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 – to outdoor
urban leisure in the Anthropocene. We build on a chromatic ...
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 – to outdoor
urban leisure in the Anthropocene. We build on a chromatic turn in leisure
studies which attends to blue and green spaces; however, we shift focus
from the therapeutic discussion of nature that tends to underscore that
turn to a contested realm of urban grey spaces. A concept of ‘greyness’ is
adopted to connote not simply the urban but also the ambivalence of
polluted leisure and the ambiguous position of skateboarding working as
pollutant, and a form of alternative sustainability, while acting with complicity in neoliberal processes that contribute to escalating consumption
and the proliferation of concrete spaces of play. In framing skateboarding
in both the material and symbolic space of greyness, we seek to stimulate
discussion about the greyness of leisure in the Anthropocene beyond
skateboarding.
