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Reading the school entranceway:

What “no skateboarding” signs reveal about who and what schools value

Dan Grassick

University of Alberta

[email protected]

Department of Secondary Education 347 Education South, University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2G5

Phone: (780) 492-3674

NO SKATEBOARDING SIGNS: WHAT SCHOOLS VALUE 1

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Growing out of pools, ramps, and skateparks, modern skateboarding terrain involved anything encountered in the modern city. ... The new skateboarding sites are not private houses or suburban roads, hidden from public view, but university campuses, urban squares, public institutions, national theatres, commercial office plazas, as well as the more public quotidian spaces of back streets, main roads, alleys, sidewalks, malls and car-parks. ... Compared to the suburbs, city cores offer more opportunities and concentrated heterogeneous social spaces. (pp. 179/186) Kelvin Ho Skateboarding: An Interpretation of Space in the Olympic City

Thus where the decentralized suburb promotes life as divorced from the city, isolating people from participatory creativity, skateboarders related individual life to the form of the city, reintroducing the city as creative and active oeuvre and thus conceptually moving the suburb closer to the complex contradictions of the city core. (p. 54)

Iain Borden Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body

‘No Signs’ & ‘Accidental Skateparks’

A few years ago, I noticed an interesting feature that seemed to be a part of the design of

all of Calgary’s schools. Posted near the multiple entranceways of hundreds of schools, a sign


was affixed to the brick facade. This sign didn’t bear a welcome to the school, a brand extension

of the school board’s mission statement (such as “future leaders at work and play”), nor even a

courteous reminder for guests to please register at the office on their way into the school. No,

the message found ubiquitously on all of Calgary’s school reads as follows: No Skateboarding,

No Scooters, No Rollerblading (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The sign affixed to all Calgary Board of Education schools. Although hard to see at this resolution, the sign is also the canvas for two different types of graffiti: stickers from a nearby skateboard store (including one crossing out the word “no”), and pencil writing (written over top of the word “no” so the sign reads “go skateboarding”). (Grassick, 2013).

I have taught in Calgary for almost ten years and it is only recently that these ‘No Signs’

have emerged from the urban background to the forefront of my attention. This occurred when I


was visiting a school for an after-hours meeting. When I pulled up in front of the main office

and got out of my car, I stopped and laughed. At the base of the walls leading toward the front

doors, the bottom of the outer school walls were angled concrete ramps. The walkway to the

school’s entrance had these ramps on both sides. Although the grade and angle were not exactly

consistent with the smooth transition found in skateboard and snowboard terrain parks around

the world, there could be no doubt; I was standing in a half-pipe. Looking right, I saw that the

school was ringed in asphalt and that rest of the school’s walls ended in more ramps and raised

concrete benches. This was no schoolyard; it was a skatepark! As I walked into the school,

shaking my head at the folly of the school’s architects, the No Sign caught my gaze. ‘If you

don’t want kids to skateboard on your school grounds,’ I thought to myself as I entered the

school, ‘don’t build them a skatepark.’

Figure 2 shows three ‘accidental skateparks’ outside Calgary middle schools. The one

that I mention above is the bottom-most series of images (3A-B). Even in these low resolution

photos pulled off of the street view mode of Google Maps, it is easy to see how school

entranceways carefully designed by architects to provide a gradual flow from the sidewalk to the

school doors could obviously be read as something entirely different to even a novice skater.

Illegible at this resolution, but present on all schools are the white No Signs. These are most

visible in 2A-C.

These signs, except for their apparent ubiquity, seems harmless enough, but when

considered critically (especially when many of these signs are positioned in close proximity to

bike racks) a number of important questions immediately spring to mind: Where do these signs

come from? What do they attempt to produce? What do they mean? What is it like to be a


student who skateboards, scooters, or rollerblades who is confronted by these signs on a daily

basis? What do these signs say to students about what their schools value?

These questions lend themselves to hermeneutic and phenomenological consideration.

