Skateboard Video

Book excerpt: This book is about skateboard video and experimental ways of thinking about cities. It makes a provocative argument to consider skate video as an archive of the city from below. Here ‘below’ has a dual meaning. First, below refers to an unofficial archive, a subaltern history of urban space. Second, below refers to the angle from which skateboarders and filmers gaze upon, capture, and consume the city—from the ground up. Since taking to the streets in the early 1980s, skateboarding has been captured on film, video tape and digital memory cards, edited into consumable forms and circulated around the world. Videos are objects amenable to ethnographic analysis while also archiving exercises in urban ethnography by their creators. I advocate for taking skate video seriously as a (fragile) archive of the urban backstage, collective memory across time and space, creative urban practice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and the globalization of a subculture at once delinquent and magnificent.