth ground and open space. Vertical showpiece buildings offer skaters little unless there is a sprawling plaza beneath.

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Finally, Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan has spectacular scale and smooth surfaces but has proven impossible to skate; it remains an elusive skate fantasy. Koch writes of Turkmenistan’s first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, [He] desired [uniformity] and famously mandated that all Ashgabat’s buildings be clad in white marble […] the standardized facades would lend the city a dramatic fell – one of opulence in the post-Soviet period, which would be visually stunning when contrasted to the hulking gray concrete blocks that were the hallmark of Soviet housing in the years after Stalin (2018: 120-121).

It is not just the scale and surfaces that make the spectacle, it is also the ‘sense of abandonment’, the lack of pedestrians (2018: 121). This is the luxury of emptiness. The urban landscapes in the new city produce scores, possibly hundreds, of spots. Skateboarders and filmers have noticed, watching the city from afar with the desire of the skater gaze as if waiting for a more permissive regime to take charge so the spots can be skated. The ethos of skaters and filmers when searching for new spots is to show up, find spots, and skate until someone, or something, stops you. Ashgabat is a rare case where skateboarding is stopped further up the line. Patrik Wallner’s account of Ashgabat is instructive. Despite several attempts to bring skateboarders into Turkmenistan as part of trips for various video projects (Meet The Stans, 2012; The Persian Version, 2014), Wallner is unable to get visas for the group. Later he is able to get a solo visa and describes looking out upon the ‘disproportionately lavish’ capital Ashgabat (2018: 85). In his book of text and photographs that accompanies his films, The Eurasia Project, he writes: ‘As much as I was tempted to skate some of that marble, police officers arrayed across Ashgabat have their eyes keenly trained on visitors, making it impossible for me to blacken any of the pristine stone with a quick 50-50’ (2018: 87). The accompanying photograph of the Monument of Akhal-Teke Horses and the Presidential Palace Square, littered with marble ledges, smooth surfaces, ramps, and open space, suggests this cruel twist of fate. Wallner can see the spots, imagine the tricks, the lines, the aesthetics, but cannot roll. In his short f ilm, Turkmenistan, 2014, Wallner shoots the streets of Ashgabat with the skater gaze. His camera pauses on spots, as if saving them for later, when political circumstances might allow for a return with skaters. Yet he dares not drop his board. Not here. Even the ‘middle-finger’ mentality has its limits in the bastions of totalitarianism. Wallner’s camera

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then slips away from the frontstage to livestock markets, horse races, and inhabitants of the lived parts of the city, the backstage. The final sequence shows a young boy wearing a red soccer uniform and flip-fops, plastic bag in hand, strolling past a golden statue of Niyazov in a vast square. The boy gives a salute to the statue, two-fingers raised at the end of an extended arm, before turning to see the camera, and then going back on his way, eyeing the statue one last time before exiting the frame. Even the statues seems to watch in Turkmenistan. Access to spectacle cities in Central Asia is uneven. However, in the case of Dubai skateboarders and filmers can be put into service for the spectacle and the frontstage can be theirs, at least for a moment.

Emptying Dubai Dubai resonates globally as a spectacular urban landscape; an archetype of ‘enclave globalisation’ (Sidaway, 2007). Despite the global economic crisis in 2008, Dubai has been in a continuous process of ‘worlding’ since the 1960s (Acuto, 2014; Bloch, 2010). Ahmed Kanna argues that Dubai is a model emulated across the region: Arab globalizing cities like many others have been engaged in the aforementioned place wars, undertaking redevelopment projects that emphasize tourism, consumption, and the construction of distinctive signature buildings. Although it would be an exaggeration to say Dubai has been responsible for this, there is an undeniable “Dubai effect”. (2011: 11)

Certainly, Baku and Astana fit the mould of mimicry. Dubai also has a dark side. As Sayid Ali argues in Gilded Cage (2010), Dubai has also become infamous for the conditions of migrant workers, who constitute 90% of the workforce in everything from construction to hotel management, maids to camel jockeys. Migrant workers are transient, under variegated rules and conditions based on their job, citizenship, and the brokerage that brought them to the city. Michele Acuto (2014) contrasts ‘corporate Dubai’, and the control of the ruling Al Maktoum family, with ‘everyday Dubai’, the informal spaces and strategies of the transient migrant labour force and some local residents, arguing that both need to be considered to understand the production of urban landscapes in the city. Acuto points to the impromptu picnics and cricket grounds of migrant workers as evidence of a city beyond the master plan, he notes, however, that such practices rarely ‘bend the rules’

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(2014: 1744). In Dubai there are limits on permissible activity, on mobility, on access. There is widespread surveillance and up to 30,000 security guards throughout the city (Nalla and Wakefield, 2014). This makes the prospects of street skateboarding, for finding and shredding spots with freedom, very unlikely. Skateboarding does more than bend the rules round use of space; it violates them, challenges them, abuses them, or mocks them. The superlative-inducing landscape of Dubai is full of spots, yet the possibilities of shredding them and celebrating by cracking a beer in the street are remote. This makes the inclusion of Dubai as a destination in Ty Evans’ epic We Are Blood (2015) both curious and significant. As a showcase of global skate travel and high-end production, We Are Blood also has an overarching narrative that connects its different destinations from the US to Brazil to China to Dubai: skateboarders are a global community of outsiders drawn together by this shared act, related by blood. Blood suggests family, and, as the opening sequence makes clear, the willingness to bleed real blood in the pursuit of skateboarding glory. There is a voice-over by US professional skater Paul Rodriguez that ties the parts of the video together and featured skaters perform voice to camera monologues about skate and travel at different destinations. Evans is a veteran of skate filming, seen as a master of the craft; a pioneer and innovator. We Are Blood showcases new (and expensive) camera technologies and methods of capture, which Evans takes even further in Flat Earth (Evans, 2017). A far cry from the grungy aesthetics of Evans’ early work in the 1990s shot on video and edited tape-to-tape, and later videos like Yeah Right! (Evans & Jonze, 2003) and Fully Flared (2007), We Are Blood is visually stunning; perhaps too stunning. The glossy end-product alienates some consumers in skate culture, who prefer things more raw, edgy, with some vomit and punch-ups thrown in. Evans is clear that with We Are Blood he was trying to make a film that a young skater could ‘watch with their family’ (in Bagley et al. 2018). Compared to most skate video We Are Blood is a showcase of, and not for, core skateboarding. It aims to attract new audiences, new consumers, and also a barometer for mainstream attention in the half decade before the Olympics. It is a truly stunning film. The definition, editing, and angles – including filming from a helicopter – present skateboarding in ways rarely seen. Stunning production needs spectacular landscapes, and Evans dedicates fifteen minutes of We Are Blood to footage from Dubai, with additional footage in the extras and re-edited versions. At the opening of the Dubai section, decorated US pro-skater Paul Rodriguez is filmed walking down a palatial looking staircase, in backwards cap, t-shirt, jeans, and skate shoes wearing a backpack and carrying his

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skateboard; the juxtaposition between street-rat and luxury surrounds is enhanced by his voice-over: It’s pretty incredible how far a skateboard can take you. It’s taken us to places we never would have imagined. But no matter where you’ve been, you’re always going to be left wondering. And that’s the thing about skateboarding, you never know what’s going to come next.

Rodriguez exits the luxury room onto a balcony, luminous sky in the background, and gazes out onto Dubai’s landscape. The angle cuts to a shot of Rodriguez on the balcony from the sky, shot from a helicopter, to reveal he is in the Burj Khalifa, the some-time world’s tallest building designed to showcase Dubai as a global city of iconic architecture, while also symbolizing ‘arguably the world’s tallest identity crisis’ (Sotoudehnia & Rose-Redwood, 2019: 1015). The dialogue is clumsy, but the message is clear: how far we have come! Skateboarding is a ticket to unlikely places, especially for the highly mobile professionals featured in We Are Blood, and Dubai is the epitome of a dream-scape, a place skaters ‘never would have imagined’ being able to skate. Shots of gleaming buildings, brightly lit souks, gold shops, elevated transit lines, construction cranes, a surprising number of planes, and fast cars on empty streets at night flood the screen before the shots of spots come; empty, unmarked by previous skaters, perfect spots. Rodriguez continues: ‘Dubai is the next frontier. It’s a blank canvas just waiting to be skated’. Other skaters chime into the voiceover over more shots of the landscape: ‘I’ve been told this whole city has been built in less than 20 years’.1 US pro-skater Clive Dixon adds: ‘We’re in like a space-age city. It’s just unreal. It looks like they should have hovercrafts going from one to another’ (he points to the skyline). As more skaters from the group come into view, surveying spots, trying out a few tentative tricks, Sean Malto says: ‘As skaters, you know, there is nothing better than skating things that have never been skated before’. Brazilian pro-skater Tiago Lemos glides along a wide, smooth surface alongside an expansive lawn with buildings in the background. Lemos turns his body to face the camera and stretches his arms to the sky, gesturing to the city around him and cries in Portuguese: ‘E paraíso’, translated in the subtitles as: ‘It’s paradise’. Dubai is not an empty landscape, but is presented as such. Aside from the few shots of the souk, there is no one on any of the stairs, plazas or 1 It’s unclear who says this. They don’t appear on screen and it doesn’t sound like either Rodriguez or Dixon.

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ledges, and there are certainly no construction workers, gardeners, street sweepers, or domestic helpers; though once the skateboarding footage gets going the denizens of the city who actually move through the urban space at ground level – as opposed to those who are carried across it or over it in motorized vehicles – sneak into the frame. Also at the edge of the frame are suit-wearing security personnel (who look as if they have come fresh from guarding a head of state) chaperoning the skaters and ensuring the spots are free of obstacles and people. The skateboarding is phenomenal. The thirteen featured skaters perform flip tricks over a gap created by a water fountain, use a curved brick ledge in a plaza in front of a luxury shopping mall as a ramp to launch into kickflip and heelflip variations, and perform lines along impossibly smooth marble surfaces to benches, ledges and stair sets, backed by palm trees, futuristic skyscrapers, and yet more fountains. In one sequence Tiago Lemos rides up to interlocking backed ledges that form a pyramid and launches a backside 180 kickflip several metres in the air – well above head height, before landing perfectly on the flatground in front of an ornate building façade. The landscapes are so empty that as the video goes on it begins to feel as if Dubai was built solely to be skated, or perhaps, more simply, that no one spends much time outside unless they have to. In one memorable sequence US-pro skater Clint Walker is shot on the roof of an indoor sports arena. The building has a semi-circular roof, and along the front edge of the roof is a narrow concrete ledge, with no barrier, running the full expanse of the building from one side to the other all the way to the ground. Walker attempts to ride down this narrow strip, picking up immense speed, and riding out onto a running track. The scene is nerve-racking to watch. Walker makes it down once and slides along the ground, skidding along on thighs and hands. On another attempt he loses balance, falls onto the roof, and his skateboard drops all the way down to the ground, landing between a barricade and a migrant worker in bright yellow full-body workwear. He gets close on a few more, skidding out on the flat ground from the speed he picks up. On the one he lands, Walker makes the situation harder for himself by ollieing off the ledge onto the roof itself, grinding a backside 50-50 (both trucks on the edge of the surface) and then dropping back onto the ledge before rolling down. This is insane. So much can go wrong on a 50-50 on top of a roof, especially if the trucks don’t grind and his weight takes him forward, or if they grind too much and he falls backwards as his board keeps moving. There is nowhere to land except the narrow ledge; too narrow to hold his falling body.

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He makes it. Roll, ollie, 50-50 grind, land and roll down the ledge off the roof onto the running track. He is going so fast he keeps rolling onto an astro-turf rugby field. It is breath-taking. The footage is shot from the ground and from above, taking full advantage of a big budget, exclusive access, and aerial capture. A spectacular sequence in the spectacle city. Walker’s body is the anti-spectacle. Hailing from Oklahoma, he wears a long bushy beard, messy hair, and his clothes are torn and smeared from all the falls he takes in trying to get his tricks. As the camera shows him surrounded by the other skaters being congratulated, he seems like a momentary transplant on the perfect landscape. A wildman soon to return home and leave the astro-turf field to rugby-playing expatriates. Back near the start of the Dubai footage, before the skateboarding really gets going, Rodriguez’s voice says simply: ‘opportunities like this come along once in a lifetime’. You can’t just show up and skate Dubai, at least not the showpiece ‘starchitecture’ featured in most of We Are Blood. Access to the spectacular landscape depends upon personal connections. The best example of this is the closing helipad sequence. In the lead up there are more shots of the Burj Khalifa. Rodriguez’s voice is heard again, mentioning the building by name and emphasizing that it is the tallest building in the world. A few of the skaters are shown getting into a helicopter and flying over the landscape, an opportunity for more shots of the architecture, turquoise water in pools and fountains, and even shots from one helicopter to another. The helicopter makes its way to Burj Al-Arab, a sail-like white building positioned out in the sea, and lands on a round helipad suspended on one edge of the building. On the helipad the skaters drag a white bench out into the middle of the helipad. The fact the skaters are left to drag the bench out is a little weird, given the abundance of personnel on hand. However it evokes countless skate videos of the humbler kind, skaters dragging a bench into a school playground to make a spot. Attempting technical skate tricks on a bench, even a low bench like this, is likely to lead to skateboards flying off in various directions. It also poses a risk of skaters falling in different directions. The edges of the circular helipad are low and a skateboard could easily roll over the edge and down the 50 or so floors. To avoid this, a pack of suit-wearing security personnel stand around the edge of the helipad, arms clasped in front (they would probably have been better off squatting if they actually wanted to stop a run-away skateboard). Skaters who are not attempting tricks also join the circle. For a few minutes of screen time, different members of the skate crew perform tricks on the bench, 50 something floors up in the air, surrounded by inscrutable men in suits, filmed from above by helicopter with the city-scape behind.

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The skaters don’t go easy either. There are plenty of technical flip tricks on and off the bench. It must be truly frightening to roll up and see the bench and then a huge drop behind it. The skill and concentration are remarkable. As the scene ends the camera in the helicopter zooms right out. There is Burj Al-Arab, the coastline, the city, the sunset. And that is the last we see of Dubai in We Are Blood. In the extras there is a five-minute long ‘Behind the Scenes in Dubai’ edit featuring more of the helipad story. There are some shots of a safety briefing, during which the British representative of Burj Al-Arab is filmed briefing the skaters drill-sergeant style about their safety responsibilities as ‘goalkeepers’ to stop errant boards flying over the edge. Part of his lecture comes as audio moments later over shots of setting up the helipad, ‘we’ve got the best skaters in the world as I understand it yeah, and you’ve got a once-in-lifetime opportunity to skate on this helipad’. And while this makes it sound like an immense privilege, the spot itself is just a bench on a flat surface. The setting is incredible. The obstacle itself is common. The spectacle is hardly advantageous to the skaters. As if to remind skaters and consumers why this matters, Evans is filmed calling out to the skaters, ‘we did it! We’re skating on a helipad 50 storeys up! YEAH!’. In an interview from 2018 Evans adds: ‘the shit we did up on the helicopter pad with the bench, it’s psycho that we’re even up there skating and they’re letting us do that. There is nothing around that. If a board fell off, game over’ (in Bagley et al., 2018). What are we to make of this sequence? Some of the world’s best skaters who cut their teeth (more accurately, broke their teeth) in the streets of Brisbane, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Sao Paulo by trespassing, damaging property, scaling fences are now skating atop a luxury hotel above an urban landscape built for spectacle. They are skating the inaccessible. Not in the usual sense of inaccessibility being behind a fence, patrolled by a security guard, or covered in skate-stoppers, but inaccessible because only the world’s most wealthy and privileged people – and the staff that serve them – can access a helipad atop a Dubai hotel. Perhaps the point is that skaters, a ragtag of outsiders who hone their craft in alleyways and loading bays, have made it to the proverbial penthouse; the world’s proverbial penthouse. In a sense the entire Dubai section is about skaters making it; not just to Dubai or to a helipad but making it as a culture to be consumed; consumed to the point that the authorities that create and rule a spectacle city (itself built for consumption) invite skaters into their landscape to have fun without consequences. The skaters are invited to experience, like other visitors with the means, the privilege of transgressing boundaries; often in clear view of denizens and citizens who have no such prospects of transgression,

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whose place in the city, and the global order that Dubai magnifies, is clearly marked on their documents, their skin and faces. In an interview on The Nine Club podcast, Evans goes into detail about shooting We Are Blood in Dubai. Evans had no plans to film in Dubai. He was bringing camera equipment to the premises of the production company working with him and he was introduced to the ‘Prince of Dubai’s assistant’ who was there for another reason. Evans recalls: That’s when I got introduced to him, and was introduced as “hey this is Ty, he’s making a skate film” and the first thing he said was: “You must come to Dubai to make your film.” And I was like, “Yeah man, I’d love to come to Dubai,” and he’s like “we have many things that would be good for skateboarding” […] And I didn’t think much of it, [then] dude, I was on an Emirates flight the next week, flying out to Dubai. They put us up in an amazing hotel, it was so dope […]. They want to show the world what it’s all about, so they’re like come out, scout, so we scouted for about a week, drove around the city, saw a bunch of amazing things. We had someone there helping us out with everything. I even mentioned something, they were like “what else do you need?”, and I was “it would be cool if we had a helicopter to fly around and look at stuff to skate on the roof”. And I was joking! Dude, we were in the private helicopter an hour later flying over Dubai. And I’m like looking at handrails and stuff like wow, crazy. It was insane. (in Bagley et al., 2018)

After this scouting trip Evans returned with the skateboarders a year later to film. In the interview Evans is asked by one of the podcast hosts, Kelly Hart, whether the authorities allowed them to skate. Evans replies: So, they were the ones that had the keys to the castle […] it was really dope man. [They were like] you can skate wherever you want, tell us where and we’re going to make it happen. But it wasn’t like drive around and pull over. That’s why I went out there two weeks before. I would sit there and say, “on this day we’re going to skate here and if we still have juice we’ll go here”. It was probably like two spots a day we would have. And if we filtered through those two spots for that day that was it, there was no, “oh, lets pull over right here”. It was specific locations for each day.

Hart asks, ‘were you the first ones to skate those spots?’ Evans replies: A lot of them. And they were super cool about it because we would have to rub-brick and lacquer stuff [to make it slide and grind]. Dude we’re

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rub-bricking and lacquering like, the Burj Khalifa. And they’re like, “don’t worry about it. We can fix this stuff . We know this is what you are going to do”. Cause I think they knew the bigger picture of how cool that segment was going to be… The people there were so cool. They were so stoked on skating. It was just rad man. I mean, not to get all preachy, but travelling around the world, experiencing different cultures and seeing them genuinely stoked on skating is so fucking refreshing than the shit we deal with out here (in the US). Everyone’s so sick of skating here.

In the extras clip ‘Behind the Scenes in Dubai’, the US pro-skater Theotis Beasley says to camera: ‘everywhere is a great spot out here in Dubai’. The footage cuts to him skating through a smooth marble plaza and performing tricks on a series of wood-topped benches. Two suited security personnel with conspicuous ID badges approach the bench after Beazley and inspect the damage. Beazley goes on: ‘we have access to everything so, the cops ain’t gonna tell us we can’t skate. That’s rad!’ He then glides past the two suited security personnel, does a kickflip to five-o grind on the bench followed by a frontside big-flip down a set of six stairs, with palm trees, lawns, and an enormous billboard advertising luxury watches in the background. South African/Australian professional skater, Tommy Fynn says later, ‘I’ve been travelling for skating for over ten years now. This is different to any other trip I have been on in my life. I’ve never had this freedom’. Though something about this seems off. The spots are not earned, not won. They are given, and not because there has been a community of skaters present in the city for decades agitating for the freedom Fynn relishes, but because the skaters in We Are Blood are put to work to promote the spectacle.

Dubai Unreal As a promotions strategy for the city, and for the company X-Dubai, whose logo appears often in the film on vans and helicopters, the scenario is puzzling. On the one hand the video showcases Dubai’s architecture and adds to adjacent attempts to ‘world’ the city as an extreme sports destination. There is even a sequence in We Are Blood that shows some of the skaters skydiving, driving buggies over the dunes, and hanging out with camels. It is a brief interlude, only a minute or so, a tourism advertisement in the middle of a skate video. The idea that Dubai can produce anything in and on its landscape – from indoor ski slopes to a grand prix circuit – to attract thrill seekers seems to be a motivating factor in this particular partnership.

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On the other hand, the street skating shot in Dubai is not replicable. Skaters going to Dubai without the ‘keys to the castle’ to use Evans’ phrase would have no access to the urban landscape, nor would they have it emptied out for them in advance. The footage of Tiago Lemos flying off a pyramid naturally occurring in the streetscape is not something another skater can go and try because they would be stopped within moments. There are no skate stoppers on any of Dubai’s spots because there are few skaters to stop; in a city of 30,000 security guards there are few chances to take unsanctioned urethane to marble. Local skaters, mostly expats, are restricted to a few patches of the city. The spectacle city is closed to them. There are several public skateparks in Dubai and the group of skaters in We Are Blood visit a local ramp, painted blue (Mamzar Park, in older videos the ramp was painted green). This is the only time in the video that the skaters draw a crowd of ordinary citizens and denizens. Another consequence of the emptied out city and the pack of security personnel is that there are very few opportunities for encounters in Dubai. The people can’t get close to the skaters. It could not be more different from China. There is access to the city but no freedom of movement. The ability to visit a spot and emulate a trick performed by another skater, and hopefully take it a step further with a different variation, is a crucial part of progression in skateboarding and one of the resonances of skate video. Privileged access disrupts that. It is antithetical to the dominant modes of social positioning in skate culture. Skaters are supposed to be on the edges, the margins. They’re supposed to be outsiders, united against the powerful, and sometimes more overtly, the rich. Does this still hold when the authorities of a spectacle city invite skaters in to play with no consequences? The promoters are likely also looking for street credentials flowing from real street skating in the urban landscape, what Nigel Thrift has referred to as the ‘affective engineering’ to create a ‘buzz’ in public space (2004: 58), for both people in the city and people consuming it through video footage. The problem is that this is not really something that can be bought. I recognize the risk of romanticizing skateboarding or downplaying its relationship to contemporary capitalism. However, to speak to its consumers and generate exchange value, skateboarding needs to uphold a counter-narrative on urban landscape, on space. Skateboarding is supposed to reimagine a city, to challenge dominant organizations of space, dominant expressions of modernity and hyper-modernity, to critique spectacle. Skateboarding is LA without cars, Kabul without war, Bangkok without tourists. Even footage from Shenzhen, while it may affirm the mythology of ‘Shenzhen speed’, captures the city in ways unintended and unsanctioned.

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Skateboarding is supposed to expose the city. Hack it. Work against its intended meanings and functions. Seek its glitches. Street skateboarding appeals to its followers, its consumers, when this counter-narrative is at the forefront of the culture’s content, especially skate video. In Dubai, We Are Blood, affirms dominant narratives about the city projected by its ruling class. It doesn’t reimagine the city, it doesn’t expose its backstage, it doesn’t lift any curtain. There is no view from below the knees when the gaze is sanctioned from above. This is likely why, despite a famed and respected director, incredible skaters and skateboarding, an enormous budget, and ways of capturing skateboarding never seen before, We Are Blood is rarely included in ‘best ever’ skate video lists. It is too unreal, un-replicable. Too detached from the idea of dropping, pushing, grinding, marking, making, capturing and then getting out of there. Perhaps this is not so much a break with the past as a hint of the future. As cities clamour to brand and re-brand themselves as creative cities, turning the urban landscape over to street skaters and filmers has appeal. In Asia, transforming patches of the city into ‘creative zones’ is accelerating. As He and Wang argue in the case of East Asia, ‘a top-down discourse of creative/ cultural city-making is now in full swing, accompanied by widespread state-led campaigns at a local level, as well as resultant contestations’ (2019: 305). Street skateboarding is implicated in the idea of creative cities. Writing about Love Park in Philadelphia, Ocean Howell argues that ‘[s]kateboarding may have been a wrench in the modernist ‘‘growth machine,’’ but in Philadelphia, it has been retooled as a cog in the entertainment machine’ (2005: 41). The culture produces and attracts artists, designers, musicians, and entrepreneurs who launch brands and labels, both short-lived and enduring. Skateboarding also provides impromptu performances in the urban landscape. It does so without displacing communities in the same ways as creative zones and precincts. On the contrary, skateboarding is usually a post-displacement activity performed in new patches of urban landscapes or a pre-displacement activity performed in ruins and wastelands slated for redevelopment. While the creative interpretation of urban space produces livelihoods for skaters and filmers and contributes capital to commercial brands large and small, core street skateboarding is diff icult to govern. Authorities can create an arts precinct, a design hub, a street performance zone, they can also create a skatepark, but it is difficult (not impossible) to purposefully create skate spots that will draw skaters given street skateboarding is about repurposing the glitches in the urban machine.