Hermeneutics is the study of interpreting ‘texts’ to derive their meaning, underlying values, and

origins (Buchanan, 2010). Texts worth studying in this inquiry are school board policy

statements, municipal bylaws, and the architectural space itself.

“As an approach to research in education, phenomenology involves a careful and

systematic reflection on the lived experience of a pedagogical phenomenon,” (Adams &

Thompson, 2010, p. 736). Phenomenological lenses are particularly helpful at helping determine

students’ affective response to No Signs and the institutional thinking that produced them.

In their 2010 paper, Interviewing Objects: Including Educational Technologies as Qualitative

Research Participants Cathy Adams and Terrie Lynn Thompson propose a series of heuristics

which allow an object to be interviewed as an active research participant. The heuristics are

derived from merging the horizons of Adams’s hermeneutic-phenomenological work with

Thompson’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approach. For this paper, I will employ a number of

Adams and Thompson’s heuristics to interview, not the No Signs, but the architectural school

space itself.


Figure 2. ‘Accidental skateparks’ outside three Calgary schools. 1A-C shows an entranceway that was part of a redesign at the turn of the century. A new office and library wing was added to the school and this entranceway was built with a ramp (not visible), multiple sets of three stairs, handrails and multi-level stone gardens with smooth concrete edges. 2A-C shows a 1960s school built into a slight hill. The main entrance (2C) includes a relatively steep set of steps which splits into two directions and two more sets of steps before reaching street level. 2B shows a section of the walkway that runs parallel to the road where a series of three benches are set just above the asphalt leading to the back door of the school (2A) where a longer set of stairs leads from the school down to a graded section of pavement and the road. 3A and 3B show the school mentioned in the introduction. The angled ramps leading to the school’s entrance can be seen somewhat in 3A, but 3B clearly shows the ramps and benches that surround the school. Photos from Google Maps.

Although my interpretations on school space could certainly be drawn by any student

who navigates urban space in a non-mainstream fashion (parkour ‘traceurs’, unicyclists, BMX

bikers, pogo-stickers, and those skiers and snowboarders who move ice shavings and snow from

their local hockey arenas so they can jam urban rails), I will focus this paper on skateboarders

because they have been the subject of considerably more research than other de/reterritorializers

of urban space. The terms “skateboarder”, “skater”, and “rider” will be used interchangeably.

On Architectural “Space”

Arguably the world’s leading skateboarding academic is Iain Borden, who is neither a

cultural historian nor a youth anthropologist, but a professor of architecture who specializes in

critical urban re/design. In his book Skateboarding, Space, and the City: Architecture and the

Body (2001), Borden points out that the notion of “space” in architecture has changed over the

last century. Initially, the product of architecture was the design and construction of structures

within space. With the development of gestalt psychology, architects began to pay more

conscious attention in their designs to building space between structures as part of the

architecture. Only recently has architecture started to take a new turn thanks to the writings of

Henri Lefebvre. Contemporary architecture includes an understanding that space and

architecture are created by those who inhabit and move through the spaces between structures.

As Borden states:


Architecture, like all other cultural objects, is not made just once, but is made and remade

over and over again. Each time it is represented through another medium, each time its

surroundings change, each time different people experience it. (2001, p. 5)

Informed by a swath of researchers including Foucault, Lacan, Lefebvre, Heidegger, and Idhe,

contemporary architecture is not an object, but a series of multiple interactions created as

different subjects enter into short-term relationships with the objects inhabiting a space as they

move through it.

In a culture stuck on cruise control, the [O]ther skater chooses to operate in a forgotten

no-man’s land. In fact, the skater thrives on using the discarded, abandoned and

generally disregarded portions and structures of the society at large. Metropolitan

dwellers are simply witnesses to the functioning of the city, where the experience of

urban space is like that of a museum, with visitors’ bodies controlled by an ‘organized

walking’ of contrived route, speed, gestures, speaking and sound.’ (Borden, p. 190,

2001).

