On participants’ relations with terrain in mobility sports, J.B. Jackson has suggested that they

Though Jackson was referring to examples of skiing, rock-climbing, and surfing (and although these activities involve escape from the city) his words are nevertheless applicable to ‘street-style’ skateboarding. But one important qualification is needed: skateboarders’ new experiences and environments are actually based on resistance to experiences and transformation of environments that are everyday, unnoticed, taken for granted. Jackson might say that the essential value of skateboarding seems to lie in a counter-contact. Skaters’ relationship with the city are at once abstract, intimate, and oppositional, having more in common with graffiti artists and small-time drug dealers , with De Certeau’s profane, factual city walkers, than with ‘normal’ people, mainstream pedestrian culture, and idealised images of the city. This relationship is rarely articulated explicitly because in many ways it is inexplicable. For example, pro skater Matt Mumford introduced his part in a recent skateboard video by saying “I’m sure every skateboarder does it. You’re driving down the street and you’re not seeing footpaths and driveways or stuff—you’re seeing spots. Know what I mean? If you’re a skateboarder you’re whole concept of the world is completely different. This is who I am, this is what I’m about”. Or, as Vancouver skater Jake Stewart said recently, “Fun for me is going downtown and being around people who don’t skateboard and think it’s weird... I like getting that reaction out of people.... if you ollie a shopping cart [‘normal’] people lose their minds. I doesn’t make any sense to them”.

Urban space, skateboard, skateboarder’s body, and skateboarder’s imagination intersect in tricks, and the most important trick in street skating is the ‘ollie’ whereby a skateboarder can leap off the ground with the board seemingly attached to the feet in a gravity-defying manner. Also important are grinds and boardslides whereby skaters skid across curbs, ledges, and handrails on the wooden deck or aluminum trucks of the skateboard, thus moving forward without the wheels contacting the ground. These tricks and the dozens of variations based upon them allow skateboarders to jump onto, across, along, over, and down from staircases, ledges, planters, hydrants, walls, handrails, curbs, gaps, speed bumps, sidewalks, driveways, sculptures, benches, wheelchair ramps, electrical boxes, picnic tables, and so forth. Whether these are architecture, objects, street furniture, or street situations, their ubiquity means that skateboarders’ terrain is found everywhere in modern cities, from Picasso’s giant sculpture in Daley Plaza to the yellow curbs at 7-11 to exurban hydro-electric station spillways. That said, the greatest density and variety of this “natural terrain” is typically found in downtown cores.

The caption to the two-page ‘centrefold’ photo in a 1995 issue of California-based, California-centric Transworld Skateboarding stated that “Vancouver British Columbia is probably one of the prettiest and most skateable cities in all of North America and that is probably why the cops go out of their way to stop people from skating there”. Why is downtown Vancouver so skateable? Part of the answer can be found a few pages later in the same issue, where a sequence of photos taken at the CIBC plaza at Georgia and Pender is captioned: “(t)his rail Jerry Fowler is lipsliding in downtown Vancouver and it’s little brother are the best handrails in the world”. Vancouver is a young and expanding city. It has smooth streets and sidewalks instead of cracked asphalt and cobblestone. Many of its numerous post-war modernist and postmodernist buildings are surrounded by open plazas that are veritably littered with ledges, benches, and handrails. There are many covered parkades to skate in when it rains. Skaters can easily move into, out of, and around the downtown core because it is densely packed and well serviced by transit. The central business district is relatively un-peopled on weekends and at night. Thus downtown Vancouver has architectural, geographical, and social attributes that make it appealing to skateboarders: there was an accessible and inviting terrain as well as a general absence of passers-by who might confront, complain about, or just get in the way of skateboarders’ use and abuse of urban spaces.

Let us consider some specific examples of skateboarders contesting space in downtown Vancouver. The most appropriate way to do so is to look at what has happened at two skate spots: ‘Bentalls,’ the plaza on private property that surrounds the Bentall Centre at Burrard and Dunsmuir, and the ‘New Spot,’ as skateboarders know the city-owned plaza/walkway at the north foot of Hornby Street.