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There are exceptions. Since 2007 Copenhagen has hosted the annual Copenhagen Open. ‘Open’ here has a different meaning to say, a golf or tennis tournament. There is no tournament, the city itself is ‘opened’ to skateboarding and draws skaters from all over the world. The event moves to multiple spots every day and is more like a festival with plenty of music, drugs and alcohol and jumping into the harbour. Sponsors include skate brands, brands with a foothold in skateboarding, and in 2019 included a Danish beer company, a high-end hotel chain and the City of Copenhagen. The event is filmed and packaged as a series of video edits circulated digitally, including the epic 43-minute 10 Days of CPH Open in 34 Chapters covering the 2018 open (Weyhe, 2019). It is somewhat surprising, for instance, following China’s embrace of creative cities through mechanisms like the UNESCO Creative Cities Network – China has twelve cities in this network including skate meccas Shenzhen, Nanjing and Shanghai – that local authorities haven’t tried to capitalize on the popularity of skateboarding in these cities and the way it animates their urban growth, architecture, design, aesthetics and subcultural capital in similar ways. Though given the top-down approach to creative cities in Asia, an activity like skateboarding that is unsanctioned and difficult to control, not to mention that damages property, might be difficult to openly embrace. China’s cities have hosted international skate competitions in designated skateparks, which is more in keeping with limiting such activities to designated zones. As Oakes and Wang write in their introduction to a recent collection of essays on cultural cities in Asia, the cultural city/creative city may have become a ubiquitous post-industrial urban growth strategy, ‘a theme park’, however ‘[c]ities all over the world retain their ungovernable spaces of creativity’ (2016: 9). Skateboarders epitomizes ungovernable creativity as they re-interpret the urban landscape, harnessing the assemblage of objects and surfaces to ollie, flip, grind and slide. Frequently, as Oli Mould demonstrates with London’s Southbank, the desire to celebrate and commoditize cultures like skateboarding is often linked to a desire to spatially contain them. Attempts to relocate skaters away from spots they have come to occupy rarely works, because as Mould argues, the reason the under-croft at Southbank is ‘so popular is precisely because it’s a spot that has been “won”’ (2014: n.p.). The Dubai in We Are Blood has not been won. It has been given. Spots are supposed to be won. They are supposed to be marked, not wiped clean. There needs to be a trace of the skateboarding that happened. Dubai remains a landscape rather than a shredscape.

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Spectacle and its Others An idea of what it is like for pro-skaters in Dubai without connections comes in Baker Skateboard’s short 2017 video Baker in Dubai (Ewing, 2017), accompanying issue 159 of (now defunct) The Skateboard Mag.2 The Baker team upholds the reputation for fast living, heavy drinking, blood-andvomit-style skateboarding. From the late 1990s through mid-2000s the team spearheaded a movement of sorts within skate culture known as the Piss Drunx. In a 2017 retrospective on the movement in Huck Magazine (Pelling, 2017), Oliver Pelling writes, ‘[p]artying was nothing new in skateboarding but the Piss Drunx flaunted it in a way that hadn’t been seen before. The wealth of talent, energy and personality centred in one area helped amplify their collective impact’. The group of skaters in Dubai in 2017 are a matured version of the crew, but Baker still carries that ethos, which makes Dubai a very odd place to go on a regular skate trip to produce footage and photographs. Baker in Dubai features a couple of the lesser spots from We Are Blood, a long triple-set of stairs with a hubba and the blue ramp in a local skatepark. There is some footage from a few ledges around the city, a bank to rail on a busy street, but none of the spectacular landscapes featured in We Are Blood. No Burj Khalifa. There are certainly no helicopter shots. Most of the footage in Baker in Dubai takes place in an amphitheatre in a public park; three blocks of smooth black marble in tiers and a fountain in the middle. US pro-skater Cyril Jackson rides right into the fountain after landing a switch frontside big-spin down the blocks and runs through the water in celebration. As a public park there are people around: two men play badminton, a local man films with his phone, an elderly South Asian couple sit on a bench, a female in a red and maroon sari and a male in a white dhoti-kurta, while two men in football kit jog past them. There are other moments like this. The skaters find a bank to rail in a mundane commercial street with dated buildings and land tricks while migrant workers, bicycles, buses and delivery trucks pass by. In their session at the blue ramp in Mamzar Park, the skaters show up and dodge the rest of the park users. This proves difficult. At one point Cyril Jackson rides down the blue ramp, launches a backside 180 kickflip into the air and over the rail cordoning the ramp from the pathway alongside 2 There are several skate videos captured in Dubai featuring pro-skaters pre-dating We Are Blood and Baker in Dubai including Deluxe skateboard’s DLX Week in Dubai (2012), DC Shoes Europe’s Dubai (2013) and In Dubai (2008).

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it. He flies through the air and onto an oblivious kid riding on a scooter. As Jackson approaches the launch someone can be heard yelling off camera to get the kid’s attention, he turns to the direction of the sound, and by then Jackson is already in the air and lands down on the kid, flattening him onto the pathway. Jackson had to contend with the local scooter traffic in the park just like anyone else. There is no privileged access. There are some arm wrestling sequences in a nondescript nightclub, a play fight (maybe real fight) between Justin ‘Figgy’ Figeoura and photographer Atiba Jefferson in front of the hired vans, camera pans to some men playing badminton. There is one shot of the city skyline. It is brief, as Andrew Reynolds pops his signature frontside flip on flatground at the base of a ledge. Even here the city is non-descript. There is no Burj Khalifa or Burj Arabia, luxury malls or ‘starchitecture’, just a cluster of sleek skyscrapers in the distance shot from the ground level. There is little else that suggests the Dubai of We Are Blood, airline magazines or government public relations. Baker in Dubai has no music or narration over the top. And despite the calibre of the skaters the tricks captured are unlikely to make it into other video parts. This is the Dubai skaters can access with modest connections. There is no overt critique of the city either. There just isn’t anything spectacular about the place; which in the case of Dubai is probably the most biting criticism of all.

Conclusion Spectacular urbanization produces showpiece urban landscapes nestled with spots. They index development as adjacent landscapes, hyper-modern and unreal. In post-Soviet spectacle cites like Astana, Baku and Ashgabat, varied access enrols spectacle unevenly in the regional cartography. In Astana no one seems to mind the skateboarders riding through the frontstage of the spectacle, in Ashgabat is impossible to roll along at all, and in Baku the spots that end up being attractive are not the frontstage spectacle, but the wide paths and public space of the Soviet grid. In Dubai, the aesthetics, the surfaces, assemblages, and scale make the frontstage of the city attractive to skaters and filmers who work with the narrative of spectacle when granted privileged access. The value of skateboarding for urban branding as creative, cutting edge, extreme, brings skaters and filmers to the proverbial penthouse of spectacle cites, or more specifically the helipad. Yet there is something askew about this, something that doesn’t feel right. Spots need to be found and fought over. Privileged access to the frontstage is not replicable, it’s

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unreal, and antithetical to the core of skate culture. However, skaters also covet the backstage, the mundane elements of the city also produce spots, and they rarely require privileged access. To search for spots backstage is to work against the spectacle, exposing its hidden human and material infrastructure, the grimy engine that makes it go.

5

For the Love of Soviet Planning Abstract Chapter 5, For the Love of Soviet Planning, focuses on skateboarding in, on and through the remnants of Soviet urbanization. The undergirding infrastructure of Soviet urbanization is a reliable source of spots, even in sites where post-Soviet symbols and objects have assumed the frontstage. Skate videos from post-Soviet Asia emphasise a shift from performance to place, from simply capturing skateboarding to narrating a journey to lands untouched by skateboarding. The chapter focuses on the large scale public squares and monuments of Tashkent and Bishkek and their replicants in smaller towns and cities. In some cases, as in Abkhazia, the post-Soviet landscapes are repositories of fresh and traumatic memory, leading skaters to question the limits of the skater gaze. Keywords: skateboarding, skate video, post-Soviet, infrastructure, memorials, memoryscape

During the Soviet Union, urban growth in much of what is now post-Soviet Asia was rapid and transformative. This chapter explores the search for spots in post-Soviet Asia, focusing on more mundane urban landscapes away from the spectacle cities discussed in the f irst part of Chapter 4. Searching for spots in post-Soviet Asia shifts the emphasis of skate mobilities from seeking perfect spots to seeking discovery in new lands, lands previously untouched by skateboarding. The curiosity for consumers of these skate videos is seeing landscapes that don’t show up in conventional skate video – unknown spots rather than iconic spots – and watching the way skilled skaters adapt to unfamiliar terrain. Indeed, skaters who can master the unfamiliar hold a special place in the culture. It takes a mixture of creativity, skill, and dedication to see a spot where others can’t, to master rough ground and broken surfaces, and to handle the rigours of long road and rail trips along the trails between cities. This contrasts with skaters

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463723138_ch05

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being delivered to perfect spots or having cities emptied out for them as explored in Chapters 3 and 4. In following the search for spots to post-Soviet Asia I make three arguments. First, capturing footage at these spots and turning it into skate video necessitates crafting a journey narrative. In some videos the narrative is overt, skaters speak to camera, supply voiceover, the route is mapped out on screen. In other videos the narrative is conveyed through a series of scenes, tricks, images, textures, sounds, edited together with minimal dialogue or information on place. Some videos show linear journeys, others are more like conventional skate parts; one clip after another – skateboarding and non-skateboarding – to achieve a rhythm, an aesthetic. There are, naturally, videos that fit somewhere in between. The videos discussed here all attempt a linear narrative of different journeys. Second, Soviet-era planning guarantees spots. As skaters travel further to search for spots in lands untouched, the cities of post-Soviet Asia are spaces of surprising, if dated, modernity, with some recent flourishes here and there, particularly in cities with heritage sites or tourism potential. Even in sites where post-Soviet symbols and objects have assumed the frontstage, the undergirding fabric of the cities is the infrastructure of Soviet urban modernity. Soviet planning promises spots and scale: enormous public parks, plazas, buildings and memorials, even in regional towns and cities. There are always monuments and memorials. Monuments have flat ground around them. Some have ledges, stairs, and embankments. Surfaces are smooth, with concrete, granite and marble. This is not to argue that all cities in post-Soviet Asia look the same or have no vernacular urban form, but rather when viewed from below the knees the common elements of Soviet urban planning are reliable producers of spots. Third, ubiquity is shattered from time to time, and contentious landscapes can impact the search for spots. In previous chapters I have argued that for skateboarders the spot is all that matters; the material assemblage of obstacles, surfaces, and their arrangement. Thinking too far beyond the spot unravels the relationships between skater and spot, between body and city. The unsettled sovereignties of certain territories in the post-Soviet world add layers of emotion to urban landscape, and it can be difficult for skaters to maintain their skater gaze, to hold steady that middle-finger to complex causality. In the borderlands of post-Soviet Asia, the symbolism of the landscape, the emotion, the haunting, can be overbearing, causing, in this case, a group of skaters travelling in Abkhazia to pause, to self-police, to think beyond the material and aesthetic value to their craft. In Abkhazia the memoryscape overwhelms the shredscape.

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This chapter has five sections. The first focuses on the relationships between Soviet planning, post-Soviet redevelopment and skate spots. The second and third discusses footage captured in the capital cities of post-Soviet states with a focus on Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan and Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Both cities retain a mixture of urban landscapes and forms from different eras, though in both cities the Sovietbuilt square and adjoining plazas are the starting point in the search for spots. Away from capital cities, urban landscapes are more varied, and in the fourth section I discuss regional towns and cities. In leaving the main routes and seeking spots in out-of-the-way places, footage from these cities adds new ink blobs to the imaginary cartography. In regional cities there are handrails, ledges, and plazas too, against desolate backdrops in some cities and famed heritage sites in others; surprising patches of modernity at the end of days-long train journeys. The final section focuses on the fragility of post-Soviet landscapes in Vante Lindevall’s award-winning Abkhazia (2017), which follows a group of Russian and Finnish skaters on a skate trip to the Republic of Abkhazia. The film demonstrates the limits of the skater gaze. While the skaters find spots they also encounter traumatized residents, aghast that the skaters can be so disrespectful to landscapes imbued with deep meaning and fresh wounds. In this and the following chapter I draw extensively (though not exclusively) on the work of Patrik Wallner. The Hong Kong-based filmmaker and photographer has produced 40 plus films between 2007-2020 in a successful quest to film skateboarding in every country in Europe and Asia, including North Korea, Iraq, and Yemen. Wallner assembles diverse groups of skaters from different parts of the world to take these journeys, generating new encounters with local communities and within the group of skaters. Many of the videos discussed in this chapter have between half a million and a million views across various platforms by early 2020. Many of these videos are independent productions, some in collaboration with other filmers and photographers, while others are supported by different brands including skateboard companies, skate media, footwear companies, and energy drinks. The journey is crucial to Wallner and he gives skaters time on camera and in voiceover to share their experiences. Wallner emphasizes the fabric of place beyond the spots. The landscapes are peopled, and the trips include gruelling train rides, unplanned detours, dubious border crossings, curious characters and plenty of attention from the authorities. Wallner has made several videos in post-Soviet Republics including 10,000 Kilometers (2009), Meet the Stans (2012), The Persian Version (2014) (parts filmed in Georgia and Azerbaijan), Zigzagging the Caucuses (2015), The Kazakhstan Triangle

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(2016) discussed in Chapter 4 (and below), and Hotel Uzbekistan (2020). Wallner has made two videos following Chinese skaters (sponsored by the shoe company Converse) on their own search for spots in post-Soviet cities in Mongolia and far-eastern Russia, Where Do We Land? (2011) and Far East Up North (2012), demonstrating the growth of skateboarding in China and the internal market for consuming it. For local skate communities, Wallner has also become conduit connecting them to pro-skaters, brands and skate NGOs, as will be discussed in the following chapter.

Post-Soviet Urban Space from Below (The Knees) In Chapter 3, I argued that China’s rapid urbanization, the ‘Concrete Dragon’ to return to Thomas Campanella’s phrase (2008), produces spots at a staggering rate. These spots are new – recently assembled out of concrete, steel, marble and granite – in the explosion of urban growth spanning the last decades of the 20th century and accelerating in the first two decades of the 21st. Urbanization in the Soviet Union through the 20th century was similarly staggering. Between 1917 and 1982 the percentage of the population living in urban areas in the Soviet Union went from 18% to 64%, and according to Oleg Yanitsky writing in 1986, ‘[m]igration of rural population to cities and transformation of rural into urban settlements were the most powerful factors in city growth’ (1986: 265). The proportion of the population living in urban areas went from a minority to a majority and cities became symbols of modernity and civilization, especially in the borderland territories of the Soviet Empire, now the independent states of post-Soviet Asia. Urban planning in the Soviet Union followed a 30-year general plan ‘regarded as the central policy document controlling the process of urbanisation and guiding the transformation of cities and towns into socialist-type settlements’ (Shaw, 1983: 393). Urbanization was a singular leap from tradition to modernity, spatially and socio-culturally, especially in Asia (van der Straeten, 2019). Following the dismantling of the Soviet Union, newly independent states fought to foment national-identity and the built environment became a battlefield to shape the symbolic landscape and to claim political legitimacy (Alexander, 2007; Danzer, 2009; Forest & Johnson, 2011; Hughes, 2017; Paskaleva, 2015). As restrictions on internal migration between urban and rural areas were relaxed (though not entirely lifted), and more citizens from post-Soviet states travelled abroad to work and sent money back to their families, ‘these cities have quite literally changed their faces as many newcomers have claimed urban belonging and as new post-Socialist

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materialities have emerged’ (Schröder, 2016: 149). Even in cities where spectacular urban transformations have taken place, remnants of Soviet planning characterize established downtown areas and older suburbs.1 Vertical growth as apartments, hotels and malls, remodelled shopping streets and bazaars change the landscape from a particular vantage point; however, what matters to skaters is the ground, the surfaces below the knees. The post-Soviet shredscape enrols new and old spaces, the shiny new surfaces and the decaying back blocks. Skaters traverse old and new, focused on the surface and oblivious to the symbolism, grinding down the imaginary lines between epochs.

Independence Square (Tashkent) Consistent throughout skate video captured in post-Soviet Asia are central squares and plazas. Squares are a fundamental element of Soviet and postSoviet public space, and have become central to the analysis of post-Soviet political and cultural change (Schröder & Nasritdinov, 2017). As Russian skater and writer Kirill Korobov remarks in the skate video Down the Volga (Wallner, 2019), as skateboarding grew in post-Soviet cities, monuments and squares became gathering spots for skaters. He says: The modern age of Russian skateboarding got started in the 1990s. Vladimir Lenin monuments in different cities turned out to be epicentres for skateboarding because of good flatground and granite or marble made ledges. Skaters choose these locations as a meet up or as a warmup spot […] Generally statues were a big part of the cultural agenda in socialist countries.

Many of these Lenin statues were removed and replaced in the years following independence, especially outside Russia, yet the squares and parks that hosted these statues remain intact.2 Crucially for skaters, the surfaces remain intact too. Many of these squares have been upgraded to promote tourism, with new elements from the ubiquitous ‘I heart [insert city name]’ 1 Astana is an exception, given its development has far surpassed the former settlement at the site, and so too are boom cities not discussed in this book, such as Aktobe in Kazakhstan (Jaeger, 2016). 2 The same is also true in communist states outside the Soviet Union. As Geertman et al. (2016) demonstrate, Hanoi’s Lenin Square is also a popular spot for Vietnamese skaters.

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signs mounted on long marble platforms to access ramps, stairs and handrails to improve pedestrian mobility; all very enticing to the skater gaze. For instance, Tashkent’s (Uzbekistan) Independence Square draws skaters to its surfaces, scale and the interplay of old and new objects. Writing on the ‘forging’ of Tashkent as a Soviet city, Paul Stronski details the importance of making symbolic claims on the urban landscape. Stronski argues that the Tashkent ‘was a “model” Asian city and an example of how socialism could be adapted beyond its original European roots to assist “less developed” or even “backward” societies in advancing out of poverty and colonialism’ (2011: 234). James Bell (1999) argues that the relationship between official public landscapes of Tashkent and the shifting narratives of Uzbek nationhood can be analysed in three crucial moments in the city’s architecture: the initial Sovietization in the 1920s and 1930s, reconstruction after the 1966 earthquake, and the post-Soviet period. The 1966 reconstruction produced the mammoth Lenin Square that is littered with skate spots. Bell writes: The centrepiece of the redevelopment project was the newly rechristened Lenin Square (formerly Red Square). The territory of the square was increased, creating a tremendous expanse of open space. Added to the existing parade grounds and former parliament house was a complex of three huge glass and steel office buildings, including Tashkent’s first skyscraper […]. Across from the government buildings, a new museum honouring Lenin was erected, facing toward the square. Within the square itself were fashioned a series of impressive fountains […]. Reconstruction of the square was finally completed in 1974, when a 10-storey tall statue of Lenin replaced its predecessor above the city parade grounds. It was the largest representation of the Soviet leader ever erected in the USSR (1999: 194).

He adds that aside from Lenin, there were few Russian elements in the reconstructed square, rather the square features a ‘dispassionate display of geometrically spaced ensembles, linear transport corridors and smooth architectural surfaces’ (1999: 194). Lenin’s statue was taken down in 1992, and the square was renamed Independence Square, reinscribed with various new monuments (the poet Alisher Navoi and despot turned nationalist-symbol Timur). The layout remains intact half a century after the 1966 reconstruction. In Hotel Uzbekistan (Wallner, 2020), four skaters (from the US, Belarus and Russia) find spots in and around Independence Square and adjoining public spaces. Even the name of the video references the cosmic modernity of Hotel Uzbekistan (c. 1974), located a few blocks east of the square.

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In one sequence US pro-skater Ethan Loy begins at the entrance to the Navõz wedding palace where he ollies up to manual (riding on the back wheels only) on a marble slab, straight into a wall ride on the side of the building and off the slab. He continues, pushing away from the building towards the stairs leading down into Alisher Navoi Park, and ollies onto a marble hubba into a brief nose manual (riding on only the front wheels), down an access ramp, into a backside bluntslide on the ledge, into a nollie boardslide down the hubba on the next set of stairs, finishing with an ollie impossible on flat ground with fountains and wedding palace framed in the background. At one point in the video, Loy describes the city through the language of spots: Ex-Soviet architecture in Tashkent was really nice though. We skated one plaza in particular with a massive statue of a woman holding her child, with a man, just brilliant as can be. Cool little bronze below that you could skate, marble manual pads, random marble bumps. Tashkent has probably been the hottest city we’ve been to. Wax just automatically seeps into the ledge as if it’s butter.

Loy is referring to the memorial to the 1966 earthquake at the far northern end of the adjoining plazas across Abdulla Kadiry street (Courage or Muzhestvo, c. 1970, see Bell, 1999: 195). Bell’s description of the monument gives context to the elements that produce the spot (1999: 195-196). There is a waist-high black marble cube in front of the figures described by Loy (woman, child, man), with a clock, frozen at the time of the earthquake and a crack down the middle. From the clock the crack continues along the ground as angled black marble and reaches the base of the memorial where the figures stand, courageous and resilient through the tragedy. The crack symbolizes the cracked earth, and makes the ‘random marble bumps’ that Loy describes. Loy, Russian pro-skater Pascha Kuznetsov and US skater Rob Wootten make good use of the memorial. They skate the marble pedestal atop of which the figures rest, making sure to dodge the lights planted at the base to illuminate it at night. They skate the bottom of the figures themselves, their bronze legs meet the marble pedestal creating another series of angled blocks. And they skate the black marble cracks representing the earthquake splitting open the city. In one sequence, Kuznetsov launches a chest-high shifty off one of the cracks (an ollie where the skater turns as if to complete a full 180 degrees turn with their body and then shifts back in the air in

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Image 5.1 Ethan Loy waxing the Muzhestvo monument in Tashkent in Hotel Uzbekistan

Wallner, 2020; screenshot; used with permission

the other direction to land in the same trajectory as they started – it is one of my favourite skate tricks, simple and graceful, but very difficult). Loy ollies off one of the cracks and lands on the black cube, performing a nose grind (grinding the right angle of the surface with his front truck) and then popping out onto the flat ground. Returning to Loy’s description of Tashkent above, he describes feeling the urban fabric, the surfaces of spots. He rubs wax onto the cracked black cube while he talks about the heat, providing a slicker surface to perform his nose grind. Loy’s description is rich in texture; texture gained from a particular engagement with the landscape, an intimacy with its surfaces. It is not the knowledge of an expert on Uzbek history or symbolism. However, it is a subaltern expertise, a specific gaze that makes calculations about surfaces, angles, the combinations of possible tricks and the need for slight moderation, wax on the cube, to string together moments of exquisite creativity. Loy is also not oblivious to the aesthetics of the statue; he knows it has meaning and Soviet origins. Beyond that, more detail won’t help him get his nosegrind. Skating the memorial doesn’t seem to bother any locals, at least not that we see on video. Bell argues that the process of reinscribing Tashkent’s public landscape has never been democratic, there has never been an arena ‘in which subaltern readings of the landscape can effectively or openly contend with the official iconography of nationhood’ (1999: 187). It would be a stretch to claim skaters

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offer an open challenge to dominant modes of landscape production in this case, especially as their visits are fleeting. However, watching skaters roll through former Lenin Square, now Independence Square, and play amidst carefully placed objects and symbols with a healthy disregard for their meaning reduces the symbolic power of these objects, even if just for a moment. If the claim for Uzbek independence is materialized in, say, the towering 65 metre flagpole in front of the Turkistan Palace, when the skaters in Hotel Uzbekistan drag a bench over to the base of the flagpole and use the angled marble rise to launch tricks over the bench, they reduce these symbols of power to objects of play, assemblages of surfaces and angles to perform their craft. They leave marks on the spot, wheels marks, wax, wood and paint chips, and they leave their mark in an adjacent cultural sphere, as Tashkent’s most important arena for ideological wrangling becomes a spot to play in a widely circulated skate video, archived online.