The same entranceway of a school can be read in multiple ways and the space itself is

created by different agents. To the average school ‘comer-or-goer’, the entranceways shown in

Figure 2 are neither special nor flexible in their potential uses. They are conduits into and out of

the school, nothing more. To me, the steps and handrails are virtual skatepark elements; I have

neither the skill nor the inclination to negotiate these elements on a skateboard myself but I can

see the potentiality of the space. To a student skateboarder, however, the “handrails aren’t for

people with mobility problems” (2001, p. 192), they’re an object to ollie onto that allows for a

downward flow to the concrete below. These youth not only see the multiplicity of affordances


that certain arrangements of concrete, steps, and handrails provide, but they are able to change

how they negotiate these spaces in unique ways that transform a school entranceway, for

example, into a performative skatepark.

Once you are introduced to the idea that school entranceways can be deterritorialized and

reterritorialized by skateboarders, you come to see the multiplicities of the shapes that were

intentionally designed by school architects, but that perfectly align with the needs of young

riders. In Figure 2, there are numerous stretches of smooth concrete and asphalt runways needed

to gain speed, take-off zones and landing zones for tricks, and run-outs that can be used to come

to a safe stop or to redirect the board’s direction for another pass.

Contemporary architecture also demands that designers consider the temporal aspect of

space. A school entranceway is only such for a few busy periods at the beginning and close of

the school day and at either end of recesses, breaks, and the lunch hour. For the vast majority of

the day, these spaces are vacant and functionless. They are no longer entranceways, they are a

meaningless assemblage of structures. Their designed monofunction dissolves into

functionlessness. The space becomes entirely virtual, an area ripe for deterritorialization by

skaters.

The Skateboard as a Reading Device

Objects touch one another, feel, smell, and hear one another. Then they contemplate one

another with eye and gaze. One truly gets the impression that every shape in space, every

spatial plane, constitutes a mirror and produces a mirage effect; that within each body the

rest of the world is reflected, and referred back to, in an ever-renewed to-and-fro of


reciprocal reflection, an interplay of shifting colours, lights and forms. (Lefebvre in

Borden, p. 105, 2001).

Skateboards ‘read’ the urban environments through their skateboards, arranging corridors

of space (stretches of pavement, drops, rails, benches, and sets of steps) together like words in a

sentence. Skateboarder and skateboard develop a human-machine relationship that Idhe (1979)

refers to as “embodiment”. The rider experiences the city through his board, each bump and

crack of the urban environment is absorbed into his body. The board affords the experiencing of

the landscape as an extension of the rider (Ho, 1999). Not only is the city read through the

skateboard like brail on a page is read by a trained hand, but it’s song can also be heard.

I listen to the skateboard. ... Skating over concrete with consistently spaced [concrete

slabs] produces a regular rhythm that varies according to my velocity. Also, the different

textures of the ground surface will communicate their qualities to me aurally. A smooth

skateable surface such as marble, for example, will reveal itself in smooth, calm sounds,

whereas an unskateable surface such as gravel will sound coarse and unforgiving. (Ho,

p. 101, 1999).

What Schools Value

In his analysis of human-technology relations, Don Ihde (1979) describes how some

objects that exist almost constantly in our surroundings disappear into the background. These

taken-for-granted constructions remain hidden to us until they reemerge as ‘Other’ due to some

breakdown (such as when a vending machine fails to accept your money or holds on to your

Coffee Crisp, dangling it in front of your eyes behind the impenetrable glass forcefield) or due to


a sudden temporal-spatial change (like the vending machine that just fell on top of someone who

was rocking it, trying to retrieve a mis-vended chocolate bar). Background and alterity can be

applied to the human-spatial relations which occur by different actors negotiating the same

space. A school administrator is functionally blind to the space of their school entranceway; this

space and its stairs and handrails has fallen into the background. This space becomes Other

when the administrator leaves school one afternoon and finds that a ‘mob’ of skateboarding

youth have reterritorialized the entranceway for ‘anOther’ purpose.

The No Sign was designed, mass produced, and mounted on schools for a reason: to

prevent the use of school spaces by riders. Its messaging is explicit, its intent is clear. But what

values does it promote and whose values are they? What is the hidden curriculum of these signs?

