Cities are increasingly becoming vessels of consumption, while various opportunities for production of space and public expression are taken away from the city's inhabitants. New architectural interventions often disregard a site's previously developed character and further aid in wiping away memories closely related to a city's cultural past. Banja Luka, the second largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been an important cultural center, even through years of unrest. Within the city's main plaza stands an unfinished concrete structure (Fig. 3), built with pre-war conceptions of a hotel. The structure's location within the city of Banja Luka has provided for a close connection with the city's inhabitants and has allowed them to relate to it directly on a daily basis. The city's youth has left traces of artistic expression on this structure; its interface with the countercultures of graffiti artists and skateboarders has created a unique testament of time which desires continued narration. With the post-war privatization of most properties within the city, and the increasing desire to live within the city center, construction cranes are appearing throughout the city's core, providing new residential towers and a high increase in places for consumption. The opportunities for production of space, for places where memories are preserved and created, are decreasing and threaten to affect the thesis site. Completion of the project as initially envisioned would disregard the existing interactive relationship established between the city's inhabitants and the structure. The beauty of artistic expression cultivated upon the structure longs to be preserved and augmented in order to enable the structure's autonomy. Recognition of the value of the existing built elements and the site's overall character is essential and requires purposeful evaluation in the unification process of the new and existing elements. The redefined space will become a monument to the activities which have echoed at the site through some of the toughest times the city's youth had to endure. "...the notion of monument I have sought to put forward here is bound up with the lingering resonance of poetry after it has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has been seen." (Solà-Morales Rubió, Ignasi and Sarah Whiting. Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 71.) The old and new will become individual halves of one self, united as they continue to play.

This is a project that asks questions. Why are we behaving in certain ways? Why are we using objects for a certain purpose and not others? Why can’t we do it differently? Questions most of us never even consider because we have gotten so used to following the path that is predetermined for us. Throughout this work I will analyze how skateboarding poses a critique of spatial regulations and pre-defined purposes, as well as how skaters are suggesting a whole new perspective on our everyday life. I argue that skaters are in fact the post-industrial designers of their everyday life, and that the perspective of skaters carries potential for sustainable change as it favors the imagination and possibilities over restrictions and limitations. This is a perspective that I believe can help us make better use of the resources we have, both in terms of ecological sustainability, but also with regards to social aspects, as it allows for greater diversity and multitudes of behaviors within the same space. Through several design iterations I have explored how skateboarding offers tactics that can be applied by others to start a process of imagining and performing alternative ways of engaging with public spaces.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

This research addresses a significant gap in previous work on the formation of urban and suburban black skateboarding subcultures. By using data generated through oral histories, photographs, mapping, and literature review, this study explores why black youth initially began skateboarding in New Orleans in the mid-2000s. In contrast to the scholarly literature and local popular perception, this visual anthropological study aims to provide an alternative origin story of black skateboarding in Post-Katrina New Orleans, and to examine the continuing popularity of the sport within the young black community.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:30:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Leonardo Brandao.pdf: 6343643 bytes, checksum: 3cfda7f1f63025834bf4386a2d16f9b2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-06-12 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This thesis aims to reflect on the development of so-called "California sports" and / or "extreme sports" in Brazil, taking as case study the practice of analyzing and skateboarding through a series of magazines published in the country between the 1970s and early 1990s. The starting point was the theory that the sport can be understood as a set of technical and organizational discourses of embodiment, and therefore being able to drive themselves to the most diverse forms of bodily experience (such a perspective is worked on the thesis by notion of power sports). We seek not only to investigate the different ways the skateboarding was co-opted by the sports universe, but also how he invented modes of spatial appropriation of subjectivity and experience that had little to do with competitions, ranking or income. The thesis we defend is that skateboarding is not trod the ways of a sportivization to result in a solid identity and which we could classify as sports. His practice was in an area of fluid and ambiguous boundaries, establishing dialogues with both the world of sports competitions organized as important to the counterculture youth movements, especially with punk rock. The restraints by which it passed in the mid-1970s, as he faced a ban in 1988, when former President Janio Quadros was mayor of Sao Paulo, indicate right, beside the existence of organized competition for a lot public, and sponsored by major companies such as Bank Itau, the existing imbalances in recent history / Esta tese tem como objetivo refletir sobre o desenvolvimento dos chamados esportes californianos e/ou radicais no Brasil, tomando como estudo de caso a prática do skate e a analisando através de uma série de revistas publicadas no país entre as décadas de 1970 e início de 1990. Para tanto, partimos da teorização de que o esporte pode ser compreendido como um conjunto de técnicas e discursos de organização da corporeidade, e por isso sendo capaz de conduzir para si as mais diversas formas de experiência corporal (tal perspectiva é trabalhada na tese através da noção de poder esportivo). Buscamos não somente investigar os diferentes modos como o skate foi cooptado pelo universo esportivo, mas também como ele inventou modos de apropriações espaciais e experiências de subjetivação que pouco tiveram a ver com competições, ranking ou rendimentos. A tese que defendemos é que o skate não trilhou os caminhos de uma esportivização que resultasse numa identidade sólida e a qual poderíamos classificar como esportiva. Sua prática constituiu-se numa zona de fronteiras fluídas e ambivalentes, estabelecendo diálogos tanto com o mundo organizado das competições esportivas quanto com importantes movimentos juvenis de contracultura, especialmente com o punk rock. As coibições pelas quais passou em meados da década de 1970, assim como a proibição que enfrentou no ano de 1988, quando o ex-presidente Jânio Quadros fora prefeito da cidade de São Paulo, indicam bem, ao lado da existência de competições organizadas para imensos públicos, e com patrocínio de empresas importantes como o Banco Itaú, os descompassos existentes em sua história recente