Ala-Too Square (Bishkek) Bishkek has featured in several skate videos in the last decade, and here I will focus on the two most popular: Meet the Stans (Wallner, 2012), an independent skate video featuring a team of skaters from the US, UK, Russia and Europe made by Patrik Wallner, and Children of the Sun (Abes, 2015) by the French filmer Sebastian Abes made for an energy drink company. The focal point of skateboarding in both videos is Ala-Too Square and surrounding plazas, an astounding landscape jammed with memorials, statues, and open spaces. Bishkek retains much of its Soviet-planning, even in the city centre. There are new symbols, and old symbols have been moved around, but the underlying material basis for the planned centre remains, albeit in a dustier state than cities in its northern neighbour Kazakhstan. In Meet the Stans (Wallner, 2012), the skaters travel from Beijing through Urumqi in Xinjiang and then by train to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Here they skate the marble ledges and stairs in the city’s expansive public spaces. The group then crosses into Kyrgyzstan. In discussing the transition between Almaty and Bishkek, US pro-skater Dan Zvereff discusses arriving at Almaty’s bus station: ‘already it started looking a lot different, not so clean, European and nice’. Zvereff can’t help but index development as levels of order, cleanliness and relative dissimilarities to Europe. Central Almaty, where the group spent their time skateboarding, is comparable to ‘European’ levels of cleanliness and order. The bus station is not. And

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this serves as a portent for what is to come when they cross the border. As the video shows footage of the borderlands between Almaty and Bishkek, where Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan meet, US pro-skater Kenny Reed begins describing what he saw: Kyrgyzstan is still more undeveloped. I think the infrastructure of that country is still trying to get a foothold and figure out who they are, and who’s where, who’s in control of what, because their ethnicities are a lot more divided as they have Uzbeks and Tajiks in their country as well […]. They’re busy trying to figure out how to get along and how to organize the government and make everyone happy.

Reed too engages in indexing development, and it is no surprise that he mentions infrastructure given how acutely aware skaters are of infrastructure when surveying a landscape for potential spots. Poor or absent infrastructure usually means bad surfaces and limited obstacles. Reed is also conscious of recent ethnic struggles in Kyrgyzstan, which at the time of filming the video was likely a reference to the 2010 ethnic violence and anti-government protests (see Agadjanian, 2020). The skate footage from Bishkek is a dazzling foreground against the mashed up backdrop of Soviet and post-Soviet urban space and Ala-Too Square and surrounds are almost always in frame. Kosmarskaya et al. refer to Ala-Too Square as ‘the most politically and symbolically charged space of contemporary Bishkek’, following the political protests and upheavals in 2005 and 2010 (2017: 147). They write, The appearance of new monuments in the central square provides a great deal of material for reflection on the role of the state in urban transformation; on the search for a new ideological basis for the developing new state; on how modern Kyrgyzstan is re-evaluating its Soviet past; and on how the concepts of patriarchy and modernity are competing in different versions of the “national idea.” (2017: 157).

Mathijas Pelkmans (2017) discusses Ala-Too Square in his ethnography of the changing ideological landscape of Kyrgyzstan paying particular attention to the rotation of statues in front of the National History Museum. Pelkmans notes the current form of the square dates to 1984. The statue of Lenin remained until 2003 before being relocated behind the museum. Lenin was replaced by the Erkindik (liberty) statue, a woman with Kyrgyz features holding a tunduk (the wooden frame of a yurt, a nationalist symbol)

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in her hands meant to symbolize freedom and democracy that lasted until 2011 when she was replaced by Manas, medieval king and unifier of Kyrgyz peoples (2017: 19-20). Pelkmans writes: ‘[t]he passing away of the communist Lenin, who made way for the liberal Erkindik, who in turn was replaced by the national hero Manas, provides one glimpse of the ideological shifts that unfolded in Kyrgyzstan’ (2017: 20). Not only do these rotating statues signal ‘the difficulty of producing a “state idea” able to infuse a sufficiently sacred aura’ (2017: 22), but Manas is a shift away from objects that signalled the future (Lenin) to remembering a glorious, if imprecise, past (Manas), with an interlude of timeless, though ill-timed, freedom in-between (Erkindik). Lenin remains, relocated, and as Sally Cummings writes, the statue of Lenin has come to possess a timelessness ‘because he symbolizes process, change and revolution and this symbolization can serve more eras than the Soviet one’ (2013: 617). In and around Ala-Too there is also a statue to Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov (across Chuy Avenue and Kiev Street directly facing Manas, c. 2011); a statue to Kurmandzhan Datka (the ‘Aly Queen’, c. 2004); Victory Square with several monuments commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War (Second World War) including the Victory Monument featuring the statue of a woman holding a cup (seemingly waiting for a returning soldier) under three connected yurt-like arches (c. 1985); the Friendship Monument with a circle of Kyrgyz figures seemingly floating off the ground (nomads, workers, farmers) suspended around two tall plinths (c. 1974); busts of various notable Kyrgyz rulers and writers; a statue of Marx and Engels chatting; the (relocated) statue of Lenin; and a remarkable monument dedicated to the protestors who stormed the parliament in 2005. The square and adjacent parks are surrounded by government offices, more memorials, museums and libraries, the philharmonic hall, the ‘sports palace’ named after the Kyrgyz strongman Baatyr Kaba Uulu Kozhomkul (with a statue of Kozhomkul hoisting a surprised horse over his head, c. 1974), and open spaces filled with gardens held up by angled marble walls; ideal for skateboarding. These symbolic readings are lost on the skaters who desire Ala-Too and surrounds for their material properties. The skaters give Ala-Too a new life, an adjacent life, as a shredscape; captured and archived on video. In Children of the Sun, photographer Kevin Mettalier remarks: ‘it’s very crazy because if you take the main street, every 200 metres you have a big square with a plaza with Lenin, or some very famous guys from communism’. As skaters roll through central Bishkek, the rapid edits of tricks performed in different spots in the square gives the impression of stitching together its parts, its

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monuments, its historic episodes into a radically different interpretation of space. In Meet the Stans, Russian pro-skater Gosha Konyshev pops a heelflip from the flat of Ala-Too Square up onto the lower platform of the Manas statue, the low camera angle showing the enormous Kyrgyz flag on one side of the frame and the State History museum on the other, Konyshev takes an extra push and floats a frontside 360 (degree) ollie down a set of five stairs. Dutch pro-skater Michael Mackrodt rolls out through the centre of the soaring yurt-frame of the Victory Monument and kickflips over a wide step onto the marble surface of the plaza, takes a push and spins a tre-flip, turns to avoid running into a child on a tricycle, the ollies onto a low, long marble hubba and balances a nose manual all the way down before dropping into more plaza. In Children of the Sun, several members of the skate crew perform flip trick variations down the wide six stairway in front of the brutalist philharmonic orchestra building, watched by groups of locals sitting on the adjacent fountain, and joined by some local skaters on the flat part of the plaza. No one seems to care that much that skaters grind along the marble ledges of memorials to national unity, Kyrgyz culture, wars, political struggles and former rulers. The authorities also seem oblivious. However, the skaters catch the attention of the police in Bishkek, momentarily, in Children of the Sun. US pro-skater Brian Delatorre attempts an ollie onto and grind down a double-kinked marble hubba (a ledge adjacent to one set of stairs, a flat landing, another set of stairs) going from the State History Museum into Ala-Too Square. Delatorre gets close to landing on a few before a trio of police, one brandishing a machine gun, charge towards him. Apes is able to film snippets of the encounter, and it is narrated by French pro-skater Charles Collet, who was standing nearby. Collet recalls: ‘I saw the cops running in the street with a big AK-47, I was like, “no, no, no it’s not possible, it can’t be for Brian (Delatorre)”’. On camera the police start escorting Delatorre from the spot. Collet adds: ‘Most of the time they can be really angry at the beginning and you don’t know why. After they start laughing with you. They know everything is cool. They are just asking for money’. In the video the police are shown shaking hands with the skaters before leaving the area. It’s difficult to know whether the foreign skaters get a longer or shorter leash with the authorities, the ‘white mischief’ discussed in Chapter 3. At the very least they get some immersion into petty corruption, gift giving, and face-saving. Not exactly China’s ‘communist wonderland’ but the rapid shift in the police demeanour from machine gun toting to laughing works for the skaters, though not in other post-Soviet landscapes as will be discussed in the final section of the chapter.

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I visited Ala-Too Square in 2018 while in Bishkek for a conference to check out the spots and seek out skaters. It was peak summer and the city was crowded with people, especially in the evenings. The flat ground around the statue of Manas was full of kids playing around. There was a vendor hiring out roller-skates, a man peddling candy-floss, and scores of Kyrgyz posing for photographs in family groups. I visited each day for a week, but there were no skaters around. Skate trips to Kyrgyzstan are about searching, not feeding a local consumer market for skate products. As local skater Roman Petenev discusses in Children of the Sun, the local scene is very small, especially when compared to the scene in Almaty in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Even more challenging is getting equipment. Petenev again: ‘I broke my board and I must order it from eBay. I can’t just go to the shop and buy here’. In Children of the Sun, French skater Manu Etchegoyen does a fakieollie to fakie-manual to fakie-treflip ‘out’ along the lower platform of the aforementioned statue of Lenin relegated to the rear of the History Museum. It’s a curious conversation between the living and immortalized: Lenin gesticulating (what Sarah Cummings refers to as the ‘characteristic haranguing pose’ (2013: 606)), while Etchegoyen glides along the smooth surfaces of the spot. In person the spot has more elements to skate than appears on video. A small hubba, also of marble, extends out from the first set of stairs leading away from Lenin and the museum, there is a long flat landing, then another set of four stairs with a long marble ledge extending for several metres. The ledges on both ends of the staircase are waxed well, and there are chips out of the marble. The gaze that brought Etchegoyen to the spot is shared by plenty of other skaters too, giving new life to Lenin as a skate spot despite being hidden away from the frontstage. I spent sometime early one morning following the lines around the spot. Performing a trick down the four-stair staircase or the long marble ledge that extends out from it takes the skater away from the statue and into a wide open space of paved walkway. The spot’s lines channel the skater away from Ala-Too Square but in the direction of Lenin’s gesturing hand. Squint, and it’s as if Lenin is cheering a skater on, gesturing for them to keep going to the next set of stairs, the next ledge, and out onto the road. Or perhaps he is about to burst into celebration, to turn his sweeping gesture into a clenched fist. Standing in Bishkek at this moment I could understand why these trips appeal to skaters of a certain disposition. The aim is to find spots and stack footage, but aside from that, to find evidence of spots used by other skaters is its own joy. It’s like finding an outpost of an exiled cross-cultural minority sect far from its heartlands. Paul O’Connor discusses the act of pilgrimage to

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iconic spots, ‘paying homages to locations and their histories’, underpinned by knowledge of the skaters that made them famous and/or the videos that captured these moments (2020: 162). Bishkek’s spots are not iconic. Discovering skate marks while moving through urban landscapes far and wide lacks the deliberate agency of pilgrimage, it is more accidental, but the marks left behind resonate immediately. I am not sure who made the marks on the marble, whether it was one of the pros in Meet the Stans or a beginner emulating what they have seen live or on video. Given how thick the wax is, scores of skaters have used the spot, scores of skaters sharing the same gaze, the same desire for assemblages otherwise overlooked. Seeing the skate marks on the surfaces is like receiving a coded message, and the further away from skateboarding’s heartlands, the more significant the message seems to be. It is hard not to look around hoping a skater might roll-up. Or to sit and wait in case they do.

The Outer Grid Skaters also travel to smaller cities and towns in post-Soviet Asia searching for spots. The promise of a Soviet grid, a square or two, and monuments old and new are enough to justify the trip, to take the risk. In The Kazakhstan Triangle (Wallner 2016), skaters travel by train out from the spectacular landscape of Astana (Nur Sultan) to Aktau and then Aralsk, on the Aral Sea, and then Almaty, where there are spots galore. In the port city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea, the skaters come to grips with the decaying urban landscapes, ‘woefully mired in the Soviet past’ (Koch, 2018: 124). Their first impressions of Aktau are a marked contrast to the awe at Astana discussed in Chapter 4. US pro-skater Nestor Judkins remarks, ‘it was built in the 1960s and there are all these Soviet blocks left to decay, paint flaking off, and a depressing little playground in between each building’. There are also radical juxtapositions. Australian pro-skater Gabriel Summers adds, ‘it was really weird. We’d be walking through these commissioned (public housing) flats, and you’d walk another five minutes and be by the beach in a really nice hotel’. The video cuts to Summers and Judkins sitting alone in a vast hotel dining room. The walls and floor of the dining room are fish tanks, and as they eat, fish of various sizes swim around them, and Summers comments in voiceover: ‘I didn’t think I saw another guest’. Later Judkins is captured walking around Aktau’s landscape taking photos. In voiceover Judkins says, ‘the majority of spots on this trip are at memorials and parks. In Aktau a lot of the spots were at memorials. Just crazy banks, “manny pads”; all these marble and granite

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manual pads which are always interesting’. Soviet planning can always be counted on, even in cities bypassed by post-Soviet economic flows. In Hotel Uzbekistan (Wallner, 2020) the skaters leave Tashkent behind and travel by train to Nukus in the semi-autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, the frontline of ecological catastrophe from the disappearing Aral Sea. As the train pulls into Nukus, US skater Rob Wootten announces: ‘We are arriving in Nukus today at 9am and we believe we are the first skateboarders ever to explore this city’. The spots in Nukus are fairly ordinary, but it is the idea of finding spots here in the most unlikely of places, in places most viewers have never heard of, that drives these journeys. In Nukus, the skaters spend time at a decrepit spot: a flat green handrail alongside a low building with a smooth run up and dubious roll-away. Ethan Loy grinds the rail and lands in the dirt pavement, sending a cloud of dust into the air. If the spot were in Los Angeles or Shanghai, Loy probably wouldn’t bother and there would be better spots nearby. However, in skateboarding’s frontiers you take what you can get. Wootten explains: Not knowing what else we were going to find in that city and knowing we were on a tight time crunch, Ethan decided to skate it regardless. He got the first trick in Nukus and from there the spots definitely got better.

The skaters find better spots in Nukus: marble ledges, marble bank-to-ledges, handrails, an expansive tiled plaza in front of the Nukus Museum of Art and some other public buildings. They skate around and through the city, animating near-empty squares, monuments and public buildings. In one sequence Wootten skates through part of the central square. He ollies onto a tall marble ledge, then over a gap, onto a backslide boardslide on another ledge and then down onto the pavement. His line fills half the screen, in the other half of the shot is a wedding party, the bridge and groom in white dress and tuxedo posing for photos in the sun. Pasha Kuznetsov and Vladik Scholtz skate a gap over a curved access ramp and handrails in front of the Tashkent Hotel. Kuznetsov lands a nollie and then a frontside 180 kickflip over the gap and into a tiled square. Scholtz gets the final trick in the Nukus segment. The camera follows him as he pushes hard past an entrance foyer to the hotel, staffed by a security guard (checking his phone), and launches an enormous nollie kickflip over the gap into a flat square, landing in front of a Soviet-style mural of Karakalpak life. The juxtaposition between Scholtz rolling away and the socialist realism leaping off the wall captures the desired aesthetic of skateboarding in the outer grids of post-Soviet urbanism.

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Later in Hotel Uzbekistan the footage cuts to the skaters walking around the heritage buildings of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand. The skaters move from the Soviet grid to the tourist grid; and search the heritage infrastructure for spots. In one of the sequences, Wootten boardslides to shove-it out down a hubba next to the historic Registan mosque in Samarkand. Spectators line the path, including uniformed school children. They clap enthusiastically and cheer when Wooten makes the trick, and he climbs back up the stairs to receive congratulations from the other skaters. He says to the camera: ‘I think that wraps it up for the Uzbekistan trip’, before gesturing with open arms to the majesty of the mosque. Then as a voiceover narration: […] just coming from the US, you skate a lot of spots there too. But none of the spots have as much history as the spots here. Not so much for skateboarding but with being involved with the Silk Road and just being here from what feels like the beginning of time.

This extends the topology of new frontiers, of lands untouched, into deep time. It is not just about finding new spots, but finding spots with history. Unlike in China or Dubai, where the spots are produced by recent urban booms, skating a heritage site ties Wooten to an imprecise but keenly felt past, vaguely labelled the Silk Road. The marble hubba he boardslides in front of the mosque looks fairly new, but the site itself is centuries old. The spot has history. Not as a skate spot like, say, the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum hubba discussed in Chapter 3 or the Wilshire Gap to Ledge in Chapter 2, but civilizational history recalibrated for the consumption in the present (Paskaleva, 2015). To skate this hubba, land the trick, capture it, share it, consume it is to enrol the spot, the landscape, the city, the country, the region and the vague civilization past into skate culture. Some spots, like Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen draw thousands of skateboarders a year, others like this hubba in Samarkand may not see another skater for a long time. But it’s been enrolled, marked. It can be visited again. And this place, the city, the buildings are introduced to thousands of skaters worldwide. The heritage landscape can also become a shredscape.

Haunted Spots Part of the reinterpretation of space, of landscape, of architecture that skateboarding brings, is to give new meaning to the built form (Borden, 2001). A handrail goes from a functional object to a desired spot through

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the skater gaze. The spread of skateboarding to new parts of the world, and Asia in particular, gives new meaning to patches of the urban landscape. In most cases it doesn’t matter what the assemblage of surfaces and obstacles is or what brought it into being, what I have referred as the middle-finger to complex causality. Banks, empty apartment buildings, public infrastructure, memorials, the calculations that matter are whether it is skateable, what tricks could be performed at the spot, whether the skaters will get harassed. To put it another way, skaters pride themselves on just going for it. See the spot, think of which tricks could be done, grab a filmer and don’t think twice. If there is trouble, ignore, beg, run, or offer to fix the damage. Some of these assurances unravel on landscapes haunted by recent conflicts, unsettled sovereignty, and anxious urban dwellers. Skaters can be affected by landscapes where meaning seeps into the material objects, the assemblages, in unexpected ways. Once meaning seeps in, it is hard to look at the surfaces and objects in the same way. It can be hard to hold the middle-finger steady, emotion, haunting, can overwhelm. In keeping with the discussion of various ‘scapes’ from Chapter 1, landscapes heavy with memory are often referred to as memoryscapes. Phillips and Reyes define the ‘memoryscape’ as [a] complex landscape upon which memory and memory practices move, come into contact, are contested by, and contest other forms of remembrance; older ways of conceptualising the past – largely framed in terms of national and local perspectives – are unsettled by the dynamic movements of globalization and new memories and new practices of remembrance emerging (2011: 13-14).

Thus memoryscapes are a ‘complex and vibrant plane upon which memories emerge, are contested, transform, encounter other memories, mutate and multiply’ (2011: 14). It allows for inclusion of actual memorials themselves – statues, plaques, murals, mosaics – the built environment that hosts them – plazas, squares, thoroughfares – and the images, videos, and other digital circulations of these sites. The most revealing example of the tensions between the memoryscape and the shredscape is the hour-long documentary Abkhazia (Lindevall, 2017), screened at film festivals in Europe and Brazil and also available online. Abkhazia follows the journey of a group of Finnish and Russian skaters to the Republic of Abkhazia in 2012. Following the AbkhazianGeorgian war of 1992-1993, Abkhazia declared independence from Georgia in 1999, though no other countries recognized the declaration. Following

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the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 (over South Ossetia), Russia recognized Abkhazian sovereignty and a few other countries followed, though for the most part Abkhazia’s sovereignty is defacto (Clogg, 2008; Trier et al., 2010). The population of Abkhazia has reduced since the end of the Soviet Union as Mingrelians and other Georgian communities have fled back to Georgia (Kolstø & Blakkisru, 2013), leaving entire stretches of landscape in ruins (Venhovens, 2019). There have been outbreaks of violence between communities and political protests in Abkhazia periodically in the years since. The opening shots of Abkhazia (the skate documentary) are bleak. Crumbling infrastructure, empty streets, empty piers extending into the Black Sea. With a stirring song in the background, Abkhazia is introduced as a former Soviet resort town, and a series of title cards narrate the arc of conflict, unsettled sovereignty, with the sequence of location shots closing on the Abkhazian flag waving through some electricity lines. Not your average skate video opener. The title cards turn to the purpose of the trip (translated from Finnish in provided subtitles): ‘the skaters hoped to find new and unique spots to film. No skaters have previously travelled there’. The scene cuts to an image of one of the skaters shot from below the knees, just legs pushing along an asphalt road with that distinctive sound of urethane wheels on rough surfaces, translating the landscape into something intelligible for viewers. The film is certainly staged as a journey into the unknown, a search for spots in a new frontier, an unstable frontier. In Abkhazia the Finnish skaters speak to each other in Finnish, the Russians in Russian, and they speak to each other in English. At almost an hour Abkhazia features much more ‘behind the scenes’ content than actual skateboarding. The skaters meet in Russia and skate in the city of Krasnodar before crossing the border. Once inside Abkhazia the prospects for spots are slim. There are beautiful green foothills, cows roaming on potholed roads, a man in a city park with a lion on a leash, and hollowed-out buildings, some with trees and other vegetation reclaiming the brick and concrete. The capital, Sukhumi, has some open spaces, especially the waterfront along the Black Sea, which is paved and has a few skateable obstacles; benches and concrete blocks. The skaters quickly get some clips, but they are attracting attention from locals. Soon a man appears in army fatigues and is filmed in conversation with skater and translator/fixer Kirill Korobov. Korobov pleads (translated from Russian in the subtitles): ‘it is really hard to find a spot that is good for skateboarding here’. The police/soldier has his own plea translated as: ‘We are asking you as if you are our grandsons. Do not skate here!’

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The skaters move on. After Finnish skater Samu Karvonen manages a kickflip to ride-down a kinked marble hubba at the front of the state philharmonic hall, the scene cuts to a session on the waterfront at a striking memorial. It features a statue of a near-naked male, frighteningly muscular, lying horizontally, one arm planted into the ground, the other making a fist pointed to the sky. Behind him is a horse, the arc of its neck matching the trajectory of the man’s fist, its limbs only half-length. The man and the horse appear suspended in the air, held up only by the man’s arm. Around the statue is a smooth marble semi-circular stage, a perfect ‘manual pad’. The skaters take turns to perform tricks up onto the stage, land on two wheels, roll the length of the stage and then perform another trick off two wheels onto the lower ground. Soon a man appears on the edge of the frame, well-dressed, late middle-aged. The camera focuses on the man who speaks quietly and politely in Russian (translated from Russian in the subtitles). Man: I’m sorry, you can’t do this here (After some confusion he tries with Korobov). Man: You are not allowed to do this here. Korobov: We can’t skate here? Man: It’s a monument dedicated to the tragic pages of our history. You can’t do it here. Please understand this. Thank you.