It’s About Keeping Kids Safe

Why no skateboards? Because skateboards are dangerous. Doctors, administrators, and

school board lawyers are worried about possible litigation stemming from skaters colliding with

pedestrians or from parents expressing outrage that their children were injured while

skateboarding on the school’s property (Borden, 2001).

Skating is dangerous. A number of studies from Australia, America, Canada, and the

United Kingdom have found conclusively that skateboarding is one of the leading causes of

adolescent injury, causing between 21-24% of all falls (Berström, & Björnstig, 1991; Konkin, et

al., 2006; Harris, Allyson, Rowe, & Voaklander, 2012; Unni, Locklair, Morrow, & Estrada,

2012; Lincoln, Caswell, Almquist, Reginald, Norris, & Hinton, 2011). Most skate-related

injuries resulted in non-urgent and semi-urgent traumas to the extremities that required mostly


non-surgical medical interventions. Fatalities are extremely rare and other activities result in

injury rates similar or great than those of skateboarding.

3.3.2. 1 to 4 yearsMore than one third (34%, n = 232) of fall injuries were

from this age group (Table 3). The leading causes of injurieswere falls from furniture (23%), playground equipment (18%),and slipping or tripping (17%). Falls from one level to anothercomprised 19% of fall injuries in this group (Table 3). Theseincluded falls from trampolines, windows, decks, and toyvehicles. Falls from slipping or tripping accounted for 14% ofcases. There is some variability by age in the occurrence ofinjuries. Falls from furniture, slipping, or tripping were morefrequent among the younger (1- and 2-year-old) children.Injuries sustained at the playground and caused by falls fromstairs were more common among 3- and 4-year olds.

3.3.3. 5 to 9 yearsThis group accounted for most number of fall-related

hospitalizations (39%). Almost a third of these injuries werecaused by falls from playground equipment. Monkey bars andslideswere themost commonplayground equipment involved.Falls from furniture (12%) and falls caused by tripping orslipping (12%) were the other leading causes of fall injuries.Falls from one level to another was the second most frequentcause of injury (Table 3). However, this classification includeda variety of causes such as falls from trees, carts, trampolines,deck, and windows. Falls associated with rough and tumbleplay (8%) typical of this age group were also present.

3.3.4. 10 to 14 yearsApproximately 19% of fall hospitalizations were from this

group (Table 3). The leading cause of injury was falls fromskateboards (24%). Skateboard injuries were more commonamong the older male children. Other causes were falls fromtrampolines and falls due to slipping or tripping. These injurieswere more common for the younger children in this age group.

The 3 leading causes of fall-related injuries for thedifferent age groups are shown in Table 4.

4. Discussion

Falls are the leading cause of pediatric injuries. However,injury prevention efforts often do not reflect the significance

of this problem. Research suggests that mothers perceivedthat society viewed falls by children as normative and thatthere was little expectation for parents to prevent them [10].However, most fall-related injuries are preventable.

With a few exceptions [11,12], studies on pediatric fallshave focused on specific types of falls [2-5] rather than injurypatterns in different age groups. Falls are likely to beinfluenced substantially by developmental stage [13]. Thedata captured in the trauma registry are informative about themain causes of fall-related injuries. However, in many cases,it fails to convey specific information that would be helpfulin guiding injury prevention efforts. For instance, the leadingcause (E-code) of fall injuries was E884.9—fall from onelevel to another (tree, haystack, stationary vehicle, embank-ment). This code covers a variety of causes and may notreveal differences by age. For infants, injuries were incurredwhen the infant slipped from a caregiver's arms, whereas for1- to 4-year olds, injuries may have been caused by fall froma stationary toy vehicle or trampoline.

