In SPOTS, a research video-essay on street skating, Daniel Paese writes about “the shift in an individual’s perspective when waking up to the world of spots,” adding that “once you begin to understand the true potential of the concrete beneath your feet, the possibilities can no longer be overlooked, as they are by so many.”1Daniel Paese, “SPOTS: A Research Piece on Modern Skating,” YouTube, 15 March 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9oY7I720vw. Skate academics have written about how skaters see, perceive, reimagine, and reappropriate public spaces in more playful, expressive, and creative ways than originally intended.2Ana Bäckström, Åsa and Anne-Lene Sand, “Imagining and Making Material Encounters: Skateboarding, Emplacement, and Spatial Desire,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 43, no. 2 (2019): 122; Ian Borden, Iain, Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History (Bloomsbury, 2019); Paul O’Connor, “Ritualised Play,” in Skateboarding and Religion (Routledge, 2020), 179–208; Sander Hölsgens, “Learning to See, or How to Make Sense of the Skillful Things Skateboarders Do,” In The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography (Routledge, 2023), 387– 400; Brian Glenney, Isaac Bjorke and Andrea Buchetti, “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play,” Frontiers in Sports and Active Living 6 (2024), 1–3. As a technology researcher, I examine this phenomenon within a wider context of technological tools acting as pedagogical instruments, with the potential to shape the spatial, temporal, and imaginative perceptions of the individual using them.3Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (W.H. Freeman, 1976).
Seminal work in science & technology studies (STS) has described how tools and technologies can frame and shape how we see the world, from clocks4Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 1963), 12. to the scientific method itself.5Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 112–131. I argue that skateboarding, too, is a pedagogical instrument that skaters utilize as they learn to see playgrounds in cities. To that end, skateboarding is a pedagogical tool akin to what David Graeber referred to as “poetic technologies” that expand our imagination beyond the limitations of restrictive bureaucracies.6David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House, 2015), 117.
In this article, I examine what it means to learn to see cities like a skater through an autoethnographic account of my own experiences skating, first as a teenager in Cairo’s private spaces, then as an adult in New York’s public streets. Leveraging an STS framing of pedagogical technologies, I explore how skateboarding – and a burgeoning Egyptian skate scene – altered my own perception of and relationship to both cities and play. I employ the “rolling ethnography” method used by McDuie-Ra and Glenney et al., where skateboarding itself is a part of an autoethnographic experience.7Glenney et al., “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play”; Duncan McDuie-Ra, “Play Space in Plain Sight: The Disruptive Alliances Between Street Trees and Skateboarders,” International Journal of Play 12, no. 3 (2023): 285–303. Here, skateboarding entails the participatory and phenomenological experiences of skating through New York, Cairo, and various cities I’ve travelled to during the research period. Primarily, I skated on a nearly daily basis as a form of (playful) commuting in New York, as well as in various skate spots and over twenty-five skateparks over the past three years.
Beyond skateboarding, rolling ethnography entails participant observation, such as observing, filming and conversing with skaters, many far more experienced than I am. This occurred in skateparks, street skating spots, and skating meetups. As Glenney et al. do, I kept notes of my skate experiences, including observing skate spots, conversations had at skate parks and in spaces where skaters gathered, and making note of my own evolving relationship with my cities as mediated through skateboarding.8Glenney et al., “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play,” 3.
Technology as a Pedagogical Instrument
In Computer Power and Human Reason, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum writes that a tool is “a model for its own reproduction and a script for the reenactment of the skill it symbolizes.”9Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–20. The tool becomes a pedagogical instrument, a vehicle by which to instruct its users across time and space on the modes of thought and action the instrument facilitates. The clock altered notions of time, work, and discipline during the industrial revolution.10Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 12–18; EP Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” In Class: The Anthology (Wiley, 2017), 27–40. Hand-held weapons such as spears position a hunter in a particular relationship with the world around them, whereas vehicles make it possible to travel faster and farther distances, thus enhancing a person’s sense of power over the material world.11Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–37.
As such, technology both mediates our relationship to the world and is redefined through our usage of it. As Bruno Latour wrote, “You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it.”12Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” Common Knowledge 3, No. 2 (1994): 29–64. In making the case for an “instrumental definition of technology,” Martin Heidegger argued that technology, regardless of whether it is older handwork or a high frequency apparatus, is a means to an end.13Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” In Technology and Values: Essential Readings, edited by Craig Hanks (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 5. It acts as a “way of revealment” of its complex context, whether it’s a field of crops, a coal mine, or a stretch of concrete.
