Abstract
This essay examines the skate spot as a contemporary urban heterotopia and considers its preservation through the lens of skaturbanism. Drawing on Foucault’s principles of heterotopia, it shows how skateboarders reappropriate ordinary public spaces, transform their prescribed functions, create alternative temporalities, and produce distinctive forms of sociability, creativity, and everyday resistance. However, these symbolic and culturally significant spaces remain vulnerable to regulation, exclusion, redevelopment, and demolition by public authorities.
The essay argues that preserving skate spots requires moving beyond approaches that reduce skateboarding to either a sport or an urban nuisance. Skaturbanism provides an alternative framework for understanding, recognizing and integrating skateboarding into the production and governance of urban space.
By acknowledging skateboarders’ experiential knowledge and involving them in processes of mediation and collaborative decision-making, public authorities can support more flexible forms of coexistence. Skaturbanism thus contributes to the co-production of cities that are more inclusive, open, adaptive and attentive to informal urban practices. Conceived as an introduction to this emerging concept rather than an exhaustive treatment, the essay deliberately leaves several questions open for further development.