Skateboarding,         Space, and The City 

 

Skateboarding's Effect on the World

 

       Most people can go through their day without ever thinking about skateboarding or interacting with a skateboarder. Most people could not care less what happens to the world of skate. They don't really care if its legal, illegal, popular, unpopular, and basically as long as these damn skater kids stay off my lawn, they are not affected. But is this true? Are they really not affected by this 4.8 billion dollar, globalized, and cultured sport? If you live in a core country, or semi-prephary country, skateboarding will affect your life. One thing that skateboarding affects is the economy. If we just took away the skate industry, not only would we take take away a over 6 billion dollar industry from the world economy, but we would aslo take a away hundreds of thousands of jobs. Thats right, believe it or not, hundreds of thousands of people work in the skateboarding industry. From engeneers to to sales reps to factory manufacturers to riders a lot of people rely on skateboarding to earn a living. While some people may say, whatever, all those people are probably just pot smoking stanist, the only thing they are hailing is skatan, or maybe some other religion. 

       That leads to the next part of skateboarding that has had a global influence on most people on this earth and that is skateboarding culture. Skate culture has helped save people, but I will admit, has at the same time made some older folk a little grumpyer. First off, how could the skate culture save people? Well, the identity of a skater is not specific. Most skaters are not the popular jocks, and they are not the kids getting strait A's and on their way to stanford, and they are not the kids who are having a perfect harm free life; skateboarders are the other. If skateboarding culture was not around, these "others" would not have a place in a society of conformity. At the same time, this leads to a potluck of personalities that are not "perfect" kids, that is why so many of you probably hate those damn skater kids. This does not mean that skate culture only affects the people who join it and the people who hate it, skateboarding culture has effected all of popular culture. Skateboarers have show up in advertisments, movies, T.V. show, and even seeped into non-skaters facebook feeds. Almost every kid has had a skateboard, and the average American probably sees a skateboard, skater, or aspect of skate culture through T.V. ot the internet every day.

       These are all very concrete ways skateboarding has a influence on everyone, but there is one way that skateboarding affects you, and you had no idea. This is how skateboarding has influenced city arcitechture since its start in the california droughts of the 60's. Durring these droughts, people emptied their pool, and the skaters moved in. The best shape of pool for skating was rounded edges and mellow transfers. Suprisingly, starting in the 70's, most pools had sharp edges and steep transfers. This kept skaters out. From there skateboarders have moved from feature to feature and along the way engeneers have designed things to make these features impossible to skate. So, when you are walking through a park or city and look around, skaters have probably influenced how the rails, benches, and stairs were designed, and are therefore influencing how you move through, and see the city. Overall, from economy to culture to architecture, skateboarding is an important aspect off the life and landscape of any globalized loction on this earth.