The role of technologies as pedagogical instruments extends to shaping people’s imagination of the world around them. In Utopia of Rules, Graeber makes the case for what he terms poetic technologies, or technologies that use the technical means to bring “wild fantasies to reality.”14Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 117–122. Due to the neoliberal emphasis on profit maximization and efficiency, Graeber argues, poetic technologies have often been replaced by bureaucratic technologies, where the technical means are employed in service of the bottom line, and only a small elite is allowed to indulge in “imaginative labor.” Yet existing technologies, such as a skateboard, can be pedagogical instruments that shape people’s imagination by influencing their relationship to the world around them. Through my autoethnography of learning to see like a skater, I examine skateboarding as a pedagogical technology that expanded my own imagination of cities as more playful, creative, and expressive spaces.
Growing up in Cairo, losing the playground
To investigate my current and evolving perception of Cairo, my hometown, I will contextualize how I learned to see Cairo, and urban spaces, at a young age. I grew up by Tahrir Square, the center of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Before I knew the square as the site of a revolution, and a symbol of the Arab Spring, however, I knew it as my playground.
As a child, my father would take me to the large garden at the heart of Tahrir Square at dawn to play hide-and-seek behind the bushes. Play mediating my relationship to the Square instilled in my younger self a sense of ownership and belonging, often joking that the garden belonged to me. In January 2011, at the age of 12, I learned that it belonged to many more, as hundreds of thousands of people flooded to Tahrir Square to call for the overthrow of the regime. Protest then mediated my relationship to the Square, instilling in my younger self a sense of collective ownership and belonging. Following the 2013 Egyptian military coup, the government renovated the square to change its spatial design and character, making it more difficult for crowds to assemble. The large garden at the center of Tahrir, my playground turned protest site, was covered in concrete rings, and an ancient Egyptian obelisk placed at the center.
Dozens of military tanks, later replaced by police vans, became a constant presence in and surrounding the square, with security personnel stationed meters away from each other, often restricting passersby’s ability to sit or stand in the vicinity, or performing random checks on people’s bags. My neighborhood, my relationship to which was once deeply personal and intimate, became a profoundly alienating site. In Seeing like a State, James C. Scott examines mapping as a way of making territories legible to state power – planning, surveillance, and control.15James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 2020), 11–52. By seeing like a skater, skaters can subvert the gaze of the state, imagining an alternate mapping of public space.
My first experience skating was also as a child in Cairo, where I bought my first low-quality skateboard as a pre-teen, and skated for a few years. I primarily skated at Gezira Sporting Club, a large private social club built by the British occupation, now populated by upper-middle- and upper-class Egyptians, or at a private beach resort in South Sinai where my family went for vacations. This is typical of Egyptian social spaces, which are highly fragmented, restricted, and privatized based on socioeconomic divides, and where public spaces are severely limited. When explaining why I stopped skating, I described my perception of skateboards as a toy for children that I enjoyed before I grew up and thus stopped playing with. As Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky write, “as people get older, they forget how to play. They forget that rules can be remade and games can always be played differently.”16David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2024), 23.
Learning to Skate, and Play, in New York
I picked skating back up, for the first time since my teenage years, and for the first time in public space, the week I moved to New York in August 2021 for graduate school. In New York, I started commuting on my skateboard, gradually building the confidence to ride it in the city — first the sidewalks, then the bike lanes, then the streets. My relationship to my board was primarily built in public space, commuting distances and skating during lunch breaks at Washington Square Park, which sits at the center of my university’s open campus. As I worked on this paper, I frequented more street spots: parking lots in my neighborhood, basketball courts, playgrounds, and locations with curbs and stairwells my far more skilled skate friends can take advantage of. Framing skateboarding as an “implicit expression of pirating pavement for the sake of play,” skater and academic Isaac Bjorke writes: “We see possibilities in cinderblocks, abstract sculptures, textures of gravel between driveways, cracks in sidewalks […] This vessel asks the individual to be creatively compelled, to transform concrete property into a playground.”17Isaac Bjorke, Sailing the Concrete Sea (Unpublished Manuscript, 2025).
My relationship to New York was completely altered with a skateboard in hand or under my feet. My knowledge of the streets, cracks in the pavement, potholes, elevation, and degrees of smoothness of my commutes became more intimate as I learned to identify more “skateable” routes. As I spent more time around and noticing skaters, I learned to see spots where skaters can exercise their creativity, or imagination, even those I would not be able to skate. As Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a rower seeing the oar far differently than a non-rower would, rolling allowed me to see the skateboard, and the city, far differently than I previously had.18Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–37. Travelling to other cities, such as Madrid, San Francisco, and Ljubljana, I intuitively gravitated to spaces such as plazas and statues. Skating allowed me to build a more intimate, tactile relationship with cities and connect with locals who had identified the same skate spots long before I had. Skateboarding became, as skater and musician Ian MacKaye described it, a way of “learning how to redefine the world” around me, akin to Weizenbaum’s description of technologies as pedagogical instruments.19Borden, Skateboarding and the City, p. 24; Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–37.
