Skateboarding in the empty city: a radical archive of alternative pandemic mobilities

Abstract

COVID-19 ruptured mobilities within and between cities during 2020–2022. Empty urban landscapes came to define experiences, representations, and memories of lockdowns and ensuing periods of recovery. However, empty cities provided opportunities for play and exploration in subcultures like skateboarding. Skateboarders, among other groups, took advantage of relative emptiness to access known skate spots and to discover new spots, charting new cartographies of urban landscapes in the process. Performances at these spots were captured and circulated through skateboard media, especially video. Skateboarding footage captured in empty cities acts as a radical archive of alternative mobilities during the pandemic, unsettling dominant tropes of immobility. By analyzing a preeminent skate video shot in Sydney during the pandemic, this article makes three points of argument. First, skate video archives shifting speeds and scales of mobility and immobility during the pandemic; as some mobilities halted, others accelerated. Second, confusing legal geographies, what was permitted and where, created new surveillance priorities and multiple surveillance glitches. Skateboarders took advantage and accessed patches of cities usually obstructed. Third, as cities try and regain their buzz, playful, unpredictable, and unregulated mobile performances with the power to enliven the streets deserve reconsideration, even if they defy control.