This retrospective review of data of pediatric patientsadmitted because of injuries from falls identifies specificcauses of fall injuries by age group. This enables moretargeted fall prevention efforts [6]. Injury prevention expertsnote the need to provide developmentally relevant counsel-ing. They also suggest restricting the number of topics for

Table 3 External causes of fall injuries by age

E-code Cause of injury b1 y 1-4 y 5-9 y 10-14 y Total % of all falls

E884.9 Fall from one level to another(tree, haystack, stationaryvehicle, embankment)

28 44 75 31 175 26%

E884.0 Fall from playground equipment 0 38 84 9 131 19%E884.2, E884.4,E884.5

Fall from furniture (including chair,bed, other furniture)

18 54 30 1 106 16%

E885.9 Fall from slipping and tripping 0 32 24 16 72 11%E880.9 Fall from stairs 4 16 5 5 30 4%E885.2 Fall from skateboard 0 1 4 22 27 4%Other Other 6 47 40 41 134 20%

Total 56 (8%) 232 (34%) 262 (39%) 125 (19%) 675 (100%) 100

Table 4 Leading causes of fall-related injuries by age

Age Leading causes of injuries from falls

b1 y Falls from slipping out of caregiver's arms (47%)Falls from beds and couches (40%)Falls from a countertop (13%)

1-4 y Falls from furniture—beds, chairs, couches (23%)Falls from playground equipment (18%)Falls due to slipping/tripping (17%)

5-9 y Falls from playground equipment (32%)Falls from beds and couches (12%)Falls due to slipping/tripping (12%)

10-14 y Falls from skateboarding (24%)Falls from trampoline (12%)Falls due to slipping/tripping (11%)

1459Age variability in pediatric injuries from falls

Table 1. The cause of fall injuries organized by age (Unni, P., et al., p. 1459, 2012).

Unni, P., et al. (2012) studied the medical records of patients treated at a pediatric

emergency care centre over a three year period. Table 1 show the causes of fall injuries

organized by age. Skateboarding does account for a large number (22 out of 125 cases; or

17.6%) of falls resulting in injury for youth aged 10-14, warranting its own row on the table.

The number of skateboard injuries, however, is less than the incidence of injuries sustained by

children falling from trees, stationary vehicles, and embankments (31/125; 24.8%), and is half as

much as ‘other’ falls which include injuries sustained on trampolines, while roughhousing, while

engaged in organized sport and in unstructured play (41/125; 32.8%). Looking at injuries due to

falls for younger primary students (aged 5-9), one must notice that skateboarding related injuries

essentially disappear but are replaced by a startlingly high number of injuries from falling during

all sorts of activities including falls from playground equipment and furniture.


At school specifically, physical education classes and team sports cause 46% of all

injuries across all grade levels, with another 38% occur during unstructured play during lunch

and recess breaks (Berström, & Björnstig, 1991). Despite this schools don’t come equipped with

“No Playing on the Playground” and “No Playing Soccer” signs. There are values and norms at

work here. Why are only a few activities seen by school authorities as being unsafe? Why is

bike culture the norm, but skate culture is not?

Bicycle riding is a potentially dangerous activity that results in injuries across all age

groups (Konkin, et al., 2006), but bicycle riding is the only activity that is explicitly prohibited in

administrative regulations for the Calgary school board whose schools and signs are the focus of

this paper (CBE, 2005). The policy mentions neither skateboards, scooters, nor roller blades nor

does it make use of the broad term “wheeled conveyance” used in the City of Calgary’s Parks

and Pathways bylaw (2011). If bicycles aren’t permitted on school grounds, why are there

bicycle racks in every school yard?

Ironically, perhaps the greatest risk to students is the one that is so socially acceptable

that it fades completely into the background. Despite their risks, skateboards will never be as

dangerous as cars. In 2009, cars caused 172,883 injuries in Canada; 11,451 being serious enough

to require emergency medical care, and 2,209 resulting in death (Transport Canada, 2009).

Regardless, a study in Victoria found that, despite living within a 20 minute walk from school,

56% of school-age children commuted by car (Underwood, 2012).

