Paradigm

Skate the City Activate the City Own the City

A skateboarder crisscrosses the city down sidewalks, through the streets with no particular destination, just an indirect path taking him from waxed curb to bench to handrail to hip. As he shifts from feature to feature, he occasionally stops at one to take a second and third run at a handrail or a hipped curb each time performing a different variation of ollie to slide or grind. He approaches two driveways separated by a six-foot long hip. As he gets closer, his concentration intensifies until his complete focus is on ollying the space between the two driveways.

He ollies and for that brief moment in time, while he’s in mid-air, his mind is completely and unquestionably concentrated on grabbing the skateboard frontside and tweaking it out before landing on the far side of the hip. In that moment there are no thoughts of school, work, family, politics or anything else that may have been on his mind a minute ago. He is completely within that moment.

As he lands, a brief smile curls up the corners of his mouth as he articulates a new destination and starts heading toward a building two blocks away that has benches and a handrail. Half of a block down he notices another hip between two driveways and proceeds to ollie it. As he approaches the hip and his concentration begins to focus on the performance, a crack in the sidewalk grabs his skateboard and holds on as he keeps going, briefly, and slams down on the sidewalk.


As he picks himself up, he looks at the crack and wonders where it came from and why he didn’t see it. He grabs his skateboard and makes a second run at the hip, ollies to tail grab, stops, and makes a third run. Then a fourth. He was doing more than occupying the space temporarily, he was owning the space.

He continues to the next location to skate the benches and handrails, to activate the city. Everytime he crosses this part of the city, he alters his course so he can stop and ollie the hip where the crack in the sidewalk that once grabbed his attention is. The space he now owns.