City of courts: excavating the future in West Los Angeles

Abstract

This paper develops ‘pollution of publicness’ in grey spaces of polluted leisure to explore three phases of development at the West Los Angeles Courthouse. Through three chromatic shifts in the bandshell stage’s paint – Monochrome (public); Shades (public-private); Compound (private), I trace this place’s construction to reveal how shifts in development desires have engendered struggles against dispossession, loss and political-economic pollution of public space. I build on calls to operationalise the ‘grey spaces’ paradigm in leisure studies in three ways. First, I provide a case study that documents how skateboarding’s material and symbolic ambivalence entrench the loss of architecturally and culturally significant skate spots. Second, I problematise the notion that ‘greyness’ offers tailored methodologies to study skateboarding by combining traditional methods of looking at cities with my skater’s eye. Lastly, I contribute an example of how ‘grey spaces’ can analyse the specificities of skateboarding and connect to broader concepts beyond the board. Excavating The Courthouse’s construction and making this conceptual bridging, I argue that architectural and political ambivalence contributes to ‘pollution of publicness’ while offering opportunities to contest this pollution. I advocate for an explicit political commitment to spatial justice in future struggles to preserve public leisure space.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.