Abstract
Skate Urbanism describes a strategy for producing skatable spaces wherein skaters collaborate with city officials to design them and plan for their integration into urban architecture. In this paper I argue that Skate Urbanism gradually undermines the creative capacities and street practices that produce skateboarding’s distinctive value to urban life. These creative capacities include the skills and values produced from skateboarding’s bottom-up "insurgent" processes and use of unsanctioned spots. Specifically, sanctioning skate spaces and using political processes desensitizes street skateboarding’s programming of the “skater’s eye” used to find and appropriate spots, along with the skills to skate and maintain them. Skate Urbanism also risks weakening skateboarding’s foundational culture values of independence, freedom, agency, and resistance to institutional control.