The first skatepark I went to in New York was a very well-known converted basketball court at Tompkins Square Park, where the city continuously repaints the ground and removes the skate obstacles, and skaters continuously re-convert it into a skatepark, bringing in ramps, quarter pipes, ledges, and even used couches. Using the example of skate parks and parks taken over by skaters, Miguel Sicart writes that play, such as skateboarding, is “appropriative” and takes place in the context of things, cultures, people, time, and space.20Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014), 11.
There are dozens of skateparks and well-known skate spots throughout the city, but the imaginative affordability of skateboarding means that it both builds a shared vision amongst skaters and encourages them to continuously expand and re-imagine what a skate spot would be. In SPOTS, Paese explains why skaters love skating the “wild architecture of the streets.”21Paese, “SPOTS”. Skateparks, the narrator explains, can very clearly communicate how the park wants to be skated, “back and forth, back and forth,” in particular “lines.” Street skating, however, offers a personal challenge and encourages exploration. Similarly, Henri Lefebvre is resistant to the idea that a certain architecture can magically generate joy, rather advocating for the subversion and inappropriate use of all architecture.22Henri Lefebvre, Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment, edited by Łukasz Stanek (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Street skating is, as Graeber described, open ended, creative, and expressive,23Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 192. facilitating Sicart’s conception of playful appropriation24Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014), 11.. This happens in mundane, forgotten, and everyday spaces, looking at curbs, ledges, stairwells, and parking lots.
Notably, my experiences skateboarding made my days more playful despite my lack of trick proficiency. In an entry from March 2025 I write, “I can’t believe this is still so fun. I’ve been commuting on my board for the majority of my last 4 years in NYC, and embarrassingly, can’t really do much else on it with very much proficiency, and yet somehow it continues to fill my most mundane moments – a sleep-deprived commute on a Friday morning, for example – with a little fun to keep me rolling.”
On the Cairo skate scene, and the right to the city
Though I (re-)started skateboarding in New York, my timing lined up with an explosion of the skateboarding scene in Cairo. Going home on breaks, I started seeing, and noticing, skaters in my city and neighborhood for the first time. Both skateboarders and roller skaters are now a common sight in downtown Cairo. For the first time since I was a kid, the still intensely policed Tahrir Square became, in one sense, a playground once more. A once alienating stretch of concrete turned into visions of skating my neighborhood. As Bjorke writes, “skateboarding is a reimagining of concrete urban space, a sneaky vision of how to conduct creative locomotor play in our estranged everyday habitat.”25Bjorke, Sailing the Concrete Sea.
Having grown up in Tahrir during the revolution, I was aware that skateboarding in its newly remade, stifled and hostile architecture carried a particularly political meaning to me that may not have been intended by a new generation of skaters. Yet, though skateboarders’ resistance to legal, physical, and social controls may not necessarily be overtly political, it does not mean their actions are not political.26Sharon Dickinson, Andrew Millie and Eleanor Peters, “Street Skateboarding and the Aesthetic Order of Public Spaces,” The British Journal of Criminology 62, no. 6 (2022): 1454–1469. I thus saw skating in Tahrir as an “urban transgression with spatio-political imaginative possibilities,”27Brian Glenney, “Skateboard Crime and the Pirating of Urban Space,” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 21, no. 2 (2025), 211–230. reshaping at least my own perception of the Square. Explaining skaters’ “sea legs”, Glenney et al liken skateboarding to an act of piracy carried out in urban space, threatening the neoliberal order of public property through a reinterpretation of the city.28Glenney et al., “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play,” 11.
At the end of my first year in New York, I attended my first Go Skate Day in Cairo, held at a basketball court – much like Tompkins – along the Nile. Organizers announced that all the ramps were made in recent days by a local skater with woodworking experience, and often needed to be fixed or re-adjusted, emphasizing the new skate scene’s DIY nature.
Returning to Cairo as a new skater, I started, for the first time, observing corners of my city as potential skate spots. Driving by the Nile, minutes away from the house I grew up in, a stretch of flat ground reminded me of learning to cruise along the Hudson and the East River in New York, and for the first time, I commented about its skateability. The next time I drove by the same spot, it was packed to the brim with roller skaters and skateboarders who saw it as I had.
All throughout my downtown Cairo neighborhood, I started making note of or photographing rare pedestrian alleyways, stairwells, and ledges that could be skated, even if I did not have the skill to skate them myself. The skateboarding literature refers to this as the “skater’s eye,” or a skater’s capacity to instantaneously gauge whether a space is skateable.29Borden, Skateboarding and the City, 218. Beyond a measure of skateability, it facilitates a more expansive, imaginative, and playful perception of public space. By viewing a space that has never been skated and imagining ways that it could be tackled, skaters can find alternative functional and aesthetic appreciation of a city.30Dickinson et al., “Street Skateboarding and the Aesthetic Order of Public Spaces,” 1458.
