As a point of departure: the pier; beginning with a comparison between surfing and skateboarding– an analogous relation between the surfer’s appropriation of the pier and the skateboarder’s appropriation of the urban environment. In Skateboarding, Space and the City (Berg, 2001) Iain Borden presents skateboarding as a ‘performative critique’ of the values associated with life in the modern capitalist city, specifically as they are manifest in architecture, as they order our relations with space and time. Skateboarding subverts the intended function of architecture (namely utility) by reducing architecture to a terrain– a composition of objects and planes to grind, jump or ride. ‘Skateboarders analyse archi- tecture not for historical, symbolic or authorial content but for how sur- faces present themselves as skateable’ ( p 218 ) ; ‘the city for skateboarders is not buildings but a set of ledges, window sills, walls, roofs, railings,... and so on’ ( p 219 ) . While skateboarding often rejects the commodifica- tion of space (frequently the skateboarder transgresses the boundary between public and private) it is also a rejection of time as a commodity: ‘Skateboarders are... more concerned with temporal distance as proxim- ity (temporal closeness of things, temporal locality), and its repetition, than with time as a valuable resource or measure of efficiency’ ( p 226 ) . The surfer appropriates the pier in a similar fashion. Ever since surfing emerged on the California Coast its adherents have congregated around the pier (the Huntington Beach Pier is perhaps the most famous example) because of the structure’s inadvertent tendency to create sandbars, whose presence enhances the shape and power of the breaking waves. The intended function of the pier, on the other hand, is primarily commercial. It exists as a simple structure built for fishermen (who pay to use them), or as a more elaborate commercial en- terprise designed to attract tourists (e.g. Santa Monica Pier). As skate- boarding does with the urban fabric, surfing subverts the intentions of the architectural object; the surfer rejects its commercial function, which she appropriates for her own purposes – free of charge. Surfing transforms this largely utilitarian artifact into an armature of the surf- break, the locus of an alternative social realm: the privileged refuge of the individual surfer, engaged in the solitary session; or a remote com- mons, where local surfers gather outside the spatial and social bounds of conventional society. In the end however, it is not the pier but the
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