Legal Geographies—Skating Around the Edges of the Law: Urban Skateboarding and the Role of Law in Determining Young Peoples' Place in the City

Abstract

This article argues that urban skateboarding and the laws by which the city is governed must be understood as intertwined. The transformation of skateboarding's most popular practices from the 1970s onward are a product of an ongoing dialectical engagement between young people and the law. When faced with shifting landscapes of property and liability, young skaters have adapted their practices, seeking out new types of terrain. This search has led skateboarding into the public spaces of the city and regimes of urban governance. Contemporary efforts to build public skateparks in cities such as Seattle, Washington are properly contextualized as part of a continuing evolution of skaters' agency in responding to and capitalizing on openings in the legal landscape. By working both within the political system and constructing skateparks outside conventional political avenues, skatepark advocates seek spaces that are free from increasingly restrictive conventional logics of private and public property.

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