The appeal of Bentalls (just across the street from the Burrard Street SkyTrain station) was its staircases and dozens of white marble ledges and blocks, which are arrayed on a series of plazas. As these plazas are between city-owned sidewalks and the private entrances to the towers, parkade, and mall that make up the Bentall Centre, they are on private property but fall within the public sphere. Most businesses in the towers are law, banking, and accountancy firms so the parkades, mall, and plazas were (and still are) relatively empty and unused between 6p.m. and 7a.m. and on weekends. Skateboarders would do tricks up and down the staircases and over, down from, and across the various marble blocks and ledges that are the perfect shape, size, and texture for doing boardslides and grinds. The security guards working for the Bentall Centre would chase skateboarders off the property, citing trespass, the potential for injury to passers-by, liability in case a skateboarder were to injure themselves, the scratches and paint left on the white marble by boardslides and grinds, and the ever-popular, perfectly obvious ‘common sense fact’ that “you aren’t supposed to be doing that here”. In the early 1990s the security guards rarely patrolled the plazas so skateboarders would come back minutes after being kicked out. Whenever “No Skateboarding” signs appeared they were ignored, defaced, and/or removed by skateboarders, who also learned how to stay out of the view of security cameras covering the buildings’ entranceways. By 1993, however, the security guards patrolled more often and sometimes called in the police to chase recalcitrant skaters away with the threat of tickets and board confiscation. But awhile after each such crackdown word would spread that “Bentalls isn’t a bust anymore” and skateboarders would return, though in smaller numbers and for briefer periods. This continued for a few more years, until in 1995 the property’s management made expensive (and aesthetically unappealing) alterations to the ‘hard’ attributes of the plaza that attracted skateboarders. Hundreds of small marble blocks were fused onto the existing marble ledges, including the many that had never been skateboarded on. Small metal clips were also welded onto the staircase handrails. These actions effectively prevent skateboarders from doing boardslides and grinds, and also, not at all ironically, replaced the once inviting appearance of the plaza with the standoffish feel of castle parapets.

Bentalls was a spot where skateboarders skateboarded. Little time was spent sitting down, talking, or doing much else because the impending ‘boot’ from security made it important to get in as many tricks as quickly as possible. For a long time ‘The Lions’ (the Georgia Street-side of the Vancouver Art Gallery) was the place where skateboarders met up in the evening and rendezvoused after being chased out of spots like Bentalls, Burrard Station, Brick Spot, Canada Place, CIBC, 666, 401, AIDS Park, Hydro Hideout, Rental Bump, Guiness, Oka, Grey Marble, Red Brick, White Marble, Brown Rails, and Black Marble. But The Lions had to be shared with hippies, protestors, movie crews, Christmas displays, and art patrons, and security guards (drawn as much by Robson Street rowdies and drug dealers as by skaters) were ever-present if not especially pressing. So when the ‘New Spot’ was built and ’discovered’ in the fall of 1992 it became the place where Vancouver’s street skateboarders could meet, skate, and hang out to their hearts’ content.

