Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia
Title
Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia
Subtitle
Endless Spots
Price
€ 117,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789463723138
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
210
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Discipline
Asian Studies
Also available as
eBook PDF - € 116,99
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Urban Asia: Endless Spots
Escaping the California Gridlock
(Re)Mapping Asia Through Spots
Structure of the Book
Chapter 2. Shredding the Urban Fabric
Spots: Urban Landscapes Below the Knees
Infrastructure's Adjacent Publics
Splicing the Map
Life on Video, Life Online
Conclusion
Chapter 3. Chasing the Concrete Dragon
From Chinese Consumers to Consuming China
Skateboarding at Shenzhen Speed
Endless Spots, New Cartographies
Communist Wonderland
Conclusion
Chapter 4. Spectacle Cities: The Luxury Of Emptiness
Central Asian Spectacles
Emptying Dubai
Dubai Unreal
Spectacle And Its Others
Conclusion
Chapter 5. For the Love of Soviet Planning
Post-Soviet Urban Space From Below (the Knees)
Independence Square (Tashkent)
Ala-Too Square (Bishkek)
The Outer Grid
Haunted Spots
Conclusion
Chapter 6. Skateboarding's New Frontiers
Iran: Revolutionary Modernity
India: Rough Cut Modern
Shredding the Architecture of Occupation
Conclusion
Chapter 7. Conclusion: Another 'Next China'
Real-Time Blues
Endless Spots, Endless Search
Bibliography
Skate Videos And Media Files
Published Sources
Index

Reviews and Features

"Duncan McDuie-Ra’s Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots is an important contribution [to studies of skateboarding in Asia], offering a reflexive and nuanced account. [...] The book provides a refreshingly respectful, conceptually progressive, and richly detailed exploration of skateboarding in Asia. It also stands as one of too few ethnographic skateboarding studies of Asian skate scenes. [...] For non-skaters this book offers the opportunity to develop a kind of verstehen or knowledge of distinct subcultural nuances and ways of analyzing built environments in often rapidly changing Asian landscapes."
- Indigo Willing, Griffith University, Asian Anthropology, 2021

"This book pushes the understanding of urban space in fascinating new ways by emphasizing the unique view upon the city that skaters develop through their peculiar spatial practice. It presents a huge number of rich insights that have been needed but never put to writing."
- Max D. Woodworth, Ohio State University, Department of Geography

"This empirically-rich, conceptually-thorough, and geographically-focused narrative opens up a whole new world of skateboarding to the academy. McDuie-Ra vividly explores how skateboarding has mutated from the West to the East, and in the process highlights the broadening cosmopolitanism of skateboarding across different cultural backgrounds from all over the world."
- Dr Oli Mould, Lecturer in Human Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London

"A remarkable reconceptualization of skateboarding geography and landscapes. Redrawing skateboarding's world to encompass the likes of China, Dubai, India, Kazakhstan, India and Palestine, McDuie-Ra rethinks skateboarding's global mobilities."
- Iain Borden, Professor of Architecture & Urban Culture, University College London

Duncan McDuie-Ra

Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia

Endless Spots

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these spots to make skate video, skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, skate video circulates rapidly through digital platforms to millions of viewers, enrolling spots from Shenzhen to Ramallah into an alternative cartography of Asia. This book explores this way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, and the implications for relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development.
Author

Duncan McDuie-Ra

Duncan McDuie-Ra is professor of Urban Sociology at University of Newcastle, Australia. His most recent sole-authored books are Borderland City in New India (2016), Debating Race in Contemporary India (2015), and Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail (2012).