Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding by Gregory J. Snyder (review)

My teenaged years were largely spent on my Tommy Guerrero skate-board, looking for the perfect place to grind, pop an ollie-to-tail slide, and just hang out. As a onetime recreational participant of the sport and now a qualitative urban culture researcher, I read Gregory J. Snyder's new book, Skateboarding LA, with great enthusiasm.

Skateboarding LA is an in-depth examination of the $5 billion industry of professional skateboarding in its primary interactional node: Los Angeles, California. Snyder notes that the world of professional skateboarding is dramatically different from the recreational activity I once participated in. While tens of thousands of (mostly male, mostly white) teens participate in the subculture, few enter the world of expert skateboarding that Snyder studied. The author leverages the career of his brother, Aaron Snyder, to provide entrée into the field, giving readers a peek into the life of the professional skateboarder: somewhere between the everyday level and the level of a multi-millionaire professional skater like Tony Hawk.

Twice annually, over a span of eight years, Snyder traveled to LA to follow his brother, or another insider accomplice, to interview and observe an untold number of skateboarders. Snyder enacted Maggie Kusenbach's practice of the "go along" method (2003) of ethnography: Following research subjects in order to catch them in media res and in situ.

The resultant text details the technical and visceral experience of skateboarding, the support personnel of photographers and auxiliary businesses, a catalogue of skateable urban architecture (e.g., ledges, handrails) and iconic locations in Los Angeles, and more. The book centers principally on two main issues: how professional careers are made of this activity, and how this marginalized subculture makes claims on urban spaces.

Like Snyder's first book, Graffiti Lives (NYU Press, 2009)—the definitive sociological examination of graffiti artists—Skateboarding LA is an intensive and engaging study, written in vivid detail and supported by copious numbers of photographs. The first 50 pages provide a nice review of the Chicago and LA "schools" of urban sociology and the Birmingham School of cultural studies, situating Skateboarding LA within the shared literatures between alternative criminology and urban culture studies. It all makes for an instructive and engaging read.

One of the more valuable contributions of this book is that Snyder details how this subculture is sufficiently robust enough to provide many "subcultural careers" to people in and around the skateboarding world. In my mind it seemed akin to aspiring musicians who, after expending much of their youth failing to sustain success as a working musician, transition into nearby careers in the recorded and live music sectors. Snyder briefly discusses skateboarders' "transferable skills" that help them transition into proximate careers (180). If the reader pays close attention, they will see where some of the characters we meet end up by the book's coda (249–51). These careers are the result of a kind of paradox: a strongly anti-establishment subculture that also links nicely with corporate logos and sponsorships both big (e.g., ESPN, Nike) and small (e.g., Darkstar Skateboards), in both formal (e.g., "Street League Skateboarding" contests) and informal/illegal activities (e.g., trespassing in order to record a new trick).

Like graffiti writing, skateboarding is primarily (although not exclusively) an illegal pursuit seeking to "win space" through unconventional creative activity. Skateboarding LA begins with how skateboarding is criminalized through various laws, policing practices, and defensive architecture (e.g., metal brackets, or "hubbas," that prevent skaters from performing tricks). Snyder notes that some spaces—due to the right mixture of temperate California weather, architectural shapes, and limited pedestrian traffic—attract two social groups competing for the same spaces: skateboarders and the unhoused. While the middle of the book tackles the issues described above, a concluding chapter, on "Skateboard Activism," returns to those spaces to illustrate a case of how this anti-establishment subculture "wins space" for itself. The chapter describes how the city council and skaters...