Skateboarding: From Urban Spaces to Subcultural Olympians

Skateboarding or ‘sidewalk surfing’ emerged in the late 1950’s southern California, whereby surfers were not in the sea. The aim of this special issue is to benchmark critical research on skateboarding, youth and subculture on an international basis to contribute to the field of research which explores contemporary skateboarding focusing on young people’s everyday lives from a cultural perspective. Skateboarding is a very individual thing; it is about balance, and it is also about how you hold yourself in a collective subculture within local communities and global media where ‘living side ways’ as Friedel (2016) calls it, is a type of philosophy of the everyday. Skateboarding has evolved from a creative urban activity with a legendary past meshed with subcultural values into an Olympic sport and a platform for multinational industry and global enterprises. On this basis there are tensions between subcultural authenticity within skateboarding and the pursuit of instrumental profit sought by corporate companies who are at some distance from the young people themselves. The process of incorporation for skateboarding in mainstream culture and in sport societies has been slow and a contested one as skateboarding has an open democratic resonance that opposes competition based on authenticity of expression (Beal & Weidman, 2003). The deviant subcultural images of skateboarding derived from dirty and dark urban spaces only given colour and light by Graffiti artists, the perception of damage to property and risk-taking in public places saw it as a near criminal activity with ‘attractive stunts’ (Blackman, 2014; Willing & Shearer, 2016). The appearance of a self-made culture celebrating DIY-subcultural practices offered skateboarding a punk ethos, alongside its brush with hip-hop musical artists including Easy E, Lil Wayne and the Beastie Boys. In the cultural West, authenticity drawing from the ideas of subculture tends to prevail as new generations are fostered in this expanding Article