In skate videos it is common to see skaters plead to be allowed to keep skating, usually with police/security guards, or wait until whoever has told them to stop goes away and then start again. Here, the skaters go quiet and walk away, unsure of how to react. The ‘tragic pages of our history’ eviction is not something they are used to. The next scene is another monument in a park, this one with a knee-high marble ledge. The scene opens with Finnish skater Miki Tähtinen sitting on the ledge waxing it to make it easier to slide or grind along. Waxing a ledge is an act of claiming, even before a skater attempts a trick, and it leaves behind a trace, a trail, evidence of a skate session on urban landscapes all over the world (Vivoni, 2009). Waxing is usually a defiant act; a skater approaches an object in space and furiously rubs wax on it. It is such a curious act to witness for those unfamiliar with skate culture because it doesn’t look like other forms of vandalism. Skaters don’t wax to damage a surface, but to enable the reinterpretation of the object; like lighting a stage. Tähtinen is self-conscious waxing the monument. His eyes dart around. He even says (translated from Finnish in the subtitles), ‘I don’t want to wax it’. A voice of camera replies: ‘Just wax it!’. Tähtinen pauses and asks if

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anyone is watching. The camera pans up as he waxes on the tiered ledges, and the statue is revealed; a man in a suit and tie with a book in hand, the Abkhazian writer Bagrat Shinkuba (1917-2004). Shinkuba is the national writer/poet of the Abkhazian nation, and his work has dealt with identity, exile and ‘cultural extinction’ (see Gould, 2016). Tähtinen tries his trick on Shinkuba’s monument a few times. After each attempt he stops to look around. The other skaters are restless too, pacing at the edge of the frame. After one attempted boardslide on the upper ledge, Tähtinen steps off his board and shouting can be heard off-camera (Image 5.2). A burly middle-aged man rides into shot on a bicycle, clearly agitated, shouting (translated from Russian in the subtitles): ‘I’m asking you why are you climbing? What are you doing? Do you know whose monument this is?’ He waits for a reply. Nothing. He adds; ‘Fuck your mother!’ and rides off, adding, ‘you have no shame’. The skaters huddle around a bench, sullen. They discuss whether the monument was marked during the skating. The Finnish skaters discuss whether Tähtinen should try the trick again. He doesn’t want to. He scans the area and mentions that there is an old lady watching nearby. They all look around. Tähtinen tries one more time and gets the trick. The scene cuts to the statue of Shinbuka still on screen, haunting the spot. As he gets his things together, Karvonen says ‘we’re really sorry if we have desecrated some writer’, he pauses then adds, ‘maybe that writer would have been really stoked that his grave is being skated. He would have been like “I have dedicated my whole life to those who act like children at heart”’. The sense of haunting runs through their attempts to skate other spots in Sukhumi, including the former building of the council of ministries. The heavily shelled building is an enduring symbol of the various phases of conflict and Abkhazia’s unsettled sovereignty. The skaters take some tentative pushes around the open paved area in front of the building. There is a monument on the grass next to a pathway, and it works as a spot for skaters who can run or ollie from the pavement over the grass, ride the angled sides of the monument and then back onto the angled bank, into a big ollie over the grass gap onto the lower pavement. Utilizing the spot requires quick feet and creativity to combine tricks on the various surfaces and angles. It looks striking with the hollowed-out shell of the building looming behind. Karvonen gets onto the angled bank, ollie to frontside tailslide on the top ledge, then back onto the bank and then onto the pavement. Russian proskater Gosha Konyshev rolls from the other side, does a kickflip to noseslide, then drops down to the pavement.

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Image 5.2 Miki Tähtinen skates the memorial to Bagrat Shinkuba moments before a local intervenes in Abkhazia

Lindevall, 2017; screenshot; used with permission

Soon an elderly man walks out of the building and tries to engage the skaters. He is seen on camera talking to the Russians skaters gesturing to the monument. The Finnish skaters discuss what they think is going on. It is difficult to work out who says what. Karvonen says (translated from Finnish in subtitles), ‘he probably lived here during wartime’. There are shots of the man going back into the building. Someone adds. ‘it’s not long ago when it was a really bad time here. So I understand when people here don’t like it when we…’ and trails off. And then: ‘They haven’t forgotten that yet. A lot of people died here’. Back on camera, Tähtinen says to Karvonen, ‘I can imagine that our jumping around here with our boards doesn’t look respectful at all’. Karvonen offers a conciliatory: ‘But we come to represent freedom too’. He adds with a smile, ‘even if it’s not the kind of freedom he expects’. Every spot they find provokes a sensitive reaction. In Abkhazia the spots mean too much. The landscape is loaded with memories and pain, and it begins the weigh on the skaters. It’s not property that is being defended by locals, but memory. As the journey goes on, the search for spots in Sukhumi becomes a search for spots without meaning. Thus with limited cultural tools the skaters attempt to navigate the city’s emotional geography, the memoryscape, searching for spots that have no meaningful past.

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The skaters have some luck improvising spots in the shipyards – skating from one chunk of concrete to another, on the rusting hulls of barges, and inside (yes, inside) a rusted tank. They wander on foot through wastelands of ship parts and industrial debris. There are some curious locals, including kids who have a turn skateboarding, and fishers and welders. Things are less hostile here. The landscape is partially disassembled, strewn with objects once part of functioning infrastructure, and everyone around is making do. Spots without meaning are hard to find and even harder to skate. Interspersed with the footage of interactions around the decaying ships and sheds, Russian pro-skater Victor Terentyev makes several attempts to ollie from one concrete construction block, to a manual on the other, to a kickflip out down a drop on the rough concrete surface of the docks. He battles hard, falling on an already strapped wrist several times and rolling over in pain. It is a rough spot, not the smooth marble of the Shinkuba memorial or the spots around Krasnodar across the border. On the final day in Abkhazia the skaters find a pavement gap; a spot created by a driveway or change in height of the pavement allowing skaters to launch from one side, perform an ollie, spin or flip variation over the lower section, and land again on the high side and roll away. Sukhumi is a long way to travel for what ends up being a fairly utilitarian spot, however it is the search, the seeking, and the setting that matter. A group of children sit on a window ledge alongside the gap and watch. During a few of the trick attempts they let out cries of ‘oooh’ at the near misses. After getting close to clearing the gap, Tähtinen starts his push for another try, photographers crouch ready at the edge of the frame, he pushes hard, clears the gap, but lands with his weight too far back and the board flies into one of the watching children, banging into his legs. The boy screams out, puts on a brave face, then starts crying and hobbles back to his house with the help of his friends. Korobov, shirtless with his pants sagging below his boxer shorts follows the kids to make sure they are ok, leaving the skaters to agonize over what just happened. Suddenly, the terrain feels hostile again. Curious on-lookers appear menacing. But things diffuse quickly. Tähtinen gets the ollie, the kid is ok, and through Korobov’s translation then relayed from Karvonen to Tähtinen some adult (either a relative of the kid or an on-looker) reportedly says: ‘just kick the kids away next time’. The session is back on. As the session over the pavement gap continues, Lindevall cuts to Samu Karvonen, tired and frustrated after several attempts at a trick, lying on his back on the pavement. He says that despite being a beautiful country, Abkhazia is not a good place for a skate trip. He says in Finnish (translated through subtitles): ‘I think this is the only spot to skate in the whole town

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that no one has been buried in’. He adds, smiling: ‘Think about this. If Mikki (Tähtinen) had killed that kid, no one would be able to skate this spot anymore’. As the journey draws to a close the skaters pass back through Krasnodar and skate the spots in this city again, they appear jubilant to be back in a place where the assemblages of surfaces, objects and obstacles mean so little. Abkhazia shows the limits of skating on unstable ground, where the search for spots is hampered by the emotional geographies of the haunted memoryscape.3

Conclusion The search for spots in post-Soviet Asia takes skaters and f ilmers from the spectacular urban landscapes described in Chapter 4 to the faithful squares, monuments, and grids of Soviet-era planning. Soviet planning promises enormous public parks, plazas, buildings and memorials. There are always spots in the Soviet-era urban core, regardless of what else may have changed around it or above it. Skaters and filmers also travel to the outer grid, the surfaces and plazas of regional towns and heritage sites. Throughout post-Soviet Asia, even in its neglected corners, there are always monuments. Monuments have flat ground, ledges, stairs, and embankments. Surfaces are smooth, with concrete, granite and marble. When viewed from below the knees, these elements of the landscape are constant, while vernacular forms and recent booms are ancillary. The shared aesthetics and desired assemblages do have limits, however, in the haunted landscapes of more unstable post-Soviet polities, such as Abkhazia. The emotional geographies of Abkhazia’s unsettled sovereignty disturb the skaters’ instinct to drop the board and go for it. The encounters with locals in Abkhazia give skaters pause and then, doubt. They have to convince one another that maybe what they are doing has some resonance with the struggles that produced the memoryscapes they now want to skate. In the end, the skaters in Abkhazia are all pleased to get back to more meaningless assemblages, more mundane landscapes, where they have some conf idence in their trained eye, their shared gaze for spots. In the skate videos featured in 3 By contrast, Russian skate company’s Absurd Skateboards’ video Absurd in Abkhazia (Barabaka, 2017) steers clear of the spots on the haunted landscape that caused friction in Abkhazia. Absurd is managed by Kirill Korobov, the translator and f ixer in Abkhazia and many of Wallner’s f ilms, and the Russian skaters in Abkhazia – Gosha Konyshev and Victor Terentyev – both ride for Absurd, though were not featured in Absurd in Abkhazia.

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this chapter the journey through post-Soviet Asia is at the forefront of the narrative presented on screen. The stories are tied together by the search for spots in unlikely places, and this narrative-driven approach to skate video is essential to the search for spots in new frontiers, the focus of the following chapter.

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Skateboarding’s New Frontiers Abstract Chapter 6, Skateboarding’s New Frontiers, analyses skate videos captured in Iran, India and Palestine, and categorizes these as frontiers within the skate cartography of Asia. Skate video captured in these frontiers creates an alternative narrative of place. The spots themselves translate unfamiliar places into familiar assemblages. Tehran may have murals of depicting Ayatollah Khomeini and slogans like ‘Down with USA’, but it also has long marble ledges, handrails, plazas and welcoming skaters. Further, the encounters between visiting skaters, local skaters and other urban dwellers produce moments of shared contact, a counter-public embrace that sidesteps geopolitics and puts these skate communities ‘on the map’. For pro-skaters, filmers and fixers, journeys along skateboarding’s backroads, its uncharted trails, is simultaneously exhilarating and irrational; beautifully irrational. Keywords: skateboarding, skate video, frontiers, Iran, India, Palestine, occupation, concrete

The opening shots of The Edge of Arabia (Wallner, 2015) capture Russian pro-skater Gosha Konyshev skating along an empty road on Socotra Island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Yemen. As Konyshev skates, clippings from US news channels discussing the civil conflict in Yemen – at the time in its early stages – are interspersed. Konyshev scrambles up hills, encounters a goat, gazes at the famed dragon’s blood trees (dracaena cinnabari), and dives into a water hole. He skates down a dry riverbed and then hikes through more trees interspersed with a television pundit talking about the dangers of instability in Yemen for the rest of the world. The juxtaposition is clear. While news of the civil war reaches viewers in the West, Konyshev is in a parallel Yemen. Later Konyshev is in the capital Sana’a’s old town, nollie kickflipping down a set of five stairs as a kid watches perched on the hubba and two men watch from a nearby bench. Konyshev keeps pushing and performs a

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463723138_ch06

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frontside wall-ride along a retaining wall and down a set of stairs. Throughout the sequence the skyline of the old town – so battered in airstrikes in the years following the filming – witnesses Konyshev’s reinterpretation of heritage. Sana’a is an ancient city and following attempts to ‘modernize’ and demolish parts of the old city during the 1960s, preservation and heritage began in the 1980s and accelerated after Yemen’s reunif ication in 1994 (Lamprakos, 2015: 43-46). It turns out Sana’a has banks, ledges, and curbs too. Footage from Sana’a makes up only a small part of The Edge of Arabia, the skaters get clips in Oman, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon. The film ends with a classic moment of encounter. Konyshev is under a dragon’s blood tree and is joined by a local boy, squatting and curious. Konyshev reaches over and demonstrates to him how the different parts of the skateboard work, ending with a gesture of the rider going up and down, like a wave. The boy nods and reaches for the board to have a turn, sufficiently briefed and ready to roll down the road. As skaters travel further and further in the search for spots, extending the imaginary map of urban Asia and enrolling more and more patches of landscape into a shared knowledge of the region, finding spots untouched by skateboarding becomes a fixation. For pro-skaters, filmers and fixers, journeys along skateboarding’s backroads, its uncharted trails, is simultaneously exhilarating and irrational; beautifully irrational. What if there are no spots? In China spots are everywhere, and there are thousands more waiting to be found in cities across the country as discussed in Chapter 3. Korea and Japan have been on the map for decades. They have deep rooted skate communities, world-class skateboarders, and are huge markets for consuming skate goods. Similar observations hold in Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and parts of Indonesia, though at a lower volume and smaller scale. Spectacle cities may have small skate communities but their showpiece architecture produces spots with varied modes of access. In the former-Soviet Union, urban landscapes vary dramatically, but the aesthetics and scale of Soviet urban planning – public squares, memorials, monuments – ensure that no matter what the state of the contemporary landscape, the prospect of finding spots is high (see Chapter 5). In skateboarding’s frontiers nothing is guaranteed. This chapter is focuses on the search for spots in skateboarding’s frontiers captured in skate video from Iran, India and Palestine. There is a voluminous literature on frontiers, and the relationships between frontiers and urbanization in various disciplines; a literature within which several of my recent projects are bound up (McDuie-Ra, 2016; Kikon & McDuie-Ra, 2020). Here, I want to depart from the uses of frontier as moored to a particular

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territorial configuration, an identifiable objective reality with a list of features and instead lean on the definition of frontiers as ‘imaginative’ zones. As Cons and Eilenberg argue, conceiving frontiers as imaginative zones draws attention to the ways ‘material realties of place are inextricably bound to various visions of and cultural vocabularies for what the frontier might be’ (2019: 7). In the cultural vocabulary of skateboarding, lands with no known spots, few skaters, and slim prospects of capturing footage are frontiers. They are ‘in relation to’ but ‘at a distance from’ (Cons & Eilenberg, 2019: 13) other nodes on the skater’s map, the cartography of spots. The cultural vocabulary of skateboarding is marginal when compared to the serious cultural vocabularies of national identity, politics, capitalism, and sovereignty. However, this cultural vocabulary is, as I have argued throughout this book, deeply significant in the lives of its millions of its adherents and is spreading throughout the world, especially in Asia. From this perspective, as skateboarding spreads the landscapes discussed in this chapter can be considered skateboarding’s new frontiers. To be clear, I am not arguing that these urban landscapes, territories and polities are frontiers in all – or even most – spheres of their material, cultural and socio-political existence. I am arguing that they are frontiers for skateboarding. As such they hold a special place in the skater gaze. In this chapter I make three arguments. First, as frontiers, cities such as Tehran, Delhi and Ramallah – along with scores of others unable to be profiled here – hold a special place in the imagination of intrepid skaters and filmers. They promise discovery, challenge, and, ultimately, a prize. The prize is not just the spots; it’s developing the capacity, the vision, to find more. If you can find spots in these landscapes you can find them anywhere. And once you can find them anywhere there is no limit to the trail. To be sure, these trails don’t appeal to all skaters, and many of the same skaters appear in these videos because they are excited by the prospects of journeys to new frontiers and, for those organizing these trips, the same skaters are known to be able to handle unpredictable journeys, diets, and cultural differences. Second, enrolling new frontiers in skateboarding’s regional cartography flattens differences between cities by focusing on common patches of landscape. It allows for comparisons to be made across different (usually problematic) ways of categorizing cities within Asia and between Asia and the West (Ward, 2008). Enrolling the modern patches of cities like Tehran and Ramallah severs the ‘privileged link between modernity and certain kinds of societies, and certain cities’ (Robinson, 2004: 721). To return to Eric Koston discussing skateboarding in Bangkok – a skateboarding frontier in

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the late 1990s – in Menikmati (Mortagne, 2000, see Chapter 1), ‘with every modern city you can usually find skate-spots’. Despite the apparent lack of skaters in Bangkok at the time, once Koston sees modern infrastructure he can translate the city, he can operate the skater gaze. Searching for spots is a different way of performing urban comparisons adjacent to scholarly and popular approaches. Skaters and filmers assume that provided there is some semblance of modernity they will find something to skate. Skaters are generous with modernity; basic pedestrian infrastructure and a little public space with sealed ground surfaces is usually enough. Local differences are part of the experience of place and help to index development, especially in India as will be discussed below. However, by finding spots and performing and capturing skateboarding, the differences between cities and polities are less important than their shared material properties. A nollie-heelflip noseslide on a ledge requires the same skill and timing in Tehran as in Berlin. It requires a similar assemblage of surfaces, obstacles and objects. It is only after performing the trick and looking up rather than down, that the skater experiences the social and cultural differences of urban space, drawing together the material and the symbolic. Third, skate video captured in these frontiers creates an alternative narrative about these landscapes, cities, countries and entire regions. For consumers of skate video there are two parts to this. One, the spots themselves translate unfamiliar places into familiar assemblages. Tehran may have murals of depicting Ayatollah Khomeini and slogans like ‘Down with USA’, but it also has long marble ledges, handrails, plazas and skaters. These patches of landscape bring Tehran into the cartography of skatespots. The city’s modernity is translated into a familiar form through the skater gaze, the practice of skateboarding, and the capture and circulation of the moment. Two, the encounters between visiting skaters, local skaters and other urban dwellers produce moments of shared contact, a counter-public embrace that sidesteps geopolitics. While this is poignant for ‘western’ viewers entangled in the circulation of images and stereotypes about nonwestern Others, it is also significant for consumers within Asia, who are not immune from indulging – and producing – similar stereotypes. The chapter has three sections arranged by site rather than theme. The first section discusses skateboarding in Iran, Tehran specifically, and the spots assembled through pre- and post-revolutionary planning and architecture. As captured in the 2014 skate video The Persian Version, skateboarders in Iran make do through the ebb and flow of sanctions with improvised equipment. The challenges for the skate community are also socio-cultural, including disapproval from older generations, rules around dress, and

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restrictions on female and male bodies gathering together in public space. Footage of visiting pro-skaters from the US and Europe alongside local skaters rolling through Iran’s urban landscapes is thick with juxtapositions that make the footage almost inexplicable, until, naturally, the skaters converse in their shared language, their shared sense as outsiders in the urban landscape. This is followed by a section on skate videos in India, of which there are a number beginning with 411 Video Magazine’s Around the World (2002). For skaters, India’s cities are rough cuts. Like the raw material of skate video yet to be edited into a finished product, India’s cities have stateable patches, but as coherent landscapes they are elusive. I focus on Gurus of the Ganges (Wallner, 2013) throughout the section, particularly the footage from Delhi, the site of one of my own urban ethnography projects in a similar time frame (see McDuie-Ra, 2012a). India is hard on skaters and the experience forges the mantra that if you can find spots there you can find them anywhere. The final section discusses the emergence of skateboarding in Palestine, and in particular the ways in which skaters reinterpret the ‘architecture of occupation’ (Weizman, 2007/2017). Skateboarding has become a successful tool in engaging young people in conflict-affected environments, perhaps most famously in Afghanistan through the NGO Skateistan (Friedel, 2015; O’Connor, 2020; Thorpe & Chawansky, 2017; 2020). Skateparks and skate-schools have become sanctuaries in Palestine, and have brought skaters from different parts of the world to teach, supply product, and build solidarities (Abulhawa, 2017). However, it is the videos capturing the overflow of skaters into the streets that resonate strongly with the themes in this book. I suggest that skate video captured in the West Bank can be seen as one of the thousands of daily acts of rebellion against occupation, especially when the architecture and infrastructure of occupation form the spots used for play.

Iran: Revolutionary Modernity The Persian Version (Wallner, 2014) follows a group of skateboarders from the US and Europe (Walker Ryan, Denny Pham, Kenny Reed, Michael Mackrodt, and Laurence Keefe) on a trip to Iran and onto Georgia and Azerbaijan (the latter discussed in Chapter 4). The Persian Version begins with a shot of the Azadi Tower, completed in 1971 celebrating 2500 years of the Persian Empire and serving as a gateway to modern Tehran. Located in Azadi Square, the tower is ringed by smooth ground, ledges and stairs, and expansive open space in the teeming city of Tehran. As the camera pans past the tower from

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a low angle, Iranian skateboarder MJ Rahmani rolls out from within the tower’s arch while the song ‘Talagh’ by the famed pre-revolutionary Iranian singer Googoosh provides the soundtrack. Googoosh is a powerful symbol of cosmopolitan, pre-revolutionary Iran. Farzaneh Hemmasi calls her ‘an object of both nostalgia and political metaphorisation’ (2017: 158). The camera follows Rahmani skating along a smooth road, past suburban houses, an Iranian flag, past a multi-story mural of Ayatollah Khomeini – the camera stays on the looming Khomeini mural as Rahmani skates by and out of frame, marking Rahmani’s journey from pre-revolutionary to post-revolutionary urban landscape – and into a leafy suburban street. Rahmani picks up his skateboard and goes through the steel gate, across a courtyard and into an opulent living room, out the backdoor and down into a basement. The basement contains all the material for making skateboards: wood press, drills, clamps, glue, paint. ‘Talagh’ fades and Rahmani speaks in English, ‘I am the first person to make a skateboard deck in Iran. Nobody knows that there is a factory in Iran for making decks’. A hidden skate deck manufacturing setup in a Tehran basement appeals to the DIY ethic of skateboarding, of making do, of improvising. Rahmani adds, ‘I’m sure after this video, all Iranians will know that there is a factory here’. As viewers we get a sense of risk, that the clandestine deck factory is going to get Rahmani in trouble with the authorities – however vaguely conceived. For the audience of skaters watching his video, Rahmani is an instant hero. In his late 20s at the time of the video, Rahmani, an engineer, talks about being the first skateboarder in Iran when he started 12 years ago (approx. 2001), about the skate community in Iran – he suggests about 100 skaters including male and females, and about making DIY skateboards. He contacted Wallner after seeing his skate videos and invited him to come to Iran. He adds, ‘it was a dream for us that one day we can see professional skateboarders in Iran’. The video then cuts to US pro-skater Kenny Reed who puts the geopolitics inhibiting the local skate scene into perspective. Reed talks about sanctions and the difficulty of importing anything from the West. He adds, ‘this put the skaters in a position of where they were forced to find a way to make their own boards. If they didn’t have MJ making those boards, I couldn’t see the scene getting bigger at all’. One of the other constraints is cultural. Reed notes, skateboarding has a direct influence from the West, so the older people tend to look down on it and they don’t want their kids following trends set by the West. So that’s what makes it so difficult for the kids (in Iran)

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to get any products at all or even hold together a scene and […] have the freedom to skate around.

The video then shows the visiting pro skaters and local skaters hanging out together in a plaza inside a suburban park. The first skater on screen is female; lipstick, jeans, sneakers, a loose black top, and a black head scarf covered with punk-style bandana. There are other skaters in their teens and 20s showing the foreign skaters their equipment. One skater has a solid metal board, and English skater Laurence Keefe holds it up to camera and whacks it on the ground to show how strong it is. The owner of the board wears a version of the global skater uniform: baggy pants, a bright yellow t-shirt, black sneakers and shoulder length hair poking out from a backwards cap. He takes the metal board and performs a near perfect tre-flip. One of the skaters, Walker Ryan, discusses the restrictions he and Reed faced as the only US citizens on the trip. They were not allowed to skate and had a mandatory guide take them around to museums and other sites, while the other skateboarders were free to go where they pleased. The guide, a 67-year-old man called Ahmed, makes a few appearances in the background. As Ryan discusses this, footage shot out of a car window of a large mural appears on screen taking up the side of a building. The mural features a modified US flag with bombs dropping as the stipes, and skulls replacing the stars, and the text ‘DOWN WITH THE U.S.A’.1 Reed discusses his frustrations with this arrangement: ‘Me and Walker pretty much had to spend time with just the two of us and our guide. Just being told what you can and can’t do 24 hours a day, I mean, we had a babysitter the whole time’. These restrictions hit the skateboarders hard because their lives are based on freedom of movement, of ignoring rules, of transgressing spatial restrictions. They manage to sneak in a little bit of skating, on some ledges in a sports stadium, while the rest of the group skate an (inexplicable) skatepark at a sports complex. On screen Tehran is modern. The city’s urban landscape is produced through Reza Shah Pahlavi’s modernization push 1921-1941 (Ehlers & Floor, 1993), rapid growth to accommodate pre- and post-revolution urban 1 This is possibly the National Organization for Educational Testing, as the footage appears to be shot from a bridge (Karim Khan Bridge) and the distinctive concrete spires of the Saint Sarkis Cathedral, an Armenian church, can also be seen in the shot. I took a similar photograph of the mural in Tehran in 2001, and it was instantly recognizable when I saw The Persian Version for the first time.

