Skateboarding in shared public space: power, gender, age and inclusivity

2023 PhD Project

About The Project

A new ‘skateboard friendly’ space situated underneath the Nottingham train station tram bridge will open in December 2022, providing a unique opportunity for place-based research. The mixed-use space has been developed as part of a wider £20 million ‘Sussex Street’ mixed use public realm project and has had significant involvement from local skateboarders. The space includes skateable installations as well as other additions which have been funded by a Crowdfunder UK campaign, Sport England and Skateboard GB. The skateable features were largely designed via a UKRI-funded participatory project, with 110 young people, including Nottingham College and NTU students, submitting ideas. The space is of key importance to the local skateboarding community, to Nottingham College, and to Nottingham Contemporary.

This project proposes an ethnographic/participant study of how the space is used, with the aim of producing evidence-based recommendations of ways it could be altered to be more inclusive. Skateboarding is a largely male-dominated sport, and other street skate spaces in Nottingham are strongly dominated by young men in their late teens and early twenties. The current Girl Skateboarder project found that local young woman skaters (and some young men) are reluctant to use those spaces due to a perception that they would not be welcomed and that their skills would be judged harshly; previous research suggests this is also true of older skateboarders. We also found that young male skaters locally want to support and include girl skateboarders but don’t always understand how. This project addresses these issues through a detailed investigation into who uses this space and how they interact with new users, particularly those who do not fit traditional skateboarder stereotypes, such as women, beginners, and older skaters.

This project has been co-created and is supported by researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham and partners at Skate Nottingham.

Project Aims

This project aims to address the following questions:

How is this space is used, who uses it, when, and for what purposes?
Do some activities and participants in the space exclude others and do specific interventions change this.
Are there groups we would expect to find in this space who are not there? Can we find out why?
How can mixed use spaces such as the one being opened in Nottingham support more inclusive skateboarding?
What can we learn from this space and its use to support the future development of multi-use city spaces in Nottingham and other cities?
How can co-created physical (public) space in the context of a UK city provide a focus for extracurricular or alternative education and enrichment (including for young people not in Education, Employment or Training)?