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

[pt] O design gráfico de linguagem singular desenvolvido na indústria do skate é o objeto de estudo desta dissertação, que procura definir quais são as suas particularidades e que fatores as determinam. O objetivo da pesquisa é estudar, por meio de uma bibliografia selecionada, análise gráfica do material coletado e realização de entrevistas, o contexto a partir do qual se criou esta linguagem gráfica e como ela se estabeleceu, partindo da premissa que a conjuntura em que o skate é praticado é responsável pela formação de um perfil próprio dos skatistas, o qual é expresso através deste design gráfico. Assim, a observação do perfil dos praticantes de skate e do cotidiano da prática deste esporte permitiu que se fizesse associações com as características encontradas nos designs gráficos dos produtos da sua indústria e então compreender o porquê do simbolismo criado e dos estilos artísticos empregados. A pesquisa também institui uma analogia entre a organização dos skatistas em um grupo independente e a criação de um campo artístico e intelectual autônomo, conforme defendido por Pierre Bourdieu. Essa analogia facilita o entendimento da intensa ligação que existe entre skate e arte, evidenciada, entre outras coisas, pela qualidade do design gráfico relacionado com este esporte. / [en] The graphic design with singular language developed in the skateboarding industry is the object of study of this dissertation, which tries to define its peculiarities and which factors determine them. The objective of the inquiry is to study, through a selected bibliography, graphic analysis of the collected material and interviews, the context from which this graphic language was created and how did it get established, based on the premise that the conjucture in which skateboarding is practiced is responsible for the formation of a skateboarders` own profile, expressed through this graphic design. So, the observation of the skaters` profile and the daily life of this sport`s practice allowed doing associations with the characteristics found in the graphic designs of the products of this industry and then to understand the reasons why its symbolism was created and the artistic styles were chosen. The inquiry also sets an analogy up between the organization of the skateboarders in an independent group and the creation of an artistic and intellectual autonomous field, conformable defended by Pierre Bourdieu. This analogy makes easy the understanding of the intense connection that exists between skate and art, shown up, between other things, for the quality of the graphic design connected with this sport.

Skateboarding and parkour are categorized as urban sports, which are a type of lifestyle sports that are primarily practiced within urban environments. Compared to regular sports, these sports have a focuson personal enjoyment and freedom to set your own goals. Sport and physical activity are an important factor in both physical health and the development of mental and social skills, but not all sports have the same needs, nor are they treated equally. To gain a better understanding for how the practitioners of urban sports view themselves and what their needs are in relation to sport, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted, where 6 participants were asked about factors relating to aspects of the sport, relationship to the spaces they occupy and how other practitioners and non-practitioners interacted with them to better understand the relationship between these practitioners and the spaces they occupy. The results of this study were then presented in relation to the theory of loose spaces to explain why these spaces are important to the practitioners, and how their needs for both space and sport can be met from a municipal perspective. The findings show that the participants have common themes between them, and that space becomes an important factor to the participants because it gives them a sense of reality in their practice. The participants describe that without this sense of reality the practice of urban sports becomes artificial and loses meaning to them.To encourage participation in these sports from a municipal perspective there are two key points, availability of space where practitioners aren’t exposed to bystanders and working with public acceptance of sport as a lifestyle activity that doesn’t have to be delegated to specific sporting arenas.

In recent decades skateboarding has expanded from recreation into a form of transportation. Skateboarders appear to use roadways much as other non‐motorized modes do. However, there is little academic research on the needs and characteristics of the skateboard as a mode. This research reports demographics, multi‐modal and travel behavior findings, and other data from an exploratory mixed‐methods study of skateboarding as a mode of transportation.

I denna uppsats söker jag svar på vad coolhet innebär för skateboardåkare i Stockholm. Syftet med studien är att ta reda på hur skateboardåkare förstår sig själva och sin omgivning. I uppsatsen diskuteras hur symboliskt kapital skapas genom ett förkroppsligande av idéer förknippade med begreppet cool. Empirin består av material som samlats in från observationer och intervjuer av skateboardåkare i Stockholm under våren 2022, samt skateboardmedia, vilken undersöks noggrannare med hjälp av de antropologiska begreppen habitus och kulturellt kapital.