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migration (Kazemi, 1980) and the growing autonomy of the municipal government in urban development from the 1990s (Madanipour, 1999: 64-65). Tehran’s modern landscape has skate spots: smooth surfaces, ledges, handrails, concrete, public plazas. These are edited together with location shots of street life, food, brief encounters with locals. Along with the material assemblage are other ‘disparate elements’ that reveal the slippage between ‘symbolic political’ and ‘material lived’ in urban space (Abourahme, 2014: 204): geopolitics, national slogans and murals, antiWestern graff iti, rules about mobility based on nationality, scarcity of equipment. Skateboarding in Iran is a powerful disruption given there are explicit rules and codes of behaviour governing public space and inter-personal encounters. These are challenged all the time, but rarely are these challenges captured and consumed outside Iran and its diaspora. In a recent essay, Alireza Fakhrkonandeh (2019) explores the body-shaping and city-shaping ideologies in contemporary Tehran and the ways these are challenged by performance art entwining images and dance on Vali Asr Boulevard. Fakhrkonandeh argues that these challenges open new possibilities for expression, playfulness, and shared experiences between performers and other urban dwellers. Reading this one can’t help but think of the footage of skateboarders shredding Tehran’s ledges and handrails, riding through dried water fountains, and rolling fast through Azadi Square. These impromptu spectacles make similar challenges to hegemonic body-shaping and city-shaping ideologies. The Persian Version had almost 300,000 combined views on YouTube and Vimeo at the time of writing, excluding those directly through Thrasher Magazine which also hosted and promoted the video. Some of these viewers may be cognizant of Iran’s past and politics, others may have no idea, but all are drawn to the performance of skateboarding and the juxtaposition between the skaters and material and symbolic elements of Tehran’s landscape. If, returning to Fakhrkonandeh, skateboarding can be considered a challenge to dominant city-shaping ideologies through bodily performance in the streets, the audience for these acts as captured in The Persian Version is large and diverse, even if the majority of this audience won’t set foot in the streets in question. The Persian Version was supported by several skate brands, clothing companies, and an energy drink. The sponsorship is significant given this is a f ilm that follows skateboarders to Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia; hardly the most obvious ‘bang for buck’ project for the associated brands. The tagline for the video on the Thrasher site reads: ‘Skating has taken root all over the world for decades now. Except in Iran. This is an

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Image 6.1 Denny Pham rolls through the arches of Azadi Tower in Tehran in preparation for a trick down the stairs in The Persian Version

Wallner, 2014; screenshot; used with permission

incredible first-look at a country essentially experiencing skating for the first time’ (Thrasher, 23 April 2014). For the skateboarders on this trip, Iran, and Tehran specifically, is a frontier. Outside of skateboarding Iran is hardly peripheral, historically or contemporaneously. Indeed, Iran has a central role in the global economy, in the geopolitics of the region that extend to much of the world, and as an intellectual challenge to pervasive dichotomies around modernity itself (Matin-Asgari, 2018). Yet for skateboarders outside and inside the country it is an ‘out of the way’ place with only faint traces of skate culture despite its modern urban landscapes. Iran’s frontier-ness comes from the seeming impermeability of Western subcultures. It is hard to get skateboards; it is hard to skate within rules of dress and social behaviour. It is off the map, an outer periphery in global and regional skate cartographies. This of course makes a skate trip to Iran irresistible. As with the other places in this chapter, if you can find skateboarding here, it seems, you can find it anywhere. And like in other frontiers, pioneers are making do; improvising equipment – possibly illegally – and creating a skate community against the odds. Skate video itself is the carrier of skate culture to Iran. Rahman’s contact with Wallner came after seeing one of Wallner’s other videos. Knowledge of skate equipment, trends, and tricks is also circulated to Iran through video. In one sequence the German professional skateboarder Denny Pham does a nollie heelflip noseslide on a marble ledge and the camera pans to one of

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the local Iranian skaters, Erfan Rostami, in tight black jeans, black t-shirt, long hair, headphones in his ears, he faces the camera and says: Nollie heelflip noseslide is fucking sexy you know. That’s so sexy. I’ve never seen it straight you know (he gestures to Pham and back to himself), like face to face that trick. I only saw it in the videos. It’s nice.

The digital circulation of skate video enabled this encounter, and it also keeps the local skate scene in Iran going. The encounters in the video are a form of person-to-person politics: a de-bunking of the myth of hostility, the encounters are bonds formed behind geopolitical lines, a testament to the thickness of global skate culture. These are consumed by audiences who now see an alternative narrative of Iran; one set in Tehran’s modern urban landscapes. There is not a cleric in sight, and there are even women skateboarding in public. In a way these trips are proof of local capacity to build a scene, a community, and connect to skateboarders in other parts of the world. The aim is not progression of the craft but exploration of how far the culture has travelled and its future possibilities, enrolling landscapes, spots and locals skaters into the cartography of spots. As the Iran section of the video closes, Rahman says to camera: ‘This is the best ten days of my life. I am really excited about [this] trip and to see professional skateboarders here’. Iran is finally ‘on the map’.

India: Rough Cut Modern India first appears in globally circulated skate video in 411 Video Magazine’s Around the World (411VM, 2002). Around the World featured some of the best known US pro-skaters of the time, including Brian Wenning, Fred Gall, Steve Berra, Kenny Hughes, Keenan Milton and Kenny Reed – who has been mentioned several times in this book already – as he has become one of the most adventurous pro-skaters of all time. Released in the same era as Menikmati (2000), Around the World fully embraced the idea of blazing new trails in the search for spots. The emphasis in Around the World is the discovery of land and culture along with finding spots in unlikely places, in new frontiers. There was less of an attempt to find local skate crews as in later videos, partly because there were fewer local skate communities in Asia at the time and partly because the genre was still focused on the leading pro-skaters. Around the World was sold as a VHS video, and to sell it needed a heavy focus on the big names who went along for all or part of

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the journey. The cover is memorable; it features Kenny Reed performing a frontside blunt slide (sliding on the tail of the board with the board angled vertically) on a stone ledge in Benares (Varanasi). Immediately behind Reed is a sadhu, leading away from him are clothes drying on the banks of the River Ganges, and then towering into the top of the frame are the famous ghats curving around the river’s edge. There couldn’t be a more prototypical ‘Indian’ landscape for Western eyes. The juxtaposition of Reed’s frontside bluntslide and the sadhu evokes the otherworldly, though in this case it is Reed who is the aberration, skateboarding in one of the most unlikely, but also most iconic, spots imaginable in India. The footage in the video takes skaters through Chennai, Goa, Mumbai, Agra and Benares, and the recurring theme is the difficulty finding spots. Along the way skaters marvel at India: train stations, elephants, temples, and people, people everywhere. Around the World was big in its day, but is now difficult to access digitally. My own copy is a VHS in terrible condition (and I can’t find anywhere to play it!). Unlike many videos from the era, it has not yet been uploaded online to have a second life. The enduring message from Around the World is that India’s cities are difficult to skate. There are many reasons for this including the general challenges impacting all urban dwellers such as the lack of planning and/or inability to realize planned landscapes (Roy, 2009), the ‘leaking’ infrastructure ‘that entangles liberal rule in lifeworlds’ of citizens and administrators (Anand, 2017: 6), and the improvised material practices that enable everyday urban life (Sundaram, 2010). There are other challenges that skaters feel more specifically: the constant presence of people and animals in and around spots, heavy presence of security personnel and surveillance of private property, contending with other appropriations of space, and a lack of smooth and debris-free surfaces. For skaters, India’s cities are rough cuts. A rough cut is the raw material of a skate video, as distinct from an edited, finished piece. Rough cuts as video are a deeper encounter between skater and landscape, an ethnographic exploration of the failures and triumphs of the performance and the reactions of those around. The rough cut exposes the pieces, the elements, that are pulled together into the finished product. Like a rough cut, India’s cities have the elements for good spots; however, they are assembled in ways that make skateboarding hard. The elements that make up a single spot are spread far and wide. It is almost as if the spots have been disassembled and scattered. For instance, in Delhi, a smooth angled embankment with a cement curb on top looks like a spot from across the street. On closer inspection the bank rises on the other side of a drain, and the large concrete slabs

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that cover the drain have all been removed so it is impossible to roll up to the spot. Elsewhere a perfect handrail stands astride a set of stairs but the run up is blocked by a rusting steamroller with DDA (Delhi Development Authority) stencilled on the side. Marble pavements and ledges abound, especially in the ritzier shopping areas of Delhi’s south, but almost every patch has a private security guard, while locals sit along the ledges trying to fashion public space in city desperately short of it, and business owners don’t help by rolling out plastic turf or having an assistant constantly pour water onto the ground to keep the dust down. None of these things matter much when you traverse the city on foot, but when you are on 50mm of round urethane the rough cut urban landscape is a frantic series of obstructions. If you could reassemble them, re-edit the city from below the knees, take the embankment from over there and put it with the pavement from over here, and add a flat bar from the parking lot across the street, there would be plenty of spots. A further challenge for skateboarders in India’s cities is that there are thousands of other people seeking to repurpose a patch of urban landscape: vendors, peddlers, loiterers, workers, hustlers, youth, children, vagrants, and even security guards, watchmen, and police. Infrastructure is already being repurposed and appropriated, hacked and blocked (Rai, 2019). A perfect marble bench with a run up might look ideal to skate, but there might be a construction worker stretched out taking a break. Before he gets up a young man may arrive and unravel a sheet on the bench with mobile phone chargers and batteries for sale. A handrail outside a bank might be ideal for a frontside krooked-grind, but there might be an umbrella repairman who has set up halfway down the staircase. The plaza out the front of a brand new housing complex may have marble ledges and hubbas, but also a fleet of security guards stationed in a ground floor office where they also eat and sleep; there is no day off for skaters to sneak in. India presents a challenge for skaters because they like to be the ones to turn orderly urban landscapes disorderly. When the urban landscapes are already disorderly, skaters don’t have the opportunity to disrupt; the landscape is already disrupted by hundreds of small acts of rebellion. As Ananya Roy writes, India’s cities – she is talking specifically about slums – are ‘terrains of habitation, livelihood, and politics’ (2011: 224). Thus despite their large size and scale, there are few empty corners, few desirable spots; only tiny patches, rough cuts. This has not, however, deterred skaters from trying to find spots over the last two decades. Patrik Wallner has made several skate videos in India with different international skate crews: Holy Cow (2011), Gurus of the Ganges (2013), The

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Rajput Ride (2015), The Curry Connection (2017), and Indian Express (2019).2 In these videos the search for spots is a challenge, and this challenge is front and centre of the narrative. These videos evoke the fine-grained ethnography of India’s urban infrastructure that has emerged at the leading edge of scholarly research in the last decade or so (for example: Anand, 2017; Cross, 2014; Doron & Jeffrey, 2018; Sadana, 2018; Siemiatycki, 2006). Indeed, there are few other popular visual forms that get this close to the fabric of India’s cities. Documentary captures the social story behind the urban experience, but the camera is always angled up. In skate video it is always down, below the knees, in the grit, the leaks, the debris, and in the new, the smooth, the shiny. Here I will focus on Gurus of the Ganges (Wallner, 2013) which best evokes the seeming futility of searching for spots in urban disorder, the triumph of eventually f inding spots, and the awkward encounters experienced along the way. In 2013 Patrik Wallner and photographer Jonathan Mehring took four US pro-skaters (Nestor Judkins, Sean Malto, Sebo Walker, Mark Suicu) to India for the Kumbh Mela festival, held every twelve years. The video, Gurus of the Ganges, was accompanied by an article with Mehring’s images in the now defunct Skateboarder Mag. In her book Pilgrimage and Power, Kama Maclean writes that understandings of the Kumbh Mela, probably the world’s largest religious festival, have been either material produced by pilgrims themselves, which is mostly devotional, or ‘coffee-table picture books and magazine photo essays […] content to entertain the reader with spectacular images of naked sadhus and wet sari-clad Indians taking part in “ancient” religious rituals’ (2008: 3). These approaches overlook the role of the mela as a blend of ‘religiosity, trade, and social communication, sharing the recreational elements of a fair’ (2008: 4). A skate video based on a trip to the mela is probably closer to the photo essays Maclean talks about, but then skaters are not your average tourists, given they are directed by the larger imperative of finding spots along the way and accumulating footage. They may seek out the spectacle but they are also draw to the material, the mundane, furtively scanning the landscape for a patch of concrete or an unattended curb. At the Kumbh Mela this proves difficult. The skaters fail to find spots among millions of bodies, mud, and rain. The spots they do find are before and after the mela, in Delhi, Jaipur and Bengaluru (Bangalore). 2 In the more recent videos listed above, local skate communities are more present, especially in South India where skateboarding has emerged following the opening of the Holystoked skatepark in Bengaluru in 2012 and local brands, such as Goa-based Piso skateboards.

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In the opening sequences of Gurus of the Ganges the skaters share their first impressions of India: culture shock, exposure to sewage and open defecation, cows in the streets, and people everywhere. These are common refence points for new arrivals but the narrative deviates once the skaters describe trying to find spots. In Delhi they find spots right away. However, the perpetual challenges are handling the crowds and removing debris. Sean Malto is shown sweeping a pair of tiled blocks with what looks like a banana leaf. In one shot Wallner pans the crowd that has appeared to watch the skaters skate a handrail coming out from the side of a building. Sean Malto, one of the most popular skaters in the world at the time, says: ‘this [crowd] is more than [at] demos I’ve skated’. He points up to an upper level viewing spot on a concrete ramp and adds, ‘look there’s even people up the top’. There are inter-species obstacles too. In another sequence, Nestor Judkins gestures to a marble plaza behind him. He says: ‘so we’re at this plaza, it’s a really good marble plaza and there’re monkeys everywhere’. As he says this two monkeys speed out from under a tree and bolt across the plaza. The monkeys perch on the marble ledges eating bananas and won’t budge for the skaters. Eventually the skaters find an enclosed spot underneath an overpass, isolated from the rest of the city. It features volcano-like planters covered in mosaic tiles, but it’s thick with dust and some of the planters are destroyed. The spot looks like it is being removed to either allow for the road to cut through or to stop people congregating. The skaters use the volcanoes to launch an array of flip tricks but it’s tough going. Later they skate the wide streets of the government and diplomatic areas in New Delhi, handrails and hubbas on stairways in and out of shopping areas, and at a marble bank-to-ledge-to-flatbar outside Palika Bazaar. The Palika Bazaar spot is well assembled: a smooth roll up, a gentle embankment, and a long and thick steel bar parallel to the top of the bank. Now a few days into their trip, the skaters have learned that it is best to start at dawn before the landscape gets crowded. The skaters get some incredible tricks, though because of the degrees of difficulty these take time. As the day warms up (it is winter), crowds gather to watch. At one point Judkins has to bail from his trick when a sweeper moves into his path determined to clear the path no matter what the skaters are doing around her. The sequence in the video that follows tells the story of Malto’s attempt to skate a handrail in Delhi and epitomizes the challenges of repurposing a disorderly landscape. Before Malto even gets started trying the trick, he is shown on a Delhi street in the early hours of the morning buying plywood to be used as his roll-up to the spot. Their taxi driver attaches it to the roof of his black Maruti van with ropes, eager to get to the spot quickly lest he

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get stopped for having a wide plank tied to his van roof. The handrail and stairs lead from a higher pavement to a lower pavement and out into the street. The handrail is blue, yet runs only for part of the staircase, from the bottom of the handrail Malto has to ‘pop-out’ in the air and clear another block of concrete and land on the lower pavement with no barrier to the busy road. Alongside the stairs is a wall tiled in hundreds of blue tiles of different hues. The spot is beautiful. Raw concrete stairs and pavements, blue handrail, blue tile wall, traffic, and a crowd of inscrutable onlookers standing and squatting in all available space. When the skaters arrive at the spot the handrail is covered in clothes that have been washed in the river and set out to try. There is a makeshift clothesline strung from one concrete ledge to the other with more clothes on it. The spot is being repurposed by someone else before Malto can perform his own reinterpretation. The skaters start moving the clothing to another rail on top of the blue tiled wall. They lay the plywood down in the roll up to the handrail and the spot is ready. Malto warms up doing a few kickflips on the plywood and soon a crowd emerges around him, around the handrail, and on the roadside nearby (see Image 6.2). Recalling the scene through voiceover Malto says: All these people started coming from all different places and it ended up being a row of people on both sides and I’m skating between them to go at this rail. There’s probably, like, 50 people there. On top of that Sebo had to catch me when I landed cause there’s a main road. And since it became like a big circle around this thing [the spot], traffic was stopping. So it was like a traffic jam with rows of people.

Malto tries a few and then lands one perfectly. There is no need for Sebo Walker to catch him; there is a small wall of people watching and Malto rolls right into them. Unlike many skate videos where the crowd of onlookers might cheer, or laugh, or clap, the crowd in Delhi stares at Malto. Sebo starts clapping and runs over to congratulate him, but the crowd is unmoved, either unsure or unimpressed by the spectacle. As rugged as the spot looks to the skaters, it appears to be a fairly recent piece of urban infrastructure. The logo for the Delhi Commonwealth Games 2010 can be seen on part of the retaining wall. There was a spree of construction in lead up to the games, along with the partial completion of the Delhi Metro, and the first phases of the DDA Masterplan for Delhi, 2021 (see Dupont, 2011; Ghertner, 2015; McDuie-Ra, 2012: Chapter 3). There is a brief shot of the Yamuna River, and it looks as if the banks have been

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Image 6.2 Off the plywood onto the handrail in Delhi. Note the drying clothes. Sean Malto in Gurus of the Ganges

Wallner, 2013; screenshot; used with permission

cleared of settlements – part of a controversial relocation in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games (Bhan, 2009). In short, the spot looks rugged to the skaters but is actually the result of recent urban ‘improvements’. Ironically, it is the skater who has to make adjustments to the urban landscape to make it skateable, to make the landscape legible, to freeze it for a moment to get the trick. It is hard to perform the adage of ‘skate and destroy’ on such a rugged patch of urban landscape. Here the adage is closer to ‘skate and repair’. Malto has a great sense of humour and does his best to engage the crowd around him and the people who are trying to push past to use the stairs. As with the China footage discussed in Chapter 3, there are moments of encounter here. They aren’t the encounters that the hyper culturally-sensitive India expert may have, but they appear genuinely warm and curious. Though there are uncomfortable moments when crowds of (mostly) men stare unperturbed as Malto and the rest of the crew hang out at the spot, rejigging it, adjusting it, and making sure Malto gets his trick. Later in the video they head to Jaipur in Rajasthan. There is no local fixer on this trip, so the skaters just take autorickshaws around the streets of Jaipur looking for spots. They find an eight-stair, a broken handrail, and, most evocative of all, a Rajput-era amphitheatre on a hilltop with a gap from the stage to the landing below rows of concrete seats. The trip ends in Bangalore where Malto gets another handrail-to-gap-to-road; a frontside five-o grind this time (grinding the rail using only the back truck). In contrast

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to Delhi, he gets handshakes and smiles from the crowd in South India. The closing minutes show clips from the trip with voiceover from the skaters. And Judkins sums up India’s rough cut modernity as experienced from below the knees. He says: Skating here doesn’t exist. We haven’t seen a single skater here. And every time we skate there are just crowds of people watching, because they’ve never seen it before […]. It’s strange to be somewhere where there’s no skaters. It’s been pretty hard here but we’ve found some amazing spots. It proves that you can skate anywhere, pretty much, on earth.

If they can find spots here they can find spots anywhere. I have spent most of my academic life, two decades at this point, researching in India and most of this has been in cities, including in Delhi where I lived for a period of time writing a book on migrants from the borderland living and working in the city (McDuie-Ra, 2012a). One of the ethnographic experiments I undertook during this research was to imagine a ‘Northeast map of Delhi ‘ (2012b) by constructing an alternative set of routes and places in Delhi were members of ethnic minority groups from the borderlands of Northeast India sought beef and pork, where they worked and hung out, where they studied for civil service exams and hospitality courses, where they found housing and places of worship outside the dominant faiths of the city, and where they try to avoid out of fear of racially motivated violence and harassment. As I moved around Delhi then, and in the countless trips to the city since, I couldn’t help but scope potential spots. The skate gaze never leaves you. So much of what I have noted about urban landscapes, whether in images, video, or in person, are the assemblages that would make good spots, or the marks left behind by skateboarders who have thought the same; the shredscape overlaying the landscape. It’s hard to switch this off, even when experiencing the landscape looking for something else entirely. Though perhaps skateboarding also functions as a sort of training for urban ethnography; one that is hard to explain to non-skaters (and I have tried). Skaters look upon landscapes assembled for a myriad of other uses, aesthetics, experiments, failures and see other things. They are not unique in having a particular gaze, but the skaters gaze is unique, with its own optical reference points. When I first saw Gurus of the Ganges it merged different worlds that I had, until that point, kept separated. After that I started to take my skateboard to India more and more, especially to the eastern borderlands where my primary field sites are located.

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I’ve encountered skaters in various cities in the mountains, sometimes skating in a patch of cement in their family compound, on new roads laid in the peri-urban fringes, and in the ubiquitous multi-story concrete carparks found in the hilly landscapes. In Aizawl, in the state of Mizoram on the far eastern edge of India, wedged between Myanmar and Bangladesh, I watched two kids sharing one skateboard take it in turns to hill bomb on one of the only smooth patches of road in the city back in 2014. Aizawl is built on a series of steep hills and the roads are narrow. The boys, aged around ten, had a system. One stood at the bend in the road and watched out for traffic. The other ran up the hill and waited for the spotter’s ok, then rode down the hill and around the bend, picking up speed before jumping off and running onto the embankment by the side of the road. Then they switched roles. There were a few close calls. A bus hurled around the corner behind the skater too fast for the spotter to do anything except call out. The boy jumped off the skateboard, stood by the side of the road, and yelled something at the bus driver. Some skater behaviours are universal. The closest thing to a scene in the borderlands – rather than just some isolated skaters – is in Sikkim. Located in the Himalayas, Sikkim is mountainous and urban growth is mostly vertical, spires of concrete housing built on fragile mountain ecology (McDuie-Ra and Chettri, 2020). In the centre of the capital Gangtok is Lal Bazar, a multi-story market complex with a flat roof. Since 2015 the roof has become a skate spot, claimed by skaters with few other flat surfaces in the city. The skaters have built a flat bar and a few ramps. The rooftop is also a thoroughfare from the multi-story market to the centre of town. Skaters must fight for use of the space with shoppers, tourists, and delinquents. I have visited the site often and it’s not an easy spot to skate. The barriers at the edge of the rooftop are cement, but only waist high – hitting them at speed (especially rolling backwards) feels like you might topple over the edge and fall down several floors. The ground is paved with slate tiles and parts break off and get under wheels, sending skaters flying. A new covered outdoor market has been built on half of the rooftop, reducing the area to skate. Still, the skaters persist. They roll fast at the flat bar, try kickflips over broken bricks, film each other on phones trying heel flips and pop shove-its. Leaning against the concrete wall facing south it looks like any skate scene. Sneakers full of holes from grip tape, jeans, t-shirts, caps on backwards. And it sounds like it too. Roll, pop, shout of joy, shout of frustration. Male and female skaters calling out the names of tricks in English in sentences mixed with Nepali. If you turn to the north you see a forest of concrete buildings, and tilting your head up you see a forest of trees

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Image 6.3 Skaters in Lal Bazar, a rare flat space amidst the vertical growth. Gangtok, Sikkim in 2019

Photo: Author

and then, if the sky is clear, Himalayan mountains to the north and west. The skaters are pushing to have the spot turned into a legal skate spot by the municipal government and to create an association that will be able to receive funding to travel to competitions in other parts of India, which are becoming more formalized with skateboarding in the Olympics. It seems like a contradiction for skateboarders to be seeking formalization and the attention of authorities. Though this is perhaps more symptomatic of the necessity of navigating local bureaucratic cultures to make anything happen than a misplaced spirit. The Gangtok spot shows how little it takes to have a skate scene. Even in the Himalayas, a flat roof, some open space, some DIY obstacles, and access to skate videos streamed directly to phones to emulate.

