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Skateboarding in the Anthropocene: Grey Spaces of Polluted leisure

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Clifton EversORCiD

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Abstract

This paper explores a symbolic environmental schema of skateboarding through the concept of ‘grey spaces’. We provide evidence of how skateboarding demonstrates a greyness – political and environmental ambiguities, contradictions, liminality, nuances, and paradoxes – of outdoor urban leisure in the Anthropocene. This builds on a chromatic turn in leisure studies which have recently addressed blue and green spaces but moves the focus from the therapeutic discussion of nature to the contested realm of the urban. Greyness is adopted to connote not simply the urban, but also the ambivalence of polluted leisure and the ambiguous position of skateboarding as pollutant, alternative sustainability, and complicity in neoliberal processes that escalate consumption and the proliferation of concrete spaces of play. In framing skateboarding in both the material and symbolic space of greyness we seek to open up and stimulate debate about the urban and grey spaces of leisure beyond skateboarding itself.

Publication metadata

Author(s): O'Connor P, Evers C, Glenney B, Willing I

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Leisure Studies

Year: 2023

Volume: 42

Issue: 6

Pages: 897-907

Online publication date: 09/12/2022

Acceptance date: 22/11/2022

Date deposited: 14/12/2022

ISSN (print): 0261-4367

ISSN (electronic): 1466-4496

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2022.2153906

DOI: 10.1080/02614367.2022.2153906

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