It’s Not About Keeping Kids Safe


No one wants to see a student get hurt at school, nor do youth skateboarders want to hurt

pedestrians. Both adult authority figures and skaters alike want their schools to be safe, but, why

then are other school-based activities which are as likely as skating to result in injury, permitted?

How can a school prohibit skateboarding but condone the frequent use of motor vehicles?

Skateboard- made of wood, metal and plastic, costs about £100, runs on leg power;

causes chips and scratches on bits of stone and metal. Car- costs a fortune, runs on

poisonous shit, pollutes the air and water, fills the city with ‘smog’, causes the death of

hundreds of thousands of people every year. Mmmmm? And yet, despite all this cars are

O.K. but skateboards are evil, objects of vandalism, a dangerous menace that must be

stopped. (Borden, 2001, p. 257)

‘Safety’ is a master signifier, a form of hermeneutic cheating that schools use to explain

away activities that they don’t want to understand (or don’t want to take the time to understand).

The hidden curriculum inherent in the No Signs does not come from a desire for safety (solely),

but also stems from the dominant culture’s disrespect and aversion to countercultural youth

activities. Lefebvre points out that architecture can be explored in terms of rhythmanalysis.

Skaters don’t move through space at the same rate and in the same linear fashion as do

pedestrians and bicyclists, rather they deke and weave through crowds very quickly and then

occupy public common spaces (like stair cases, parking garages, and plazas) for extended

periods of time. Temporal-spatially, skaters are Others.

Mixed Messages


As Giroux says, the school is “organized not to eliminate differences but to regulate them

through cultural and social divisions... [D]ifferences are either ignored ... or subordinated to the

imperatives of a history and culture that is linear and uniform” (2000, p. 177). He uses the term

“border youth” to describe those who occupy the fringes of social institutions and who must be

brought into the centre. Twenty years ago, only a handful of institutions and boosters

saw skateboarding as the ‘best youthful antidote to urban boredom that has come

along for years’ (The Times of London), more usually the public dialog was about

banning skateboarding from the city streets. Such concerns have now died away,

perhaps from the realization that skateboarding although physically robust is not

inherently life-threatening. (Borden, pp. 249/250, 2001).

The City of Calgary has an award-winning multi-phase Skateboarding Amenities Strategy

that is seeking to increase the amount of skatepark space available to the city’s exploding youth

population. A skatepark recently opened on the Vancouver campus of the University of British

Columbia. Some communities in Australia are actively encouraging skateboarding as an

acceptable youth sport. Some cities in Europe, the United States, Canada, (and even Pakistan)

have opened skateboarding alternative schools. Yet there seems to be little interest by Calgary

school authorities to acknowledge and accept skate“border” youth into the mainstream public

space of the school.

Despite widespread cries to battle youth obesity, and research supporting the value of

unstructured play (Figure 3), anti-skateboarding sentiments still permeate our schools. Giroux

(2000) begs teachers to consider the roots of modern identity formation in youth so articulately,

that he merits quoting verbatim here.


This is a world in which one is condemned to wander across, within, and between

multiple borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness, difference, and a dislocating

notion of meaning and attention. ... No longer belonging to any one place or location,

youth increasingly inhabit shifting cultural and social spheres marked by a plurality of

languages and cultures. (Giroux, p. 180, 2000).

Educators need to understand how different identities among youth are being produced in

spheres generally ignored by schools. Included here would be an analysis of how

pedagogy works to produce, circulate, and confirm particular forms of knowledge and

desires in those diverse public and popular spheres where sounds, images, print, and

electronic culture attempt to harness meaning for and against the possibility of expanding

social justice and human dignity. Shopping malls, street communities, video halls, coffee

shops, television culture, and other elements of popular culture must become serious

objects of school knowledge. (Giroux, p. 190, 2000).


Bradley 293

(e) interacting socially and feeling accepted and supported by others. Perhaps the impact of skateboarding, like that of other leisure activities, is mediated by these processes.

In sum, the literature suggests a number of possible correlates of skate park use, and a number of possible antecedents and consequences of involve-ment in this leisure context. Figure 1 provides a conceptual overview of the factors likely to be involved. The current research investigated a subset of these factors.