The New Spot is a public plaza/walkway near Waterfront SkyTrain station. It presented many possibilities to skateboarders: it had a smooth running surface, bumps, wheelchair ramps, handrails, benches, stairs, curbs, a massive gap known as the Coins, and a vast array of ledges of different heights. While these ledges are not marble like the ones at Bentalls, skateboarders ‘lubricate’ the edges of concrete ledges for boardslides and grinds by rubbing wax onto them. After being skated on the surface of the ledge gets ground down and wax, paint from the board, and aluminum from the trucks get ground in, staining the waxed surface black. In addition to this, many skaters have a penchant for graffiti and applying stickers around skate spots. But this damage and marking seems to have been less of a complaint against skaters than their actual use of and presence at New Spot. For nearly a year the plaza seemed to be an open playground for skaters: no security guards or police ever tried to keep skaters from skateboarding or hanging out there. But this changed in the summer of 1993. Why? The walkway is located between the waterfront and the shopping district, and is thus on a pedestrian ‘flight path’ for high-end tourists going between the Pacific Centre-Robson Street shopping district and the luxury hotels and docked cruise ships on the waterfront. To be kicked out of New Spot with the justification that “you might run your skateboard into somebody” came to imply that “you might run into certain somebodies,” i.e.: precious tourists from out of town. And this‘running into’ need not require physical contact with a loose skateboard or out-of-control skater: for tourists to even see teenage skateboarders disrupts a carefully cultivated image of Vancouver. It is also very important to realize that the walkway’s abutting neighbours are The Vancouver Club and The Terminal City Club. Friday and Saturday nights in the summer were when the most skateboarders would be at the walkway, and these also happened to be the evenings that social events would be held on these prestigious establishments. After several speedy, timely, resource-intensive, and intricately coordinated police and security crackdowns, skateboarders learned that it was best to stay away from New Spot till after midnight on these evenings, especially during summer months when the clubs used their outdoor patios that backed right onto the section of the walkway where skaters preferred to sit (the highpoint, from which other skaters’ tricks could be watched and the streets in both directions surveilled). Police and security guards could appear as often as the other at the New Spot because the walkway is actually the rooftop of a City of Vancouver-owned parkade that is leased out to a private company. The old taunts of stepping onto the public sidewalk when security guards appeared or skating on private property in full view of the police did not work there because both a private security company and the city police exercised de facto if not de jure authority over that space.

The first ‘hard’ anti-skateboarding measures appeared at New Spot in early 1995 (a short while before the ones at Bentalls) but it was not until the fall of 2000 that the last ledge was secured. Although skateboarders have found ways to destroy, avoid, and even incorporate these obstacles into tricks, they have since been applied to almost every single other skate spot in downtown Vancouver. In 1994 it could be said that “Vancouver is the ledge capital of the world,” but only four years later local pro skater Rick McCrank complained that “All the spots downtown are gone except one ledge and one rail so you have to go out to the suburbs and it’s hard to find new spots. I think someday we are going downtown with a sledge hammer and claim all our spots back”. In 2000 it could be said that the previous few years had witnessed “the destruction of every famous (and not so famous) spot in the downtown core”.

Today the plazas of new buildings such as the apartment towers along West Georgia and the new Coal Harbour Community Centre are being designed and constructed with anti-skateboarding features built right in. In his fascinating book “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” William H. Whyte suggested that the best way to deal with the presence of “undesireables” (who he acknowledges are too often “the most harmless of the city’s marginal people”) in urban spaces is to increase social activity there, but explicitly warned against adding defensive measures or depending on what has since been referred to as “spatial censorship”. But the derelict winos, teenage hippies, and small-time dope dealers Whyte referred to as examples seem to interact with and stand out (and thus give offence) in urban spaces for social reasons, whereas skateboarders are more interested in the actual physical features of urban space. It is also useful to remember Malmberg’s assertion that young people can ‘tune out’ adults—this, combined with an oppositional approach to urban space, helps explain why many skateboarders actually enjoy running from the police and security guards. Thus even if it were somehow possible to increase social activity in downtown Vancouver’s plazas between 8p.m. and 2a.m. it is doubtful this would dissuade skateboarders. In a contest for the meaning of urban space, for the symbolic capital that is bound up architecture, it is therefore not surprising that “denial cues” like cameras, guards, signs, clips, blocks, and chains should be added to make allegedly-public walkways and already-defensive private plazas in the public sphere into what have been called counterlocales, “locales to which both entry and behaviour are monitored and controlled so as to reduce the possibility for discomforting, annoying, or threatening interactions”.

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In 1993 Plan B skateboards released Virtual Reality, their second team video. Vancouver played a prominent part in several Plan B riders’ sections, and one location in particular -- the New Spot -- was the setting for dozens of tricks. The New Spot was also prominent early on in the video as the stage for a vicious and prolonged street fight between several teenage skateboarders and a large cordless power-drill-wielding contractor. This thirty second-long scene stands out all the more because the average time between editorial cuts in this and most other skateboard videos is somewhere between three and six seconds.

Six years later Transworld magazine (which is owned by Times Mirror and regarded as the most ‘mainstream’ skateboarding magazine) released The Reason, the ninth in an occasional series of videos that complement its glossy, monthly, three hundred-odd page paper publication. Interspersed throughout The Reason’s opening montage (and thus more briefly but just as emphatically as in Virtual Reality) are bursts of a well-known Vancouver skateboarder at another well-known Vancouver skate spot delivering a ‘beat down’ to a karate-kicking opponent. More than a dozen similar examples involving Vancouver could be cited from other skateboard videos.

