Consumption and Sustainability in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 209 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 9789463723138.
Duncan McDuie-Ra’s Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots is an illuminating study on the diversity of urban landscapes in Asia through an ethnographic mapping of (skate) “spots” observed in skate videos. Despite contributing greatly to the circulation of knowledge of urban landscapes, skate videos have largely been overlooked by urban studies. Duncan McDuie-Ra convincingly argues that by enrolling spots, skate videos provide a rich archive of non-expert knowledge of the urban landscapes that host them.
The book opens with two background chapters which set the historical and methodological scene for this demonstration. Chapter 1, “Urban Asia: Endless Spots,” discusses how Asia’s urban landscapes have become central to the global practice and industry of skateboarding. It also addresses how skating generates knowledge as “a permanent site of experimentation” of urban landscapes free of established approaches (A. Simone and E. Pieterse, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, Polity, 2017). The chapter introduces how the analysis of skate video offers an alternative lens to explore urbanization within Asia and between the Global North and Global South via four interlinked arguments: the archived spots produce an alternative cartography of urban Asia; the search for new spots is constant; the enrollment of spots in regional and global cartographies provides an alternative index of urban development; the spots characterized by unintended and unorganized encounters bring the city to life (32–37). Chapter 2, “Shredding the Urban Fabric,” discusses the “skater gaze,” one which is primarily directed downward and inspired by Francisco Vivoni’s “below the knees” method (F. Vivoni, “Spots of Spatial Desire: Skateparks, Skateplazas, and Urban Politics,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 33, no. 2, 2009), as a conceptualized shared way of looking at urban landscapes. From here follow four thematically organized chapters analyzing the search for spots, their production, and their enrollment in regional and global cartographies, ultimately producing the “(Re)Mapping of Asia Through Spots” (31).
Chapter 3, “Chasing the Concrete Dragon,” showcases how China’s rapid urban growth has produced “endless spots” via an analysis of urban landscapes in skate videos showing the centrality of China in the skating world. It discusses the discovery of China’s urban landscapes by foreign skate filmers in the early 2000s in Shenzhen, the skateboarding trails to other cities, and the perception of China’s urban culture as permissive and tolerant towards skateboarding, especially when compared to the US (65). Chapter 4, “Spectacle Cities: The Luxury of Emptiness,” takes the reader to the perfect, yet—within the skater gaze—unrepeatable experiences of skating in Dubai, in highly controlled spaces with privileged access. Analyzing footage from spots in cities such as Astana, Baku, and Dubai, the chapter illustrates the contrasting differences in accessibility of the spots within cities (Dubai) and among the Spectacle Cities. Chapter 5, “For the Love of Soviet Planning,” takes the reader to post-Soviet spots located in large-scale public squares and monuments in Central Asia and the Caucasus. This analysis illustrates how remembrances of Soviet state authority are discovered and enrolled because of their skate-friendly, smooth surfaces. The analysis in this chapter highlights the limitations of the skater gaze in locations where skaters self-police due to repositories of fresh traumatic memory (115). Chaper 6, “Skateboarding’s New Frontiers,” focusses on how the footage and discovery of spots translate unfamiliar places into familiar assemblages (139). Examples from Iran, India, and Palestine illustrate how these places move into the frontiers of skate cartography for the region. This chapter provides interesting insights into the journey of skateboarding’s backroads, for instance as a successful tool in engaging young people in conflict-affected environments.
The last chapter, “Conclusion: Another ‘Next China,’” surprisingly starts with a new case: Taiwan. It illustrates how a new area is discovered and enrolled into the cartography of spots, and how within the Asian region new cases are compared with China, at the top of the skaters’ index list. The author closes by discussing how within the idea of rolling ethnography, the new frontiers in skateboarding’s regional cartography flatten differences between cities by focusing on common patches of landscape (141), thus creating an alternative narrative about landscapes, cities, and entire regions. The chapter also addresses how the inclusion/formalization of skateboarding (i.e., Olympic Games/ skateparks) is threatening to skateboarding as the ethos of the culture (being free of authority, self-discovery) requires spots to be naturally occurring in the urban landscape, an attitude conceptualized in chapter 2 as Shredspace.
Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots is a captivating, empirically rich contribution that reconceptualizes urban landscapes in Asia as it analyzes a unique view on the city through skateboarding practice. By (re)mapping Asia through skate spots, the book casts light on how skaters generate a unique form of system knowledge, an alternative cartography within cities and regional spaces (putting entire cities on the map). The book offers fascinating insights on how skate videos, skaters, and filmers in the Asian region produce a vernacular cosmopolitanism and on how skateboarding travelled from the West to the Asian region, where different urban landscapes subject to a variety of state-society relationships contribute to a diversity in skate experiences, different within the region and different from the West. Reading this book, one might miss certain locations in Asia, but the book intends to be a starting point, not a complete archive of all spots in the Asian region. Instead, the book invites additions and improvements. The book is a welcome contribution to the urban studies and planning scholarship. The (re)mapping of urban landscapes in Asia provides new insights of non-expert knowledge, perception, and use of urban space in Asia. It shows how life in cities is continuously taunting the more controlled spaces and places through appropriation and unintended uses, demonstrating that cities are fluid systems with different (temporary) uses and meanings depending on their users.
Stephanie Geertman
Independent Scholar, Utrecht