Shredding the Architecture of Occupation In Chapter 2, I discussed reading David Ulin’s Sidewalking Los Angeles (2015) alongside Gregory Snyder’s Skateboarding LA (2017) and various other skate videos captured in LA. The point of the exercise is to identify the overlaps between Ulin’s walking map of LA and the skate map of LA; both alternative ways of mapping space and place in a city dominated by cars. In this chapter I suggest a similar exercise reading Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land (2007/2017) on Israel’s architecture of occupation in Palestine alongside

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skate videos captured in cities in the West Bank and Gaza, in particular Wellspring (Lay, 2020), Dharbet Shams (Lay, 2018), Pieces of Palestine (Harris, 2017), Epicly Palestine’d (Krish & Joa, 2015) and Yalla Yalla (Konyshev, 2018). Alongside one another, Weizman’s account of the ways architecture and infrastructure is used to produce and perpetuate occupation meets the reinterpretation of the same terrain by skateboarders for play and rebellion. Weizman argues that unlike the geographies of stable, static places, frontiers are elastic territories. He writes, ‘[t]emporary lines of engagement, marked by makeshift boundaries, are not limited to the edges of political space but exist throughout its depth’ (2007/2017: 4). Here, he argues, ‘the mundane elements of planning and architecture have become tactical tools and the means of dispossession’ (2007/2017: 5). He adds ‘Palestinian life, property and political rights are constantly violated not only by the frequent actions of the Israeli military, but by a process in which their environment is unpredictably and continuously refashioned, tightening around them like a noose’ (2007/2017: 5). In skate video, Weizman’s ‘elastic geographies’, meet the ludic geographies of skaters, desperate to reinterpret the ‘structured chaos’ (2007/2017: 5). Watching skate video from Palestine is to witness the freedom of movement on wheels rubbing up against a multitude of obstacles both non-human (walls, gates, barriers, fences, checkpoints, towers) and human (soldiers, security personnel, police, and the public). Weizman argues that it may appear that only one ‘side’ shapes the landscape of the West Bank and Gaza, however, ‘the agency of the colonized makes itself manifest in its success in holding steadfastly to its ground in the face of considerable odds’ (2007/2017: 7). There are thousands of daily acts of rebellion against occupation in Palestine, from the confrontational to the mundane. Compared to many of these acts, skateboarding is low stakes. Yet skateboarding on and through the architecture of occupation wears down its edges. The continual refashioning of the built environment produces potential spots, especially given the abundance of concrete. Many of these spots are difficult to skate because of the heightened levels of security embedded in the landscape, above it, and below it and where ‘the distinction between “inside” and “outside” spaces, private and public, cannot be clearly marked’ (Weizman, 2007/2017: 4). Skateboarding challenges occupation on the surface layer, the street level, the ‘thin crust of the earth where civilians struggle to live’ (2007/2017: 258). It is on this crust that skaters find spots, and, remarkably, build spots. The town of Qalqilya makes for a remarkable story. The town is a walled enclave, most recently cut off from neighbouring Habla in 2003 as part of the ‘separation wall’ and ‘shredded into a patchwork and isolated from its

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urban heart’ (Lagerquist, 2004: 22). The documentary-style video Epicly Palestine’d begins in Qalqilya following two teenage skaters, Abdullah and Eihab, through the town (Krish & Joa, 2015). The first thing the skaters say is that people are conservative, religious and unaccepting of new things, a more intimate obstacle to their skateboarding dreams. The boys walk the streets, drawing a crowd of younger kids, they end up near Qalqilya Zoo, traverse a football field, open two locked doors, and behind the doors is a wooden skate ramp. Abdullah says: ‘no one knows it exists here, so it’s like our secret club or something’. American skater and photographer Daniel Zvereff wrote about visiting the ramp in 2017. He describes passing through local security, tea vendors and old amusement park rides, a taxidermized giraffe, an ‘emaciated and exhausted looking lioness resting in her pen, staring vacantly through the bars of her cage’, before going through the doors to see a group of 20 boys and girls learning to skate. Zvereff writes: More remarkable to me, however, are the anomalies within the group that seem unique to the Middle East. The gender split, which is heavily biased towards males in the west, is absent among these young skaters. I learn that the sheer novelty of skateboarding, along with the individualistic nature of the activity, has left it an open question about its propriety for different genders.

Skating on unstable ground also suggests the gender roles within skate culture are also unstable, and far from being fixed given its relative newness. There are several skateparks in the West Bank, including SkateQilya, started by activist Mohammed Othman based in Qalqilya. SkateQilya’s logo features a silhouetted skateboarder grinding across the top of the infamous concrete ‘separation wall’, with a surveillance tower on one side, with their motto below: ‘Walls Can’t Keep Us from Flying’. Visiting pro and amateur skate instructors volunteer in skate camps at these different skateparks. These skaters in turn make short videos, vlogs, and printed media, circulating the stories of skateboarding in Palestine within skate culture and even to mainstream media outlets. US pro-skater Nestor Judkins, another frequent traveller, has taken several trips to Palestine to volunteer in one of the skate camps. In an interview on The Nine Club podcast he describes a typical journey (Bagley et al., 2019b), stating: You have to bring product out on you. It’s too expensive to ship stuff. You fly out and bring as much as you can […]. I took out hundreds of boards, like 5 huge duffel bags. They let me go through. It was an ordeal, but the boards made it.

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Judkins goes on to discuss what it was like to skate there: It was interesting and gnarly in a sense […]I don’t feel unsafe. You just feel bad for the situation they are in […] born into a situation you can’t escape […] but super nice people. Hospitality like crazy. Gnarly, gnarly walls everywhere. You feel unsafe because of the military presence. You go through a checkpoint and you have an 18 year old military person with a gun, like an uzi, staring at you.

Judkins is asked by the host Chris Roberts about whether the skaters can leave the skatepark and skate the street. He responds: There are spots. I was surprised. Where the park is, it’s a little village, there’s nothing to skate. And then culturally they don’t know skating so it’s safer to keep the kids in the skatepark. That’s the idea, that they will learn skating through this […] when I went back the second year, some of the kids were ripping […] The hope is they have skating, we introduced it and they will take it out [beyond the park]. They watch videos. We play skate videos for them. We went to one of the main cities in Palestine. I saw a spot, actually one of the best street spots: marble ledge and three block. I skated it but I was like, “damn, I wish I could film a line here” one of the best street spots. [Skating in Palestine] is mellow. It’s like when you first go to China, it’s such a spectacle. People like to see people doing tricks.

The spot he describes is Ramallah Plaza, which features in most skate videos captured in Palestine. For Judkins, the skate camps help skaters develop in a safe space, and then take that out onto the streets. There are spots, good spots, and the people are curious and friendly towards skaters, which he compares favourably to the wonderland of China discussed in Chapter 3. Central to this is skate video. It is part of the assemblage of skateboarding in Palestine. Local skaters consume it, instructors at the skate camps use it as a tool to help skaters develop, and skate video of these encounters are captured and circulated to the wider skate community around the world. Skateparks like Jayyous and SkateQilya are enclaves within enclaves. Enclaves for kids to feel free, to feel safe, to experience mobility, even if just within the confides of the skatepark. These enclaves are cut off, at least on the surface strata, from the enclaves of violence and occupation created by the separation walls, what Lisa Taraki (2008) calls the ‘enclave micropolis’. The search for spots in the streets goes on in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus, captured in Pieces Of Palestine, filmed and edited by Jacob Harris

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for English skate brand Isle Skateboards in collaboration with the NGO Skatepal. Harris is renowned for his filming and editing style, following Isle’s Vase video in 2015, and the series Atlantic Drift. Pieces of Palestine is closer to a regular skate video, especially as the tour/trip video has become so popular for skate brands in the 2010s. The video has the barest thread of a narrative, it is ‘pieces’ of visual and sonic texture. The edits jumps around locations, stills, and skaters, cutting in footage from the landscape and sound bites from skaters and from locals, along with ambient sound and short blasts of music. The dialogue is overlayed, so that we hear different skaters talking almost at once about what they were seeing, the spots they found, their experience of place. In one memorable sequence, French pro-skater Sylvain Tognelli skates along the ‘separation wall’ in Qalqilya. The wall has narrow ledge running across its length, about a metre off the ground. Tognelli starts off running on this ledge, then drops his board and rolls. The wall ledge alters in height creating a small hip (or launch), which Tognelli ollies off, and does a wallie. To translate, he actually rides on a section of the wall (Image 6.4). The section features graffiti of the Palestinian flag morphed into a mountain range, and text with people’s names and slogans like ‘God is Love’. He drops off the ledge back onto the road. Fleeting in the moment, and at a more basic level, absolutely incredible when one considers the surveillance and security on this patch of territory, Tognelli’s wallie is captured, edited, and circulated around the world. Anyone with a connected device can view this moment, and send it on, the moment when the architecture of occupation was repurposed as a skate spot. In this moment the architecture of occupation is used directly as an obstacle; the notorious, infamous ‘wall of separation’ becomes a spot, reduced to an angled slab of cement.

Conclusion The search for spots takes intrepid skaters and filmers to new frontiers, to lands seemingly untouched by skateboarding. These journeys promise spots but also discovery, challenge, and, ultimately, the capacity to find more spots, to keep the trail going, to extend the cartography of spots further and further. Enrolling new frontiers in skateboarding’s regional cartography flattens differences between cities, polities, and modernities by focusing on common patches of the urban landscape, on shredscapes found in unlikely places. Skaters are drawn to similar types of assemblages in Tehran’s post-revolutionary streets, Delhi’s rough cut modernity, and Palestine’s

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Image 6.4 Showing ‘the wall’ no respect. Sylvain Tognelli in Pieces of Palestine

Harris, 2017; photograph by Sam Ashley; used with permission

‘elastic geographies’. Once the moment of performance has passed the skater experiences the social and cultural differences of urban space. Skate video captures encounters between skaters and locals, moments of shared contact that sidestep geopolitics and challenge stereotypes. Thus skate videos captured in new frontiers are circulated and consumed, spreading

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an alternative – though particular – narrative about these landscapes, cities, countries and populations that focuses on the specifics of the skater gaze, the shared culture of ludic geographies of play mixed with free movement and mild delinquency. Videos flow back to the frontier too, indeed it is video that allows communities of skaters to start out, make do and survive far from the main nodes of the culture, and in the cases of Palestine and Iran, make contact with skaters and filmers and create bonds across space and time.

7

Conclusion: Another ‘Next China’ Abstract The final chapter, Conclusion: Another ‘Next China’, explores the ‘next China’ label. The label is thrown around regularly, and there are many ‘next Chinas’ in the skate cartography of Asia. I use a brief discussion of Taiwan in skate video and in real-time to revisit the ways urban landscapes are enrolled into the cartography of spots, the different ways in which place is configured in skate video, and the value of skate video as an archive. I close by revisiting the book’s arguments and encourage researchers to embrace the skater’s take on urban modernity. Skaters are generous with modernity and find it in places that others don’t bother looking, following the concrete, steel and marble surfaces wherever it takes them. Keywords: skateboarding, China, Taiwan, cartography, cultural topology, urban studies, modern landscapes

Taipei and other urban landscapes in Kaohsiung, Keelung and Taichung have featured in scores of skate videos in the last decade as a stand-alone destination in place-specific videos, woven into longer parts that are skaterspecific rather than place-specific, and as a new skate frontier, one of several ‘next Chinas’. For instance, the accompanying blurb for the video Tourists in Taiwan featuring Element Skateboards’ Australian team (Bolton, 2013) reads: Everybody knows how amazing China is for skateboarding. China has been heavily covered, with its marble, granite, steel and weird sculptures lining every street and city, it’s a certified skateboarder’s paradise. Well, we didn’t go to China. Fuck it. It’s already been done […]. As skateboarding is relatively new in Taiwan, we saw more than our fair share of virgin spots. We’re talking perfect marble hubbas without a lick of wax, and tiny immaculate handrails without a trace of boardslide. We were on the search for the ultimate spot porn and Taiwan didn’t disappoint.

McDuie-Ra, Duncan, Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463723138_ch07

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Interestingly in this blurb, Taiwan is not compared to the US or Australia or Europe, but to China; the standard for perfect spots against which all other cities and polities are indexed. For skaters, Taiwan is attractive because there is still an opportunity to find ‘virgin spots’, to discover perfect assemblages without a history on video. To return to the terminology used in this book, there is still an opportunity to enrol new spots into the skate cartography of Asia, the below the knees map. Skate video captured in Taiwan pushes a narrative of discovery in the search for spots. Element skateboard’s Keep Discovering Taiwan (Wallner, 2014) features highly-skilled pro-skaters and captures the best of Taiwan’s spots. The trip is recounted in a print article by Latvian pro-skater Madars Apse in Thrasher Magazine. The article is entitled ‘No Play in Taipei’ (2014, online). Apse explains: An often-recurring phrase in Taiwan is, “No time to play.” For the Taiwanese, anything outside of work is considered play: going to a bar, watching a movie, hitting a tennis ball around. Life consists of work, eat, sleep and play. Every security guard we encountered shouted the same phrase at us: “No play! No play!” As travelling skateboarders, our entire existence was strictly play: no arranged schedule, no obligations and no real responsibilities (besides landing tricks). It was just 100-percent play all day – every day.

There are the marble ledges at Taipei Station, the incredible wooden pyramid like sculptures by the water at Keelung, a wavy ribbon of narrow concrete in a Taipei park that resembles a miniature of the famous red-ribbon in Guangzhou, a red pained concrete bump on a cross-river bridge, a marble wedge (which on closer inspection is a memorial) on Jia Xing street from which skaters can launch over (or onto) two cable boxes then into traffic, a temple in Keelung with large concrete flowers that form mini-bowls that can be skated with an absurdly picturesque backdrop. These spots, and others, appear again and again in footage of Taiwan. It is fast becoming a gathering place for skaters, including from the US, Brazil, Australia and Europe but also from within Asia. Notable videos include Taipei Ducks (Wallner, 2015) featuring Vans footwear’s Japan team, Carhartt clothing’s Pushing Formosa featuring skaters from China, Japan and Thailand (Zhao, 2017), Levi’s clothing’s Drip Through Stone (Batard, 2019), HUF clothing’s The Stoops Asia Tour (Kuzma & Reisel, 2014), Enjoi skateboard’s Panda Patrol: Taiwan Typhoon (2019) and the earlier Fatback: Enjoi in Taiwan (2014), and the independent Canadian skate video Glass: Volume 3 (Valentic, 2018). Videos featuring local skaters such as Adee Lu

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Skates Taiwan (Oki, 2015) feature spots in suburban areas, around residential housing, colleges and administrative buildings. The city has a certain look on skate video; a Taiwan aesthetic. Viewers can tell it is Taiwan, even if it is not noted on screen. It’s enrolled. It’s recognizable. Consumers of footage don’t need to be told. The assemblage of concrete, marble, and unpainted steel railings evoke China or Seoul, though the surfaces in Taipei feature plenty of timber and tiles, which give a different sonic quality to Taiwan footage: rapid fire clicks of urethane wheels on tiles, muted noise on timber. Taipei has hundreds of underground walkways and subway entrances. Housing their entrances are 3-4 metre high frames with roofs angled down at 45 degrees from the apex to the street level, forming wedges. Some of these angled roofs continue all the way to the pavement while others have a change in trajectory on the way down before flattening and creating a second drop at their far end. Up close they look as if they were created specifically for skateboarders, and it is clear why they are irresistible. Taipei has never looked (or sounded) like it does in GX1000: Taiwan (Garshell, 2015). GX1000 is a collective of skateboarders based in northern California known for high-speed skateboarding presented on video with no music and shot on the grainy SonyVX1000 camera by Sean Garshell. The style of skateboarding is fast and improvised. There is less focus on particular spots where skaters might stop for an hour or two trying to get a trick and more focus on the shredscape as a connected whole. The editing makes everything seem fast, urgent, as if any moment the skaters will crash into traffic, people, a wall; and they often do. There are no place-based shots. No ‘local colour’ shots of temples or crowds in shopping districts. No narration. No geo-political context. No broad cultural brushstrokes. No drone shots of landmark buildings. No introduction. Just the title and straight into skateboarding through the urban landscape with little regard for, well, anything. Some of the well-known Taiwan spots feature in GX1000: Taiwan, along with improvised spots (including a row of parked motorcycles) and an incredible soundscape, especially when skaters roll over tiles at high-speed producing a sharp ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ and then launch onto smooth marble which barely produces a sound at all. Like all the skate videos discussed throughout this book, there are moments of encounter. At one point in the video a male police officer attempts to evict the group of skaters from a smooth angled wedge (the back of one of the subway entrances) at night-time. The police officer climbs onto the spot and points out the ‘no climbing’ sign on the wedge. One of the skaters off-camera says, ‘we are not climbing, we’re skating’. The police officer wipes

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his gloved fingers along the surface, inspecting the damage. One of the skaters off camera offers, ‘it’s just dust. It’s just dirt. We’re not hurting it’. The police officer looks up at them and back to the surface, it’s condition now the centre of their encounter. The police officer seems to tweak that something unusual is going on and asks if anyone can speak Chinese. His question is ignored. The police officer steps to the edge of the wedge, raises his palms and shakes them back and forth. He says, ‘no, no, you can’t play anymore’. One of the skaters off camera replies: ‘we’re not playing’. The skaters persist and, remarkably, the police officer relents. The camera continues to roll as US pro-skater Yonnie Cruz takes a run up, drops his board, rolls up the marble wedge, ollies onto the curved ceiling, grinds its edge and lands out onto the road, quiet in the dead of night. In the final sequence, also at night, a suited security guard emerges to stop the crew skating a marble wall angled at a perfect pitch over a set of six stairs. US pro-skater Jake Johnson speeds towards the spot and the security guard stands flush against the wall at the top of the stairs, trying to physically prevent Johnson from attempting to ollie onto the wall by obstructing the exact patch of ground where Johnson would take-off. The security guard has made his own calculation of body, speed, and trajectory. He picks the best launch pad and tries to block it. It is a high-stakes game of chicken. Johnson continues towards the stairs at high speed, and ollies past the security guard and onto the wall, riding it at a tight angle, and landing onto the pavement at the bottom of the stairs. The camera pans back to the security guard in his suit, standing awkwardly at the top of the stairs. His heroic attempt to put his body on the line for the protection of private property is thwarted by the length of Johnson’s ollie. The security guard is now part of the assemblage, gathered at the spot and captured on video for posterity. With that, the video ends. No credits. It cuts straight to SMPTE bars. Taiwan, done.

Real-time Blues March 2018: it’s raining in Taipei. Really raining. I am in the city for something else, researching a ‘smart city’ exhibition for a different research project, but I’ve made sure to keep days spare for seeking out spots and skating in the city. I wanted to see, touch, and roll through the urban landscapes, test my declining skate skills on the assemblages of surfaces, objects and obstacles I had seen in scores of skate videos over the years. The rain didn’t let up for a few days. Rolling ethnography has its limits in this weather. I

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walked around to a few spots with an umbrella and took some photos. I took a train to Keelung and walked around the wooden pyramids near the station. Apse was right about security guards, they were everywhere: protecting buildings, spotting for traffic at the entrance of underground carparks. The rain emptied out the spots of skaters (and other people) and the landscapes had reverted to their original purpose, their envisioned aesthetic. Given how difficult skateboarding is to witness in real time, the scene reiterated the value of skate video. The landscape is full of evidence of repurposing; damage left behind on a handrail, skate stickers on a bench, skate stoppers drilled into a ledge. In the heavy rain this all seems to retreat, to wash out. A few days without skaters and the spots nestled in the urban landscape seem to dissolve back into it. I took cover next to the marble ledges in front of Taipei Station, an essential spot in footage of Taipei, and thought about rain as the greatest skate-stopper of all. I half-expected, half-hoped for a skater to tear through the rain and do a nose-blunt slide on the marble in front of my eyes, spraying water in all directions to the shock of law-abiding citizens. But the mythical skater never came. I couldn’t find many skaters because of the rain, but I saw plenty of signs of skate culture. When I visited skate shops in Taipei they were stacked with the latest goods, particularly apparel and footwear. In restaurants, food courts and malls and it was common to see skate brand logos on clothing on young people, couples in matching skate brand pullovers, and even a father shepherding children through a crowded food court wore the Thrasher t-shirt. The consumption of skate fashion is evinced further in the proliferation of fake skate or skate-related fashion in markets, one of the many trails the subculture leaves as it travels through Asia. The industry needs consumers willing to pay a premium for footwear and apparel, especially limited additions and one-off collaborations. These fund the tours and demos and the side-trips that produce more footage to promote brands and keep skaters, filmers, shop and distributors in business, even when many of the consumers may never push around on a skateboard (see Looser, 2016). After days of wet weather blues I was directed to Taipei’s undercover skatespots beneath the many flyovers in the ‘city of displacements’ (Allen, 2012). I spent most of my time at Jianguo Bridge Skatepark under the Xinsheng Elevated Road. The spot is well-hidden under the arch of the flyover which forms the roof of the spot and two vehicle ramps on either side form walls. Enclosed by a wire fence on the ‘high side’ where the flyover rises and by the concrete walls of the flyover on the ‘low side’, the spot can be closed off by gates at the entrance and rear. The space features ramps, concrete

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blocks with steel edges to grind and slide, benches, handrails and flatbars, and some wedge-ramps. The thick concrete pillars holding up the flyover are part of the spot. Lighting is affixed to the pillars for night skating, the surfaces of the pillars are covered in graffiti, and a row of shoes tied by their laces have been hurled up over a pipe set just below the underside of the flyover. It is quite the youth hang-out spot. The surface of the spot is smooth in parts, though down the ‘low end’ the ground is much rougher and there are painted parking bays with numbers from the time when it was used as a market. This space is something between a skate park and a skate spot – between a purpose built space to skate and a spot ‘naturally’ occurring in the urban landscape. It was not purposely built as a skate-spot initially, but created out of off-cuts, the backyard of the ‘cathedrals of modernity’ discussed in Chapter 2 (see also Ingersoll, 2006). The sides are open and the spot maintains aspects of the sensory city: traffic noise, fumes, blasts of wind and rain, uneven ground, occasional pedestrian interruptions (when the gates are open). It is free of police, and security guards but it is also contained, limited, and closed off. Skateboarding is allowed here, but only inside the walls. Try the same tricks across the road on the wide stair set at the Huashan 1914 Creative Park and eviction will be swift. In his exploration of the skate-scene in Seoul, Sander Hölsgens argues that for skateboarders in Korea the skatepark is an ‘urban extension of the dwelling’, as familiar as home, in line with ways public spaces are used for private behaviour throughout the city (2019: 372). Jianguo too has a sense of dwelling, of domesticity. Female and male skaters arrived after school and university class, dump their bags and start skating. Skaters arrive with plastic bags of food and drinks from the convenience store and have impromptu picnics on the edges of the spot. There was plenty of hanging out, laughing, smoking cigarettes, playing on phones. The park also serves as a training ground. One local skater, Lee, showed up every day mid-morning when the park was empty. In his 20s and wearing a beanie with his white t-shirt and black cargo pants, we exchanged nods and got chatting a few times. Lee was practicing a ‘line’. He started with a big push, kickflipped onto the manual pad into a manual (riding on the back wheels only), onto the flat ground, he rode up the wedged ramp and ollied into the air landing on the handrail on both trucks and grinding a 50-50 before pushing into the larger pyramid, riding over the top and ollieing into a krooked grind down the thick concrete hubba. Lee didn’t land every part of his line every time he tried, but he did land often, and instead of celebrating he repeated the line again and again. He was training before taking the

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tricks out into the streets and trying them on a similar assemblage. This is the reverse trajectory of many other activities. Someone might practice soccer in the street and then take it to the arena, rehearse a dance in the home before taking it to the stage. In skateboarding the designated space, the skate park, is for practice. The moments that matter are in the urban landscape proper, at spots, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. While Lee was able to land his krooked grind down the hubba over and over again under the flyover, it will only matter to him when he can execute it ‘out there’ in the city somewhere. To count, skateboarding needs to be performed where it is not supposed to.