If the practice of street skateboarding is based on “destruction of property, destruction of boards, destruction of the skater’s body,” on disrupting the intended meanings codified in urban space, then perhaps the representation of urban space in skateboard magazines and videos should be considered as a countermapping process. Recording, transmitting, and sharing the experience of ollie-ing down ten stairs, being gang-tackled by security guards, or just sitting around at a skate spot is a representational form of opposition to the image of the city projected in grid-pattern street maps, promotional films, tourist brochures, and ‘bird’s eye views’ that focus on conference centres, malls, hotels, sports arenas, and business towers. Displaying and sharing these ‘trophies’ of stolen counter-experiences distributes knowledge and awareness of a contest for the meaning and use of urban space on both local and wider scales. Every skater in Dublin, Cranbrook, Winnipeg, and Hong Kong who can describe the texture of a marble ledge in Toronto, or knows the layout of Love Park in Philadelphia or Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., or is aware of the rivalry between security guards and skateboarders in Vancouver is, in a sense, contributing to a larger, networked countermap of contemporary cities.

Before looking at the representation of skateboarding and urban space, let us touch on some general ideas about subcultures, representation, and communication. In his important book Subculture: the Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige mostly discussed representation in terms of mass or ‘mainstream’ media’s treatment of subcultures such as the early punks. He suggested that subcultures are a type of noise or interference, “a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation,” and that the mass media smothers or attunes this ‘noise’ by incorporating subcultures’ disturbing aspects into mainstream culture. This is done by translating styles into commodities and by ideologically domesticating, trivializing, and exoticizing meanings and participants. Hebdige only briefly discussed punks’ own media, suggesting that their fanzines provided “an alternative critical space within the subculture” that counteracted the incorporating coverage of mainstream media. This is echoed in a recent study on the communicative geography of riot grrrl zines. Marion Leonard suggests that this punk/feminist subculture stands apart from most male-centric subcultures in that “(t)he importance of occupation and conquest [of space] is offset by the importance placed on being a subterranean network”: communication through zines is one of, if not the, defining bases of riot grrrl subculture. Yet skateboarding, which is so intensely spatial an individual activity, similarly places great importance on a ‘space-less’ media network as part of the subculture: the representational subject just happens to be skaters’ interaction with urban space. Thus it is with only a small amount of sarcasm that skateboard magazines declare video cameras the “the false idle [sic?] of skateboarding,” and the box for a skateboard company’s team video advises frankly that “you will laugh, you will cry, you will be sitting down watching t.v. instead of skateboarding”.

Skateboarding has been represented in many different types of media, but this essay will focus on two kinds of magazines and also touch on two kinds of videos.

The first skateboard magazines, which appeared in the mid-1960s, opened, closed, and reopened depending on the immediate popularity of the activity. By the mid-1980s two skateboarding magazines could be found on skateshop and 7-11 shelves across North America and beyond: Thrasher from San Francisco and Transworld from San Diego. Though different in many ways, they (and most every other skate magazine) are similar in that their staple is photographs of skateboarders doing tricks, usually accompanied by a caption identifying the skater, the trick being done, and the location. With only the rarest exception, all articles are based around these photos and it would be perfectly feasible to produce a skateboard magazine without text or articles (or even content). Skateboard photography has several noteworthy aspects to it, including the constant use of wide-angle lenses and flashes. Flashes facilitate the high shutter speeds needed to capture clear images, and distorting wide-angle lenses are used to emphasize or exaggerate the size of the trick a skateboarder does. Photo sequences are also very prominent. In the days of skateparks stills were adequate to show off ‘big air,’ but street skating’s abstract terrain and complex tricks often necessitate a rapid succession of exposures so that readers can tell exactly what trick was done, how it related to the terrain, and whether it was landed successfully.

