Urban Space and Representation (a paper written by Iain Borden author of Skateboarding, Space and the City) highlights the similarity of skateboarding to the practices of the Situationists:
Skaters’ representations thus have more in common with the Situationist tactics of the dérive, détournement and psychogeography – "maps" composed from the opportunities offered by the physical and emotional contours of the city, and, above all, enacted through a run across different spaces and moments......Skateboarders’ representational maps are thus always situated through a continual re-living of the city – "an open mind always seeking out new lines and possibilities." (Pullman, Sidewalk Surfer, 1995) Skaters attempt neither to "see" the city or comprehend it as a totality, but to live it as simultaneously representation and physicality...
...Another distinction from conventional maps concerns temporality. In the aerial form of map, the entire city is understood simultaneously within a single glance – but in skateboarders’ cognitive mapping the time is that of the run, composed of a disparate objects in a sequence (linear time), with some objects "read" once (isolated time), others encountered several times (repeated time) and still others returned to again and again on different occasions (cyclical time).
This pulls out the idea that maps can be performed - citys become through the action of bodies within space.
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