Endless Spots, Endless Search Skateboarding has become an enormous industry and a far-reaching culture. The epicentre of the industry, its historic heartland, remains in the United States, in California, though the industry also has thriving nodes in the US East Coast and Europe. And while there are successful local industries in Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Korea and Brazil, these are ancillary. To ‘make it’ in skateboarding, whether as a skateboarder, photographer, or filmmaker still necessitates a period spent in the heartland of the industry or its main nodes. And in turn, livelihoods in skateboarding depend more and more on access to spots. As these spots become harder to access in heartlands, Asia has emerged as a utopia of endless spots. Outside academia, skateboarding is in a moment of high visibility. A culture that is built on anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian identities and practices, skateboarding is making its way from the social margins to the centre of the multi-billion-dollar action sports universe; though not for the first time. Organized (and televised) competitions such as the X-Games (established 1995, and initially resisted by many of the top pro-skaters), the Malouf Money Cup (2008-2012) Street League (established 2010), and inclusions in the now postponed 2020 Olympic Games and 2021 Southeast Asian Games attract new audiences, non-skate corporate sponsors, and interest from national sports ministries. Inclusion threatens to bring organization and systemization (O’Connor, 2016; Thorpe & Wheaton, 2019). These shifts raise anxieties about the soul of the culture, and indeed whether it can or should be considered a sport. The Olympics and other regional games provoke the most anxiety (Schwier, 2019). Proponents argue that the Olympics is really no different to the other televised competitions that have become accepted, if enclaved,

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within the culture. For others it is the idea of competing for nation-states, skating under a flag, that grates with the ethos of the culture. All logic implies that skateboarding should be antithetical to nationalism. As the culture has travelled it attracts people because of the shared experience as outsiders (see Yochim, 2010). Boundaries shaped by race, nationality, citizenship and (more recently) gender and sexuality are challenged – not without tensions and contradictions – and occasionally dissolved. The identity of being a skateboarder assumes primacy, and diverse communities share the role of producing space, time and social being – to return to Borden (2001: 261) – in the act performed in place, in the streets. Competing for nation-states seems like competing for the wrong collective. The idea of wearing uniforms emblazoned with nationalist iconography and standing on podiums seems so antithetical, along with the idea of future generations of skaters being picked and trained as competitive athletes in hierarchical systems mirroring organized sports. One of the ways sections of the industry contend with the spectre of the Olympics has been to organize alternative events, counter-spectacles. An example is the Dime Glory Challenge, a self-styled ‘anti-competition’ supported by Dime, a Montreal-based clothing brand and skateshop. The 2019 Challenge was held in the brutalist playground of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium littered with concrete ledges, blocks, stairs and handrails. This is not a purpose-built course (though the Dime Challenge has done this in the past), but a repurposing of existing spots. The footage of the 2019 event posted through the Thrasher Magazine platform is accompanied by a short blurb: ‘[w]ith Tokyo 2020 looming, it’s easy to feel like skateboarding is getting too serious. Need some relief? Spend the next nine minutes watching the Dime Street Challenge in Montreal. Ahhh… that’s more like it’ (Bublitz et al., 2019). The footage is wild. Professional skateboarders from all over the world attempt highly skilled tricks amidst raucous crowds, drinking, smoking, laughing. Skaters join in the festivities, moving from board to crowd, one moment attempting a trick, the next chugging a beer or puffing a joint. In one session skaters take it in turns to attempt tricks on or over a picnic table, in another they try tricks from the flat onto a steep concrete embankment with high drop at the end. There are some amazing tricks and a lot of falling over. The pinnacle is a session on a set of sixteen concrete stairs with a high concrete hubba (angled ledge) down one side of the stairs and a rectangle handrail attached to a concrete wall on the other side. Skateboarders take it in turns to attempt tricks on either the hubba or the rail and upon landing (or falling) they are enveloped in the crowd, showered with high fives, hugs, and beer spray. There is no competition,

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no places, no prize, no structure, no video screen or instant reply, just the glory of (hazy) recognition from within the culture. There is a flip-side to the Olympic conundrum, however, that can be seen when skateboarding is viewed from its edges. Inclusion in the Olympics means governments and sports ministries in countries where skateboarding is relatively new fund grassroots development and facilities. It gives NGOs and other foundations leverage with local government for building skateparks or having a more permissive culture around skateboarding, as in Sikkim and Palestine discussed in Chapter 6, and in the documentary Pushing Myanmar (Holman, 2017). It gives former pro-skaters and industry figures incomes as team managers and coaches. It might also give skaters a bit longer on their board if they are able to tell parents that they are training for the Olympics rather than a poorly paid career in trespassing and vandalism. In the long run it may change aspects of skateboarding, but it is unlikely to threaten the central ethos of skate culture, namely, the search for spots in the urban landscape. This book has explored skate spots and the urban landscapes that produce, host, and threaten them, as they are captured and consumed in skate video, an underutilized archive of urban change and reinterpretation animated by unsanctioned performance, play and destruction. I have discussed the centrality of the spot as an assemblage of objects, surfaces, and obstacles created for other purposes and nestled in the urban landscape and suggested skaters are an adjacent public for the production, maintenance, and even decay of infrastructure (Chapter 2). There are different ways of approaching urban landscapes to embody the skater gaze, and here I have advocated for rolling ethnography, an extension of the wandering inherent in walking ethnography, but on wheels, attuning the observer to the surfaces, inclines and obstacles that constitute the urban fabric. Rolling ethnography is tactic for observation but also a tactic observable in skate video, where filmers, skaters and fixers act as the ethnographers, engaging landscapes and bodies in a dialogue with varied modes of narrative; from place-based commentary and reflection on a linear journey alongside clips of skateboarding in new frontiers (Chapter 6) to almost place-less rapid edits of landscapes, spots and security guards on grainy tape with only ambient sound. Through the different chapters I have tried to map the diversity of urban landscapes constituting the skate map of Asia, rather than attempting a definitive account. From the endless spots of China’s ‘concrete dragon’ (Chapter 3) to the perfect, yet unrepeatable experiences of skating Dubai with privileged access (Chapter 4). From the remnants of Soviet planning undergirding post-Soviet urban landscapes in Central Asia and the Caucasus

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(Chapter 5) to the new frontiers of skateboarding in Iran’s pre- and postrevolutionary architecture, India’s rough-cut urban modernity, and the improvised spots produced by the architecture of occupation in Palestine (Chapter 6). I have focused on the highlights that best illuminate the arguments of the book, forcing omissions of Japan and Korea in particular, which could each have chapters on their own. I hope the highlights of what is a vast, deep and dense cultural topology serve a useful starting point for research on skateboarding, skate video, spots and urban landscapes at a regional scale that other scholars inside and outside the academy can take up in the future. Skate spots produce an alternative cartography of urban Asia at varied scales: local, regional, and global. It maps the topologies of urban space in tracking change, relationships and incongruities; a constantly re-drawn diagram (Shields, 2013: 141). Once enrolled as part of this diagram, a city shows up ‘on the map’ and will be drawn and re-drawn in relation to its spots, themselves assemblages of gathered elements, neither made for or by the skaters who desire and consume them. Skate spots re-map Asia through a particular gaze, and produce knowledge about cities that flattens diverse urban landscapes into a shared gaze, a shared visual and sonic language of spots. Cartographic and topologic knowledge of spots is circulated, rapidly, to millions of skaters through personal and digital exchanges, while also being amended and improved, redrawn with new information, often in real-time. This map exists though not in one place or one form. However, despite its fragmentation, the knowledge that underpins the map, that opens the spaces of possibility for its materialization, is in the public domain, provided you know where to look. The search for new spots is constant. More skaters means more brands, more consumers and more demands for footage. The ethos of skate culture requires spots naturally occurring in the urban landscape, what I have referred to as the shredscape. Spots come and go, though in some parts of the world they feel as if they are disappearing faster than others. More security, defensive architecture and the adjacent proliferation of legal skate parks intended to control skateboarding in a particular place squeeze street skateboarding out of some cities, countries and regions and into others. This was the lament of Finnish pro-skater Arto Saari two decades ago in the opening narration from Menikmati (2000) discussed in Chapter 1. After finally making it to California, all the iconic spots were knobbed or patrolled. Saari, along with other skaters in the video, had to search for spots around the world. As spots disappear from some cities they are being created at break-neck speed in others, at ‘Shenzhen speed’ (Chapter 3). Since the early

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2000s China has been considered a factory for spots, and this notion has spread from Shenzhen and Shanghai to cities like Ordos and Changsha. The combination of perfect spots, endless urban landscapes, and permissive authorities make China central to contemporary skateboarding at a global scale. However, the search for spots does not end in China, and the trails branch off in different directions to other established skate cities in Korea, Japan and Taiwan and along the backroads to post-Soviet Asia and other new frontiers. The search for spots is a way of indexing urban development, based not on in-depth expert knowledge of urban history, economic booms, investment trends and state-planning strategies, but on the creation and proliferation of spots. Often, the creation of spots correlates with strong economic performance and careful urban planning, at other times it comes from hubris of ‘celebratory spectacles’ (Koch, 2018: 6), or concentrated capital injections to small patches of the landscape, or the remnants of past mass urbanization schemes pursuing civilizational imperatives. As far as skaters are concerned, landscapes covered with concrete, granite and marble are signs of development. Add handrails, stairs, ledges and plazas and peak urban civilization is laid bare underfoot, or under wheels. If the city has good connective infrastructure, even better. Indexing urban development in this way is fluid and relational. For instance, Aktau is less developed than Astana (Chapter 5); Bangkok is surprisingly developed for Koston in Menikmati (Chapter 1), and the same could be said for Tehran, which is materially ‘developed’, but for skaters is culturally constrained by rules and economically constrained by sanctions; Shenzhen is developed as an urban landscape but bereft of other attractions, whereas Shanghai and Nanjing are akin to heaven (Chapter 3); Taiwan is developed but ‘virginal’ (Chapter 7); Dubai is so developed it doesn’t seem real (Chapter 4); India’s urban development is uneven within (rather than between) a particular urban landscape (Chapter 6); and the relative under-development of Palestine (Chapter 6) makes its skaters pioneers, making do out in the frontiers. Indexing development happens within cities too, this area over that area, the frontstage over the backstage. To skate the less developed patches of the urban landscape is to demonstrate exemplary skills, mastery of rough surfaces, fragmented infrastructure. Less developed patches appeal, but not to all skaters and not for all purposes. A skate video part might have some footage in rough cut urban landscapes, but also needs plenty of perfect spots. In general, skaters have a more generous take on modernity than many other consumers and shapers of urban landscapes, including tourists, development professionals, and some scholars. Skaters chase modernity,

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and they find it in places that others don’t bother looking. Unhindered by urban theory, skaters follow the concrete, the form and shape of the landscape, wherever that takes them. It is crucial to acknowledge that while Asia is indexed as constantly producing more spots, the West, and the US in particular, is declining, it’s urban landscapes tired, heavily policed, and full of hostile actants – security guards, angry property owners, omnipresent defensive architecture. Skaters are experimental geographers of a sort. This index travels. Consumers of skate video and image view cities and polities through the same prism, especially when their knowledge of Asia is transmitted primarily through skate culture. This is non-expert knowledge of cities, polities and regions. It ignores complex causality and focuses instead on the assemblages; the gathering of surfaces, objects and obstacles and the possibilities of tricks, lines, and capture. Amin and Thrift write about a newly emerging urban ethnography that accounts for ‘slums, suburbs, congested public spaces, tower blocks and busy city centres’ as more than just spaces urban dwellers learn to navigate, but as an ethnography that shows ‘that humans are equally of their habitat in these environments, with agency very much a hybrid of mind, body, machine and matter’ (2017: 19). For skaters, they are ‘equally of their habitat’ wherever they find spots, whether near or far away and whether on their first visit to Shanghai or their tenth. Their index ignores the mechanics beneath the machine, the complex factors that drive urban growth, maintenance, and decline; though the same could be said for other ways of consuming urban landscapes too. The tourist, the migrant worker, even the resident does not always, or perhaps rarely, consider the complex socio-political and economic dynamics that undergird the city. However they do think about the landscape, exercising the ‘mind, body, machine, matter’ hybrid. Skaters gaze at a landscape from below the knees and think about what they could perform there, what might have been done there before, and what it might look like on video or still image. They touch the surface, rub on wax, even add a plank of plywood for a roll up or smooth over a crack with Bondo (a fast drying putty). The same goes for filmers, photographers and fixers. Thinking this way happens in the moment, when a spot is found, though for known spots it can start months, even years before ever visiting the landscape. On the ground, the skaters’ knowledge of the city comes from rolling through it and from smashing up against it; bodies slamming into the concrete ground, bone chipping on marble ledges, skin shedding on tiled embankments. This kind of urban knowledge may not be expert, drawn from conference rooms, demographic data sets, planning maps, or deep immersion in place; but it is intimate.

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Image 7.1 Unorganized encounters in urban Asia: Thai skater Beek Supavich frontside noseslides a ping pong table in Bangkok

Photo by Janchai Montrelerdrasme for Preduce Skateboards; used with permission

Urban landscapes are not empty, unless they are emptied on the behalf of skaters and filmers as in We are Blood (Evans, 2015) discussed in Chapter 4. They are spaces of encounter. Throughout the book I have taken encounters to be unintended and unorganized moments of interaction that bring the city to life (see Liggett, 2003). Skateboarding creates encounters between skateboarders and authority, skateboarders and the public and skateboarders with each other. Skaters are in urban landscapes for different reasons to almost anyone else. They are there for different periods to time, in different circuits of mobility, in different engagements with objects, and as such they draw attention in different ways. Performing bodies (on wheels) encounter spectating bodies, hostile bodies, bodies trying to get out of the way. They also encounter other skateboarders, and sometimes roller-skaters, bikers, dancers, takraw players and even ping-pong playing school kids. These encounters are captured during the moments of performance, when a skater is trying a trick or when they have successfully landed it, and then replayed again and again. There are few other mechanisms that capture such moments for wide consumption.

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In many Asian cities visiting foreign skaters are given a long leash, recalling Middleton and Pradhan’s (2015) reflections on ‘white mischief’, or foreign mischief to be more accurate, discussed in Chapter 3. Foreigners can get away with a little bit more in encounters with authority or hostile members of the public than locals. Locals face the pressure that they should know better, they should have more respect for place, for infrastructure, for the people earning a living protecting it. In skate video it is common to see local skaters, fixers and translators disappear out of the frame when a security guard or police officer comes to evict skaters from a spot. The best initial tactic is to feign ignorance, to smile, or in some cases to plead. This doesn’t always work, and as in several cases discussed in the book, skaters, filmers and translators with the appropriate linguistic skills have to step in and smooth things over. Generally in Asia, encounters with authority and the public are noted for their relative tolerance, curiosity and nonchalance, especially when compared to the US. As skate video has become more diverse in style and aesthetic and skaters and filmers have become more adventurous in their search for spots, the journey has become an important narrative. Encounters extend to moments off the board and these are edited into skate video; place shares the video with performance. Skate video produces a vernacular cosmopolitanism (Werbner, 2006), or perhaps a form of ‘low-end globalization’ (Mathews, 2011), enveloping skaters who travel to Asia, skaters who travel within Asia and local skaters too. Skaters who spend time in Asia, (including those who relocate as expats) return home carrying new knowledge of place, stories of encounters, intimate details of urban landscapes. Skaters based in Asia have a cosmopolitan worldview in their awareness and consumption of cultural cues from skateboarding, their encounters with visiting skaters from around the world, and their own consumption of urban landscapes through skate video, a kind of ‘transnational digital habitus’ (Nedelcu, 2011). This vernacular cosmopolitanism may lack the serious cultural engagement of the diplomat, business executive, or area studies scholar, but it is much more fun, and, arguably, more prolific given the volume of flows in the digital circulations of skate video, clips and image. The COVID-19 outbreak in late 2019 and through 2020 had a wave-like impact on skateboarding. At first it took away access to China, Korea and Japan. The best spots were out of reach. Then as the virus began to spread to the US and Europe, street skateboarding itself ground to a halt. At first there was optimism that lockdowns would leave urban landscapes empty, unattended. As the magnitude of the virus began to register, skaters stayed home. Skate parks and skate spots sat empty, tantalizing but unreachable.

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As the wave began to recede, new skate footage started to reappear on social media and on the main skate video platforms. This is captured in the skate video Diplomatic Immunity (Brini, 2020) filmed in Shanghai during February and March 2020. In the early months of the pandemic Shanghai’s streets are empty and skaters resident in the city suddenly have unfettered access to every ledge, bench and embankment. Though the security guards and caretakers (Boa’an) also remain on duty. Some of the footage from Diplomatic Immunity shows masked skaters and masked security guards conversing, negotiating and haranguing in the otherwise empty city; looking like the last humans alive in this dystopic moment in the city’s history. The search for spots depends upon a privileged mobility; on skaters and filmers being able to travel and search for spots. The slowdown of international travel during the worst months of COVID-19 cut off access to these spots for skaters from outside the region. One of the layers of mobility was suspended. Skaters in Asia also have limited mobility during this period, though on the flip-side they have exclusive access to their local spots, the dream spots, the endless spots, that fuel the desire of skaters all over the world. Evidently, from the footage coming out as daily clips and montages from Bangkok, Osaka, Seoul and Shanghai, the spots are in good hands, or more accurately, good feet.

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Index 10 Days of CPH Open in 34 Chapters [Video File] 110 10,000 Kilometers [Video File] 117 12 Days in China [Video File] 72 1947 [Video File] 79 Abes, Sebastian 123 Abkhazia (Republic of) 115-117, 131-137 Abkhazia [Video File] 117, 131-137 Absurd in Abkhazia [Video File] 137n3 Acuto, Michele 100 Adams, Levi 29 Adee Lu Skates Taiwan [Video File] 166-167 Afghanistan 34, 143 Aizawl (India) 156 Aktau (Kazakhstan) 128, 175 Aktobe (Kazakhstan) 119n1 Album [Video File] 67 Ali, Sayid 100 Aliyev, Heydar 97 Aliyev, Ilham 97 All For You (Rough Cut) [Video File] 80 Almaty (Kazakhstan) 97, 123-124, 127-128 Amin, Ash 31, 51, 176 Apse, Madars 83-84, 166, 169 Aralsk (Kazakhstan) 128 Argentina 171 Armato, Lizzie 18 Around the World [Video File] 143, 148-149 Ashgabat (Turkmenistan) 91-92, 94, 99, 112 assemblage see spots Astana/Nur Sultan (Kazakhstan) 29, 38, 91-92, 94-97, 100, 112, 119n1, 128, 175 Atlantic Drift [Video Files] 161 Australia 14, 18, 20-21, 64, 88, 166, 171 Australian national 14, 28, 75, 84, 96, 107, 128, 165 Azerbaijan 91, 97, 117, 143, 146 Bach, Jonathan 70, 82 backroads globalization see globalization Baker in Dubai [Video File] 92-93, 111-112, 111n2 Baku (Azerbaijan) 38, 91-92, 94, 97-98, 100, 112 Bandar Seri Begawan (Brunei) 93 Bangalore/Bengaluru (India) 34, 151, 154 Bangkok (Thailand) 21, 24, 26-30, 32-34, 108, 141-142, 175, 177, 179 Bangladesh 156 Barbier, Sal 17n1 Barcelona (Spain) 20-21, 52, 80, 89 Batu Pahat (Malaysia) 34 Beal, Becky 18-19, 41, 58

Beazley, Theotis 107 Beijing (China) 34, 64-65, 67, 70, 75-76, 83, 86, 123 Belarus 120 Bell, James 120-122 Benares/Varanasi (India) 149 Berlin (Germany) 142 Berra, Steve 148 Bethlehem (Palestine) 160 Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) 34, 39, 115, 117, 123-128 Bones Brigade Video Show, The [Video File] 14 Bordeaux (France) 17 Borden, Iain 16-17, 19, 41, 58, 83, 130, 172 Brazil 14, 18, 22, 64, 101, 131, 166, 171 Brazilian national 59, 71, 79, 102 Brisbane (Australia) 21, 105 Brock, Justin 87 Brown, Don 47n2 Bufoni, Leiticia 18 Bukhara (Uzbekistan) 130 Burman, Dane 28-29 Busan (Korea) 21, 34 Caballero, Steve 65-66 California (US) 14, 22-24, 30, 167, 171, 174 Campanella, Thomas J. 63, 81, 88, 118 Campbell, Thomas 14 Canada 22, 65 Canadian national 67, 166 cartography below the knees cartography/mapping through skate spots as method 31-34, 51, 54, 76, 78 global cartography of spots 15, 21, 23-24, 89, 141, 161 imagined cartographies 32, 34, 36, 38, 66-67, 88-89, 117 regional cartography of spots, Asia 13, 32-33, 39, 64, 79, 89, 97, 112, 139-142, 148, 165-166, 174 Changsha (China) 64, 67-69, 82, 175 Chengdu (China) 27, 34, 83-84 Children of the Revolution [Video File] 18 Children of the Sun [Video File] 123, 125-127 China 20, 27, 33, 35-36, 38-39, 46, 60, 62-75, 78, 81-89, 92, 101, 108, 110, 118, 126, 130, 140, 154, 160, 165-167, 173, 175, 178 Chinese language 84, 168 Chinese national 38, 63-66, 69, 73-76, 78, 83-85, 87, 118 Chiu, Chihsin 43 city/cities see urban