Vancouver has had a disproportionate presence in internationally distributed skateboard magazines. Canadian insurance regulations spared the free, public skateparks in east Vancouver and North Vancouver and made it feasible for the private, indoor Richmond Skate Ranch to operate for many years. In the late 1980s skateboarders from California would take road-trips to Vancouver to skate these parks, and later, as street skateboarding came to dominate the subculture after 1990, they would also come to skate in the downtown core. Some stayed for a weekend, others for months. Through Transworld and Thrasher’s coverage of these road-trips Vancouver came to be known around the world as a great city to skate in, and local skateboarders from Vancouver also acquired reputations for being talented, imaginative, and confrontational in their use or transformations of urban space. While never explicitly condoned or condemned, the latter aspect of this reputation has in fact been polished and promoted through numerous inquiries and discussions in skate magazines to the point where it has reached an almost legendary status. Consider, for example, the case of the Red Dragons.

When asked by an interviewer for Transworld to rank Vancouver for skateboarding, Mike Santarossa, a pro skater from Costa Mesa who lived in Vancouver for the summer of 1994, replied: “Probably one of the best. As far as street terrain, anywhere downtown is fun to skate. But I advise no one else to go there, because the Red Dragons don’t want you there”. When asked, Moses Itkonen explained to Transworld readers that “Red Dragons started out as something to yell at security guards when they were kicking us out of a spot. We were mocking gangs that were around, and it [the label] ended up being our thing... There used to be a whole lot of us—just a big, huge gang of kids who skated all day and smashed shit all night”. In an interview in another issue of Transworld Colin McKay answered a question about Vancouver skaters fighting security guards by saying that “there would be big groups of us coming home from the Richmond Skate Ranch. We were like hellions. We always got into confrontations with the security guards downtown. We skated every day and there were so many confrontations with these barely educated security guards trying to take our boards”. Through coverage of the Red Dragons as individuals and as a group Vancouver has been presented as a kind of skateboarders’ fantasy world, where there is great ‘natural terrain’ to skate, an intense contest for the meaning of city space, and lots of confrontations in which skaters usually came out on top. Regardless of its accuracy, this image has given some skaters (relative) fame and fortune, and encouraged many skaters from across Canada to move to Vancouver.

In addition to a reputation for being a closely contested space through the activity of skateboarding, Vancouver has also been and been represented in widely-distributed skateboard magazines as an “ultra-secret city” where representation-of-resistance is itself contested. This refers to a cryptic but overtly ‘public’ secretivity around the play-terrain found in Vancouver’s urban fabric. Access to, information about, and the image of skate spots and their use are managed by that city’s skaters and skate photographers. For example, a photo of Moses Itkonen doing a trick at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, printed in the February 1998 issue of Transworld, was captioned as “a tall ollie off a bump in Dragon Peninsula, British Columbia”. And for the introduction to an article about Vancouver Island, a Vancouver skater/photographer facetiously wrote that “we have another Vancouver... We keep it out in the ocean off the west coast of the first Vancouver. We felt that by completely surrounding it with water, we’d be able to keep it secret for much longer: away from the prying eyes of those who descend on our zone to devour our spots...”. Presenting this kind of overblown, half-serious, and openly secretive territoriality over ledges, plazas, and entire cities and regions serves to enhance the idea that ‘We [Vancouver skaters and skaters in general] Run the Streets’ in both our own direct and representational fashions.

In addition to widely distributed magazines like Transworld there have also been many smaller-scale publications, ranging from individuals’ zines to small magazines made for city-, region-, and state-wide distribution. This author knows of relatively few zines from Vancouver, but an important mid-sized publication to come out of that city is Concrete Powder magazine. Founded in Richmond in 1991 and published four times a year, Concrete Powder is a free, nominally pan-Canadian skateboarding and snowboarding magazine, but is actually dominated by Vancouver skateboarding. As one skater recently put it:

