- Title
- The Draw of Dysfunction: India's urban infrastructure in skateboard video
- Creator
- McDuie-Ra, Duncan
- Relation
- Geographical Research Vol. 60, Issue 3, p. 383-394
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12531
- Publisher
- John Wiley & Sons
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- India’s urban infrastructure is maligned for its breakdowns, inefficiencies, and inequities, and popular resentment at dysfunctional infrastructure is constant in public life. This article focuses on the surprising desire for India’s urban infrastructure among skateboarders. Skateboarders are drawn to India’s urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction, its seemingly unfinished nature. I explore these relationships by analysing four skate videos and making three arguments. First, infrastructure attracts skateboarders for possibilities of creative interpretation and appropriation, on‐camera aesthetics, and the encounters generated between mostly foreign (though not always “western”) skaters and local urban dwellers. Second, far from isolated moments, the appropriation of India’s infrastructure is captured and circulated to an audience of millions in skateboard videos. Third, skate video presents urban India as a frontier in its subcultural geographic and cartographic imagination; although over two decades India’s cities have drifted closer to skateboarding's core; concrete and steel replacing cows and festivals on screen. The article closes by exploring the implications for skateboarding—a subculture built on disrupting the city, hacking its infrastructure, moving against its flows—when operating in spaces where disruption is the essential condition of everyday life, and how this is transmitted to an adjacent viewing public.
- Subject
- aesthetics; cartography; India; infrastructure; skateboarding; video; SDG 9; SDG 11; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1485634
- Identifier
- uon:51656
- Identifier
- ISSN:1745-5863
- Rights
- x
- Language
- eng
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