204 

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Claravall, Anthony 69-73 Collet, Charles 126 concrete (material) 15-16, 24, 26, 29-30, 34-35, 48-49, 51, 54, 58-59, 63, 66, 68, 75, 81, 83, 88, 99, 103, 116, 118, 132, 136-137, 139, 145n1, 146, 149, 151-154, 156, 158-159, 165, 167-170, 172-173, 175-176; see also urbanization consumption of Asian cities 30, 32, 38, 47, 52, 56, 61-62, 65-67, 76, 83, 88, 91, 100, 105, 108, 115, 130, 146, 148, 162, 167, 173-177 of skate culture 13, 15, 31, 37, 39-41, 60, 101, 105, 109, 118, 178 of skate goods 13, 19, 22, 40, 44, 59, 66, 87, 97, 127, 140, 169, 174 of skate video 15-16, 21, 26, 32, 40-41, 55-59, 61-62, 92, 105, 115, 130, 142, 160, 162, 167, 176, 178 Copenhagen (Denmark) 110 Copenhagen Open 17, 110 cosmopolitanism/vernacular cosmopolitanism 37, 178 COVID-19 19n2, 178-179 creative cities 109-110 Credits [Video File] 14 Cruz, Yonnie 168 Curry Connection [Video File] 151 Dal Santo, Marisa 18 Delatorre, Brian 126 Delfino, Fabiana 18 Delhi (India) 29, 36, 141, 143, 149-155, 161 Desimi, Jill 33 Dharbet Shams [Video File] 158 Didal, Margielyn Arda 18 digital geographies/digital worlds 19-20, 22, 26, 30, 33-34, 37, 41, 43, 57, 61-62, 64, 76, 110, 131, 148-149, 174, 178 Dime Glory Challenge 172 Dime Street Challenge 2019: Live at Olympic Stadium [Video File] 172 Dinces, Sean 19, 40-41, 58 Diplomatic Immunity [Video File] 179 Dixon, Antuwan 17n1 Dixon, Clive 102 Dixon, Dwayne 40, 58 DLX Week in Dubai [Video File] 111n2 Dohrs, Jasper 27 Domino [Video File] 14 Down the Volga [Video File] 59n4, 119 Drip Through Stone [Video File] 166 Dubai (United Arab Emirates) 38, 46, 67, 91-97, 100-112, 130, 173, 175 Dubai [Video File] 111n2 Edensor, Tim 53 Edge of Arabia, The [Video File] 139-140 Encore [Video File] 78, 88

encounters definition 37, 177 with law enforcement 29, 35, 37, 42, 60, 65, 68, 83-85, 108, 166-168, 177-178; see also police; security; surveillance with public 29, 37, 42, 60-61, 65, 86-88, 117, 137, 139-140, 142, 146, 151, 154, 177-178 with skaters 37, 42, 65, 139, 142, 148, 156, 160, 162, 177-178 England 22; see also United Kingdom Epicly Palestine’d [Video File] 158-159 Etchegoyen, Manu 127 ethnography 38, 41-42, 52-53, 55-58, 59n4, 124, 143, 151, 155, 168, 173, 176; see also rolling ethnography; walking ethnography Europe 11, 14-15, 20-21, 23, 36, 64-65, 67, 88, 97, 117, 123, 131, 143, 166, 171, 178 European 14, 21, 48, 86, 120, 123 Evans, Ty 13-14, 38, 55n3, 67, 73, 75, 84-85, 92, 101, 105-106, 108, 177 Evisen Video [Video File] 14 Exploring China’s Skate Scene with Wang Huifeng [Video File] 74, 85 Far East Up North [Video File] 118 fashion 14, 66-67, 75, 78, 169 Fatback: Enjoi in Taiwan [Video File] 166 Figeoura, Justin Figgy 112 Finland 22-23, 30 Finnish language 23, 132, 136 Finnish national 23, 117, 131-135, 174 fixers 29, 35-36, 59, 64, 68, 84, 88, 132, 137n3, 139-140, 154, 173, 176, 178; see also translators Flat Earth [Video File] 101 Forshan (China) 64, 75 France 18 French national 23, 123, 126-127, 161 frontiers cultural frontiers, concept of 39, 140-141, 158 skateboarding’s frontiers 29, 36, 38-39, 64, 69, 75, 80, 89, 102, 129-130, 132, 138-142, 147-148, 161-163, 165, 173-175 Fully Flared [Video File] 13, 73, 85, 101 Future Primitive [Video File] 14 Fynn, Tommy 107 Gall, Fred 148 Gangtok, Sikkim (India) 34, 156-157, 173 Garcia, Nick 67-68 Gaza (Palestine) 158 gender 14, 18, 50, 59, 159, 172 geopolitics 139, 142, 144, 146-147, 162 Georgia (nation-state) 117, 131-132, 143, 146 Ghertner, D. Asher 26, 153 ghost cities 81-83, 95 Give Me My Money Chico [Video File] 71-72 Gizmo [Video File] 14 Glass: Volume 3 [Video File] 166

Index

Global North 31, 94; see also West, the Global South/‘near South’ 31, 94 globalization 13, 15, 21, 23, 26, 29, 36, 100, 131, 178 Go Skate Day 37, 42, 47, 47n2, 48 Goa (India) 149, 151n Guangzhou (China) 34, 64, 66, 74-75, 88, 166 Guerrero, Tommy 17n1 Günel, Gökçe 95 Gurus of the Ganges [Video File] 143, 150-155 GX1000: Taiwan [Video File] 167 Habla (Palestine) 158 Hanoi (Viet Nam) 88, 119n2 Harris, Jacob 158, 160-162 Hart, Kelly 106 Head Count [Video File] 14, 78 Helsinki (Finland) 23 Ho Chi Minh City (Viet Nam) 40, 44-45, 81 Hoffart, Jordan 67 Hölsgens, Sander 40, 170 Holy Cow [Video File] 150 Hotel Uzbekistan [Video File] 118, 120, 122-123, 129-130 Howell, Ocean 17, 109 Hsu, Jerry 17n1 Hughes, Kenny 148 In Dubai [Video File] 111n2 India 34, 36, 39, 84, 139-140, 142-143, 148-157, 174-175 Indian Express, The [Video File] 151 Indonesia 20, 34, 140 Indonesian national 48 infrastructure 15, 26-28, 31, 36-37, 39, 41-42, 50-52, 59, 62, 65, 71, 81-82, 93-94, 97, 113, 115-116, 124, 130-132, 136, 142-143, 149-151, 153, 158, 173, 175, 178 Ingersoll, Richard 52, 170 Instagram 35, 59 Iran 34, 36, 39, 97, 139-140, 142-148, 163, 174 Iraq 117 Israel 157-158 Jackson, Cyril 111-112 Jaipur (India) 151, 154 Jakarta (Indonesia) 34, 94 Japan 14, 18, 39-40, 60, 85, 140, 166, 171, 174-175, 178 Jayyous (Palestine) 160 Jeff Grosso’s Love Letters to Skateboarding: China [Video File] 69-70, 72 Jeff Grosso’s Love Letters to Skateboarding: LGBTQ+ [Video File] 19 Jefferson, Atiba 112 Johnson, Jake 168 Jordan (nation state) 140 Joslin, Chris 67-68, 72 Judkins, Nestor 95-96, 128, 151-152, 155, 159-160

205 Kabul (Afghanistan) 34, 108 Kanna, Ahmed 100 Kansas City (US) 105 Kaohsiung (Taiwan) 165 Karvonen, Sam 133-136 Kathmandu (Nepal) 34, 58 Kazakhstan 91, 94, 119n1, 123-124, 127-128 Kazakhstan Triangle, The [Video File] 95, 97, 115, 128 Keefe, Lawrence 143, 145 Keelung (Taiwan) 165-166, 169 Keep Discovering Taiwan [Video File] 166 Khiva (Uzbekistan) 130 Khomeini, Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi (Ayatollah) 139, 142, 144 Knowles, Christine 36 Koch, Natalie 38, 93-94, 99, 128, 175 Konyshev, Gosha 98, 126, 134, 137n3, 139-140, 158 Korea (South) 34, 40, 60, 140, 170-171, 174 Korean national 49 Korobov, Kirill 59n4, 119, 132-132, 136, 137n3 Koston, Eric 23-30, 55n3, 141-142 Krasnodar (Russia) 132, 136-137 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) 34, 40 Kuznetsov, Pascha 121, 129 Kyrgyzstan 34, 117, 123-125, 127 Lai, Eric 70 landscape(s) 13, 15-16, 20-23, 26-27, 29-33, 35-39, 41-45, 47, 52-57, 60-70, 72, 74-76, 7884, 86, 88-89, 91-95, 97-105, 107-112, 115-120, 122-124, 126-128, 130-133, 135-137, 140-152, 154-156, 158, 161, 163, 165, 167-171, 173-178; see also urban landscapes Larkin, Brian 50-51 Lay, Ryan 67, 158 Lebanon 140 Lemos, Tiago 102-103, 108 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov/Lenin monuments 119-120, 123-125, 127 Lhasa (China) 64, 75, 88 Li, Shiqiao 86-87 Life on Video: Guy Mariano [Video File] 73 Lindevall, Vantte 117, 131, 135-136 Lisbon (Portugal) 80 London (UK) 110 Los Angeles, LA (US) 19n2, 20-21, 33, 42-43, 45, 53-55, 55n3, 73, 80, 86, 105, 108, 157 Lost in Ordos [Video File] 81 low-end globalization see globalization Loy, Ethan 121-122, 129 ludic/ludic geographies 35, 74, 88, 158, 163; see also play Mackrodt, Michael 126, 143 Maclean, Kama 151 Magnified: Carlos Ribeiro [Video File] 79-80 Makassar (Indonesia) 34

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Sk ateboarding and Urban L andscapes in Asia

Malaysia 27, 34, 140 Malmö (Sweden) 17 Malouf Money Cup 171 Malto, Sean 102, 151-154 Mandalay (Myanmar) 34 mapping see cartography marble (material) 34, 45, 47, 67-71, 73-74, 78, 91, 95-96, 99, 103, 107-108, 111, 116, 118-121, 123, 125-130, 133, 136-137, 139, 142, 147, 150, 152, 160, 165-169, 175-176 Mariano, Guy 55, 73 Markham, Jordan 87 Mazir-i-Sharif (Afghanistan) 34 McClung, Trent 80 McClung, Trevor 67-68 Meet the Stans [Video File] 14, 99, 117, 123, 126, 128 Mehring, Jonathan 95, 151 memory/memoryscape(s) 30, 39, 115-116, 131, 135, 137 Menikmati [Video File] 13, 22-28, 30, 53, 142, 148, 174, 175 Mettalier, Kevin 125 Mexico 20, 65 Milton, Keenan 148 Misled Youth [Video File] 14 mobilities 20-21, 35, 39, 43, 53, 64, 102, 115, 178 Modus Operandi [Video File] 14 Mohammad, Robina 38, 92 Mongolia 34, 118 Mortagne, Fred 13-14, 22-23, 26, 142 Mosley, Gershon 17n1 Mould, Oli 110 Mouse [Video File] 55 Myanmar 30, 34, 46, 93, 156, 173 Nablus (Palestine) 160 Nanjing (China) 33-34, 64, 67-69, 87, 110, 175 Naypyidaw (Myanmar) 93 Nepal 34 Nepali language 156 Never [Video File] 78, 88 New York (US) 69, 89 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 118, 143, 161, 173 Nguyen, Don Nuge 17n1 Niyazov, Saparmurat 99-100 North Korea 117 Nukus (Uzbekistan) 129 Nursultan, Nazarbayev 94, 96 O’Connor, Paul 15, 18, 20, 31, 43, 58, 87-88, 127, 143, 171 O’Neill, Shane 75, 84 Oklahoma (US) 104 Olympics/Olympic Games 69, 73, 87, 101, 157, 171-173 Oman 140 Ordos (China) 34, 64-65, 75, 80-82, 88, 175

Ordos [Video File] 81 Osaka (Japan) 34, 40, 179 Othman, Mohammed 159 Page, Barney 67-68 Pahlavi, Reza Shah 145 Palestine 34, 36, 39, 139-140, 143, 157-163, 173-175 Panda Patrol: Taiwan Typhoon [Video File] 166 Paris (France) 95 Penang (Malaysia) 34, 40 performance/performing 15-16, 22, 26, 32, 39, 41, 43-44, 49-51, 57-58, 60, 62-63, 65, 67, 79, 81, 84, 88, 92, 94, 96, 98, 101, 103-104, 107, 109, 115, 122-123, 126-127, 133, 136, 142, 146, 149, 153-154, 162, 173, 176-178 Persian Version, The [Video File] 14, 97, 99, 117, 142-143, 145n1, 147 Petenev, Roman 127 Petersen, Rodrigo 71-72 Pham, Denny 143, 147-148 Philadelphia (US) 66, 78, 109 Photosynthesis [Video File] 14 Pieces of Palestine [Video File] 158, 160-162 Pink, Sarah 55 PJ Ladd’s Wonderful, Horrible Life [Video File] 18 place/concept of place/place-making 17n1, 21, 28, 32-33, 39, 43, 50, 53, 61, 77, 79, 81, 98, 100, 106, 115-117, 130, 139, 141-142, 147, 157, 161, 165-167, 172-174, 176, 178 play 16, 19n2, 21, 47, 82, 108, 123, 143, 158, 163, 166, 168, 173; see also ludic geographies police/cops 14, 17, 24-25, 45, 48, 63, 68, 83, 8588, 99, 107, 126, 132-133, 150, 158, 167-168, 170, 178; see also security guards; surveillance Portland (US) 20 Powell, George 65-66 property/property developers/property owners/property rights 15, 30, 35, 37, 59, 63, 65, 76, 81, 83, 86, 105, 110, 135, 149, 158, 168, 176 Pretty Sweet [Video File] 73 Pushing Formosa [Video File] 166 Pushing Myanmar [Video File] 173 Putrajaya (Malaysia) 34 Qalqiya (Palestine) 158-159, 161 Qingdao (China) 64 Qinhuangdao (China) 65 Questionable [Video File] 13 race/racism/ethnicity 14, 17, 17n1, 84-85, 172 Rahmani, MJ 144, 147-148 Rajput Ride, The [Video File] 151 Rama 8 Team Session [Video File] 27 Ramallah (Palestine) 34, 36, 141, 160 Reed, Kenny 124, 143-145, 148-149

Index

Reeves, Madeline 51 regions, regionalism 13, 15, 31-39, 54, 61, 93, 100, 112, 116-117, 130, 137, 140-142, 147, 161, 171, 174, 176, 179 Reynolds, Andrew 112 Ribiero, Carlos 59, 79-80 Ride the Tao: Etnies in China [Video File] 67-69 Road Less Travelled [Video File] 28-29 Roberts, Chris 160 Rodriguez, Paul 75, 101-102, 102n1, 104 rolling ethnography 38, 41-42, 55-56, 168, 173; see also ethnography; walking ethnography Rostami, Erfan 148 Roy, Ananya 149-150 Russia 118-120, 132 Russian language 132-134 Russian national 59n4, 98, 117, 119, 121, 123, 126, 135-136, 137n3, 139 Ryan, Walker 55-56, 143, 145 Saari, Arto 23-24, 30, 53, 174 Sablone, Alexis 18 Samarkand (Uzbekistan) 130 San’a (Yemen) 34, 139-140 Sao Paulo (Brazil) 105 scale 20-21, 32, 35, 45, 57, 70, 80-81, 91-92, 97, 99, 112, 115-116, 120, 140, 150, 174-175 Scholtz, Vladik 129 security/security guards 14, 17, 24-26, 29-30, 34, 45, 48, 62-63, 68, 76-77, 81, 83-86, 92, 95, 101, 103-105, 107-108, 129, 133, 149-150, 158-159, 161, 166, 168-170, 173-174, 176, 178-179; see also police; surveillance Selamat [Video File] 27 Seoul (Korea) 33-34, 40, 167, 170, 179 sexuality/sexualities 19, 172 Shackle Me Not [Video File] 13 Shanghai (China) 14, 33-35, 52, 64-67, 70, 75-80, 83, 85-89, 91, 110, 129-130, 175-176, 179 Shanghai 5 [Video File] 78 Shen City Peaks [Video File] 78 Shenzhen (China) 33-35, 52, 64-67, 69-75, 84-86, 88, 91, 108, 110, 130, 174-175 Shenzhen speed 69-70, 74-75, 108, 174 Shields, Roger 21, 32-33, 174 Shinkuba, Bhagat 134-136 shredscape definition of 22 examples of 26, 28, 33, 39, 51, 55, 68, 75, 80, 94, 110, 116, 119, 125, 130-131, 155, 161, 167, 174; see also spots Sidaway, James 38, 92, 100 silk road/silk route 33, 130 Simone, Abdoumaliq 31, 94 Singapore 27, 34, 37, 42, 46-51 skate video characteristics/cultural value 14-21, 57-61 examples see video file index entries

207 skateboarding and architecture 14, 16, 23, 35-36, 38, 44-45, 54, 63, 65, 75, 83, 86, 91, 95-98, 102, 104, 107, 110, 120-121, 130, 140, 142-143, 157-158, 161, 174, 176 culture 13, 15, 17-20, 17n1, 22-24, 29, 32, 37-38, 40-44, 50, 58, 59n4, 60, 62-65, 67, 69, 73-74, 79, 83, 86, 91-92, 101, 105, 108-111, 113, 115, 130, 133, 147-148, 151, 163, 169, 171-174, 176 literature 16-20, 41, 43-46 performance see performance Skateistan (NGO) 143 SkatePal (NGO) 161 skatepark 15, 17, 43, 62, 66, 74, 83, 109, 111, 145, 151n2, 160, 169-170 SkateQilya (NGO) 159-160 skater gaze definition 33-34 examples of 22, 26, 32, 36-37, 41-42, 44, 54-55, 62, 64, 78, 93, 99, 102, 109, 115-117, 120, 122, 127-128, 131, 137, 141-142, 163, 174 Smooth [Video File] 26 Snyder, Gregory 41, 43-45, 54-55, 58, 157 Socotra Island (Yemen) 139 Something Sinister [Video File] 78 Sorry [Video File] 14 Sour Solution II, The [Video File] 14 Southeast Asian Games 171 Soviet planning see urbanization, in Soviet Union Soviet Union/post-Soviet Union/post-Soviet Asia 15, 36, 39, 91, 93-94, 98-99, 112, 115-137, 140, 173, 175 spectacular urbanism/spectacle cities see urban spectacle spots as assemblage 13, 15, 26, 31-33, 35, 37, 41-45, 50-51, 57, 78-80, 88, 93, 110, 116, 131, 142, 146, 160, 167-168, 173 drivers of skate mobilities 13, 15, 20-21, 28, 30-31, 34-36, 42, 45, 54-55, 59, 62, 67, 75, 89, 91, 94, 113, 115-118, 127-128, 130, 132, 135-138, 140, 142, 148, 151, 160-161, 165-166, 171, 173-175, 178-179 Steve Rocco: The Man Who Souled the World [Video File] 66 Stoops Asia Tour, The [Video File] 166 Strange World [Video File] 18 Stronski, Paul 120 Suburban Diners [Video File] 65-68 Suciu, Mark 151 Sukhumi (Abkhazia) 132, 134-136 Summers, Gabriel 96-97, 128 Supa, Danny (Supasirirat) 17n1 Supavich, Beek 177 Supermix [Video File] 27 surveillance 17, 31-32, 34-35, 45, 50-51, 56, 61, 63, 86, 92, 101, 149, 159, 161 Sydney (Australia) 20

208 

Sk ateboarding and Urban L andscapes in Asia

Tähtinen, Miki 133-137 Taichung (Taiwan) 165 Taipei (Taiwan) 34, 165-169 Taipei Ducks, The [Video File] 166 Taiwan 39, 60, 67, 140, 165, 168, 175 Tashkent (Uzbekistan) 39, 115, 117, 119-123, 129 Tehran (Iran) 14, 29, 34, 36, 139, 141-148, 161, 175 Teixeira, Rodrigo TX 59 Terentyev, Victor 136, 137n3 Tezuka, Mami 18 Thailand 18, 24-27, 30, 60, 85, 140, 166 Thrift, Nigel 31, 108, 176 Tognelli, Sylvain 161-162 Tokyo (Japan) 34, 40, 58, 88, 172 Tongkong, Orapan 18 topology/cultural topology definition of 21-22 examples of 32, 34, 77, 79, 130, 140, 165, 174, 178 tourism/tourists 27, 46-47, 49-50, 77, 87, 96, 100, 107-108, 116, 119, 130, 151, 156, 175 Tourists in Taiwan [Video File] 165 transgression/‘middle-finger’ mentality 27, 83, 99, 105, 116, 131, 145 translators 35-36, 59n4, 64, 68, 84, 132-133, 136, 137n3, 178; see fixers Turkmenistan 91, 99-100 Turkmenistan [Video File] 99 Turner, Brandon 17n1 Turner, Jovontae 17n1 Ulan Bator (Mongolia) 34 Ulin, David 53-57, 100, 157 Umali, RB 17n1 United Kingdom (UK) 14, 18-19, 65, 67, 123; see also England United States of America/US/America 17n1, 19-26, 36-37, 45, 64-65, 70, 73, 81, 85-86, 88,101, 107, 130, 139, 145, 166, 171, 176, 178 urban aesthetics 17, 26, 44, 51-52, 57, 68, 82, 96, 98, 116, 129, 167, 169, 178 backstage 26, 33, 38, 44, 51, 91-93, 100, 109, 111, 113, 115, 137, 151, 158, 175 development, indexing through skate spots 15, 30, 35-36, 44, 63-64, 66, 70, 73, 76, 80-82, 92-94, 100, 109, 112, 117, 119n1, 120, 123-124, 142, 146, 173, 175 knowledge/subaltern urban knowledge 13, 15, 21-22, 30-31, 33, 35, 37, 41-42, 61-62, 64, 76-77, 87, 89, 122, 128, 140, 147, 174-178 landscapes see landscapes spectacle 36, 38, 47, 80, 91-101, 103-105, 107-108, 111-115, 119, 128, 137, 140, 146, 175 studies, debates in 50-51, 60, 81-82, 141-142, 149

urbanization Asia 17, 31-32, 36, 38-39, 46, 62-64, 70, 83, 92, 94, 109-110, 115, 118-119, 140, 145, 156, 175-176 and military occupation 139, 143, 157-161, 174 and modernity 16-17, 22, 25-28, 30, 38-39, 52, 67, 76, 81, 83, 91-94, 96, 108-109, 112, 116-120, 124, 140-148, 155, 161, 165, 170, 174-175 Urumqi (China) 64, 123 US/American national 23, 28, 55, 65, 67, 72, 75, 85-87, 95-97, 101-103, 107, 111, 120-121, 123-124, 126, 128-129, 143-145, 148, 151, 159, 166, 168 Useless Wooden Knowledge 19n2 Useless Wooden Toys [Video File] 19n2 Uzbekistan 117, 120, 123, 130 Vasconcellos, Nora 18 Vase [Video File] 161 video see skate video Video Days [Video File] 13 Visser, Robin 76, 83 Vivoni, Francisco 17, 42, 44, 64, 133 Wainright, Danny 65-66 Waldheim, Charles 33 Walker Ryan’s Wilshire Wonderland [Video File] 55-56 Walker, Clint 103-104 Walker, Sebo 151, 153 walking ethnography 38, 42, 52-55, 173; see also ethnography; rolling ethnography Waller, Patrik 14, 59n4, 95, 97-99, 117-120, 122-123, 128-129, 139, 143-144, 147, 150-152, 154, 166 Wang, Huifeng 74-75, 85 Watson, Karl 17n1 Way To Everest, The [Video File] 83-84 We Are Blood [Video File] 38, 75, 84, 87, 92-93, 101-112, 177 We Blew It At Some Point [Video File] 67 Weizman, Eyal 143, 157-158, 161, 174 Welcome to Hell [Video File] 13, 18 Wellspring [Video File] 158 Wenning, Brian 148 West, the/western 17, 20, 32, 70, 83, 88, 139, 141-142, 144, 147, 149, 159; see also Global North West Bank (Palestine) 143, 158-159 Where Do We Land? [Video File] 118 white mischief 84-85, 126, 178 White, Shari 14 Williams, Jahmal 17n1 Williams, Stevie 17n1 Woodworth, Max 64, 80-81, 95 Wootten, Rob 96, 121, 129-130

209

Index

X-Games 171 Xi’an (China) 64, 67 Xiaoping, Deng (person) 70-71 Xiaoping, Deng (spot, Shenzhen) 66, 71, 74-75, 130

Yeah Right! [Video File] 55n3, 101 Yemen 34, 117, 139-140 Yochim, Emily Chivers 17n1, 172 Yogyakarta (Indonesia) 34 Yuan, Fei 69

Yalla Yalla [Video File] 158 Yangon (Myanmar) 34 Ye Olde Destruction [Video File] 14

Zigzagging the Caucuses [Video File] 117 Zvereff, Dan 123, 159