The Current ResearchThis research was conducted in a coastal city of Australia (population of 500,000) in which approximately 30 outdoor skate parks have been built and are maintained by the local city council and are freely available for use by all. Research by Boag et al. (2003) indicated that about one-quarter of adolescent residents of this city spend at least some of their leisure time in skate parks, with many others reporting being constrained (by a lack of money, transport, etc.) from so doing. Despite evidence of this kind demonstrating the popularity

Gender

Age

Skills,interests

Personality

Non-leisureactivities

Identityexploration &expression

Goal setting &striving

LeisureContexts &Activities(including

skate parks/skateboarding)

Task focus, flowconcentration

Developing &using

competencies

Socialinteraction

and supportOther(e.g.,

ethnicity)

PersonalIntegration

Social Bonding

Achievement

Opportun-ities for

IdentityAchievement

Self-esteem

Agency

Subjectivewell-being

Peers

Family

School

Society

School grades& retention

Vocational

Sport/leisure

PhysicalSelf

Health

Competencies

Figure 1. Conceptual overview of variables antecedent and consequent to participation in leisure contexts and activities

at UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIBRARY on March 9, 2013jar.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Figure 3. The benefits derived from unstructured play. (Bradley, p. 293, 2010)

Schools are meant to be inclusive spaces, but the use of No Signs and their undercurrent

non sequitur logic persist and need to be confronted and resisted.

Conditional Identities

I went into a clothes store and a girl came up to me and said, ‘If you need anything, I'm Jill.‘

I thought, This is amazing! I've never met anyone with a conditional identity before. ‘Wait! Who are you if I don’t need anything?”


‘If you don’t need anything, then I’m Eugene’. (Martin, 2006)

Comedian Demetri Martin tells the joke above during a number of his shows in which he

deconstructs word choices and meaning. Although the idea of a ‘conditional identity’ is a

humorous one, it does apply in the case of skateboarders at school where no skateboarding is

allowed.

Bruno Latour contends that, when different subjects and objects are assembled, complex

human–technology hybrids emerge which engage “new intentions, associations, and actions” (as

cited in Adams & Thompson, p. 733, 2011). Latour’s famous example is the ‘citizen-gun’ that

results when a person and a firearm are brought into proximity. The way that the citizen-gun

approaches the world and interactions is significantly different than the way the citizen-without-

gun does. By extension, the configuration of skater-with-skateboard has different potentialities

than the skater-without-skateboard.

A skater-without-board, compliant to the hierarchical and non-sensical rules of the No

Sign and school authority, arrives to school and still sees the space of the school’s entranceways

as the skater-with-skateboard would. Only now, without the tool that allows him to develop

performative architecture, his ability to produce the actual space that he perceives is impaired; he

is handicapped. Like ghosts able to see the world but not act upon it or a Greek character

trapped in repetitive and ironic perpetual torture in Tartarus, skaters-without-skateboards are

constantly disciplined. Not only suffering from not being able to occupy and negotiate space in

the way he would prefer, a skater-without-skateboard suffers from a kind of ‘conditional identity

crises’.


Conclusion

Performative architecture, such as skateboarding and parkour, have different intention

than traditional forms of architecture. They are less about “form, space, and materials,

and more about critical place-making that seeks to subvert the power of hierarchies

inherent in building edifices. ... Interestingly, the apparently powerless, can use the

‘tactics’ of movement and timing to usurp that power momentarily. ... Architecture has

always repressed the ‘other’. (McGaw, p. 219/220, 2009)

No Signs are about oppressing skate“border” youth just enough that they’ll conform to

institutional norms which emerged decades before their sport. The hidden curricular message

being received is loud and clear: If you’re a student who is book smart, you’ve got it made. If

you can draw, you’ve got a gift. If you are good with computers, you might be kind of a nerd,

but you’ve got a future. If you’re a creative writer, teachers will love you. If you’re a skater,

you’re not welcome.

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