Like skatezines and most other limited-distribution skateboard magazines, Concrete Powder contains more detailed, nuanced, and locally-sensitive forms of representational countermapping, for its readers are presumed to have more knowledge of and/or experience with skateboarding in downtown Vancouver than readers of Thrasher or Transworld. For example, the locations tricks are being performed at are not mentioned so often in Concrete Powder’s photographic captions, but this is done not out of some effort to present an air of control: it is because it can be assumed that most readers have either skated at that spot or have already learned (through the skate media) its form and use if not its ‘street name’ and/or ‘real’ location. Smaller magazines also contain kinds of resistance-through-representation rarely found in the big magazines from California. Perhaps the best examples are the articles that have appeared in Canadian skate magazines on “Do It Yourself” street spots and “Guerilla Ramp Building”. Waxing a planter’s edge, putting a piece of plywood on top of the grass at the bottom of a staircase, or bashing an anti-skate clip off a handrail are all ways that skateboarders can ‘improve’ a spot. However, as ‘natural street terrain’ is taken away by ‘hardening’ alterations to the material aspects of urban space, some skateboarders have taken a more active role in manufacturing new spots. Concrete Powder has included several articles on topics like how to ‘liberate’ BC Transit benches, how to make one’s own portable skate bench, and on mixing concrete to add transitions to banks, walls, and parking barriers, and run-ups and landing areas around gaps, rails, and so forth. Some include no names, while others hint at who the thoughtful ‘culprits’ might have been. Some openly give credit, as with ‘Lee-side,’ an illegal skatepark built in an unused Cassiar Connector tunnel under Hastings Street. And a few actually revel in the fact that ‘builders’ were charged with mischief and vandalism and forced to destroy their own creations. These sorts of actions are a kind of retaliation against property owners’ anti-skateboarding modifications to their buildings, and they are represented in local skate magazines as inspirational and (in the case of those caught and charged) as acts nearing martyrdom.

Another interesting point about the way small-scale skate magazines represent skaters’ interaction with the city is that they often include articles which, due to their local focus, are far more insightful, perceptive, and sensitive to relations with urban space than those found in internationally-distributed magazines. For example, Alex Morrison’s brief article in Concrete Powder about his “Guerilla Ramp Building” (humorously subtitled “or the anti-monumental movement and its fight to reject the values and spatio-temporal modes of living in the contemporary capitalist city”) is illustrated by photos of the writer skating his creations, and is also a superior analysis of skateboarders’ contact and conflict with the city than are found in academic journals. Downtown J’s story “The End of an Era for Downtown Vancouver” is an especially thoughtful story by somebody who admits to being “one of those skaters that came here to follow a dream”. Yet although he says that “in the two and a half years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen everything remotely skateable capped and skate proofed” he concludes by saying that “I hope when every spot is dead and gone there’ll still be people out there finding new ways of skating their environment”. This article is illustrated by six pages of photos of Vancouver skaters doing tricks over, around, between, and through anti-skateboarding devices at well-known and supposedly ‘skateproofed’ locations like the New Spot and Bentalls. Still other issues of Concrete Powder have included meditations on the ‘life cycle’ of spots, on the authenticity of and motives behind new skateboard parks, on the nature of skateboarding in suburbs, and on the ‘delerious’ experience of skateboarding in the downtown core.

Skateboarders’ contests for and confrontations over the use and abuse of urban space tend to be represented implicitly or indirectly in magazines through interviews, captions, and action photographs. But the medium of video, in addition to allowing tricks to be recorded and shared in even more detail than in photographic sequences, allows for a more active and direct countermapping of the city. Skaters can do a series of tricks that involves traversing an entire plaza, or in some cases, several city blocks. The sounds, sights, and even movements (when the videographer gets involved) of chases, arguments, and scuffles can be recorded and shared with other skateboarders. Video cameras get broken by boards and riders flying into them from bailed tricks and by videographers who, when following a skater doing a line of tricks, are vulnerable to falling. And of course ‘slam sections’ are an important part of many skateboard videos: when “Violence and Destruction Equals Entertainment” the more brutal the falls taken by a company’s team riders or a city’s local skaters the higher their reputation goes.

The first skate videos appeared in the mid-1980s, but they became more common with the rise of street skating, with its emphasis on series of tricks. Video cameras were also cheaper, easier to use, more portable, and more flexible than still cameras. The Plan B videos were the first major widespread filmic exposure of Vancouver’s street terrain and skateboarders, and scenes like the Red Dragons’ fight at New Spot seem to have inspired other Vancouver skaters (and videographers) to the point where similar scenes became a common trope: if a skateboard company had a rider from Vancouver on their sponsored team then one could expect some kind of confrontation to be involved in their video part. Not all videos are made by skateboard companies, however. Some are made by the videographic equivalents of Concrete Powder to Transworld. For example, the notorious and independently-produced Whiskey series of snowboard videos based in Whistler always included some Vancouver street skating, as if seeking urban confrontation and destruction to complement the alcohol-fueled on-mountain and apres ski mayhem generated in small mountain towns and destination ski resorts from Alaska to Patagonia.

Several people involved in making Whiskey and other independent skate videos realized that a market existed for a series of Canadian skateboard videos, so they copied the successful idea behind and format of 411VM, a California-based skateboard video magazine that is published/released every two months. Skateboard Canada video magazine was thus created. Video magazines cut away the textual trappings of the road-trip, contest, and interview articles in print magazines: except for captions identifying the skaters, quick introductory comments at section breaks, and the credits there is almost no writing or speaking in the ‘magazine’. Each issue consists of a ‘Pro Pick’ that highlights a well-known Canadian skateboarder, a few ‘Draft Picks’ that show up-and-comers, a section on a Canadian city (in the manner of 411VM’s ‘Metrospective’ segments), and a ‘Brodeo’ that mixes together loose footage from many skaters in many cities. Two interesting points stand out about ‘Skate Canada,’ as it is generally known. The first is that there have been only a couple of notable confrontations involving Vancouver skateboarders in the seven bi-annual issues that have thus far been released. Instead it has been skateboarders and videographers from Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Montreal who have chosen to represent themselves in battle with security guards and anonymous passers-by in addition to the meanings and symbolic capital embodied in the urban fabric. One wonders to what degree this behaviour and the decision to share it with skaters across the country has been influenced by the example set by street skater from Vancouver in the early and mid-1990s. The second interesting point is that Vancouver, the Mecca (or Southern California) of Canadian skateboarding, has not yet been given a ‘metrospective’ section, while Montreal, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Victoria, and Ottawa have. However, Vancouver, much like in Concrete Powder magazine, still looms large. Most of the ‘Brodeo’ sections consist of footage involving Vancouver skaters and/or terrain. Skaters originally from Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Calgary, Halifax, Ottawa, and several smaller cities and towns across Canada have chosen to move to and/or use the setting of Vancouver for their video parts. Many of them have made an effort to skate at spots like Bentalls and the New Spot, even though these locations are ‘skateproofed,’ such as it were. These spots do not have to be labeled for viewers because they are (or are assumed to be) already part of viewers’ mental maps (or countermaps) of that city and its fabric.

Iain Borden, through the somewhat unfortunate surfing-related metaphor of discovering “beneath the pavement, the beach,” has concluded that “(b)y using their youth, and in particular by using their own bodily pleasure, skateboarders create their own space, their own cities, their own architecture”. Unfortunately, he did not give much consideration to the ‘space-less,’ subcultural, and representational relationship between skateboarders and the same urban space that they transform into a play-terrain. One wonders what Dick Hebdige might see in magazines like Transworld and Concrete Powder and video magazines like ‘Skate Canada’. Dissemination and magnification of the devaluing of the symbolic capital of the city? A conscious flaunting of the ‘common sense’ image of handrails, hydrants, and urban space in general? Might he see, in the medium, format, means of distribution, and the fact that the Red Dragons (having converted their reputations into skateboard shops and clothing lines) advertise in these media, evidence of the commodification and ideological incorporation of a subculture into mainstream culture via media? Or might he see, in the fights, fires, naughty words, middle fingers, and general representation of an adversarial attitude towards urban space a sustained effort to ‘keep it real’? Perhaps he would feel that this last one rings truest, were he to consider Robert Rinehart’s study of skateboarders’ antipathy towards the format, participants, and most importantly, the representation of skateboarding in contemporary ‘extreme games’ event/programs produced by cable television networks.

As Rinehart points out, many skaters complain that not only are these contests presented by and for non-skaters, but that the contests’ s-called ‘street courses’ are egregious shams.