While the imaginative potential of skateboarding changes how skaters see and play in their city, however, imagination is not enough to overcome the still existing hyper-securitization of the city’s public spaces. Whereas skaters around the world, including in New York City, are accustomed to being kicked out of public space, “No Skateboarding” signs, and running away from the cops, these experiences, particularly the latter, are significantly heightened in a city as policed as Cairo. While skaters can be seen in the city’s downtown neighborhoods, they still often skate at its outskirts, outside its dense traffic and heavy police presence, in newer parts of the city characterized by private residences, gated communities, and large stretches of skateable concrete.
Conclusion
In a YouTube comment on the SPOTS film, a user wrote, “becoming a skater and suddenly seeing spots everywhere where you didn’t before is like when you learn a new word and suddenly hear it all the time. It was always there, you just didn’t know it yet.” Another replied, “it’s like putting on glasses for the first time.”31Paese, “SPOTS”. Don Ihde has similarly written about putting on glasses for the first time, describing the relationship between him and the world as one mediated by his glasses, through embodying the “technics” of vision.32Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology (Indiana University Press, 2010), 72–75. Experiencing such relationships through technologies, he elaborates, pertains to his glasses and hearing aids and cane. But in a finely engineered sports car, too, he illustrates, one has a more precise feeling of the world and embodies a new perception of distance. In this article, I have examined my own relationship to the world, to New York, to Cairo, to Tahrir, as mediated through a skateboard and the act of skateboarding. I find in skateboarding a pedagogical instrument that allowed me to see and appreciate playfulness and imagination where I once experienced restriction and alienation, a poetic technology.
Cairo’s new skate scene meant that it was possible to visibly observe the city’s aesthetic order reshuffled, its spaces used in radically different ways, even if just by allowing a culture of play to permeate its urban spaces. This is an affordance of the technology as an instrument, a small, portable, and simple wooden plank with four wheels that allows vast portions of cities to be seen differently. The playfulness skating allows is not about turning cities into playgrounds but turning individuals into people who can find playgrounds in cities.
Seeing the city differently does not always mean experiencing it differently. At times, my new perception of Cairo’s urban spaces was more disappointing than playful, to see the joyous potential in the city’s securitized and mundane spaces but not be able to fulfill it. Egyptian skaters found play in the city’s downtown neighborhoods, in Tahrir and across the Nile, but as Heidegger wrote, the instrument exists within a complex social context.33Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” 5. Its “revealing” included the imaginative and playful potential of Cairo’s busy streets, but it also reveals the city’s still fragmented stratification and privatization. Despite the restrictions, however, the capturing of the imagination itself, as Graeber wrote, is also a deeply political process.34Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 45–105. For an Egyptian whose childhood became defined by protest and alienation, the “poetic” pedagogy skateboarding offers is to learn to play once again, or at least begin to imagine it.
Notes
| ↑1 | Daniel Paese, “SPOTS: A Research Piece on Modern Skating,” YouTube, 15 March 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9oY7I720vw. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Ana Bäckström, Åsa and Anne-Lene Sand, “Imagining and Making Material Encounters: Skateboarding, Emplacement, and Spatial Desire,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 43, no. 2 (2019): 122; Ian Borden, Iain, Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History (Bloomsbury, 2019); Paul O’Connor, “Ritualised Play,” in Skateboarding and Religion (Routledge, 2020), 179–208; Sander Hölsgens, “Learning to See, or How to Make Sense of the Skillful Things Skateboarders Do,” In The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography (Routledge, 2023), 387– 400; Brian Glenney, Isaac Bjorke and Andrea Buchetti, “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play,” Frontiers in Sports and Active Living 6 (2024), 1–3. |
| ↑3 | Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (W.H. Freeman, 1976). |
| ↑4 | Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 1963), 12. |
| ↑5 | Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 112–131. |
| ↑6 | David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House, 2015), 117. |
| ↑7 | Glenney et al., “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play”; Duncan McDuie-Ra, “Play Space in Plain Sight: The Disruptive Alliances Between Street Trees and Skateboarders,” International Journal of Play 12, no. 3 (2023): 285–303. |
| ↑8 | Glenney et al., “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play,” 3. |
| ↑9 | Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–20. |
| ↑10 | Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 12–18; EP Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” In Class: The Anthology (Wiley, 2017), 27–40. |
| ↑11 | Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–37. |
| ↑12 | Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” Common Knowledge 3, No. 2 (1994): 29–64. |
| ↑13 | Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” In Technology and Values: Essential Readings, edited by Craig Hanks (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 5. |
| ↑14 | Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 117–122. |
| ↑15 | James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 2020), 11–52. |
| ↑16 | David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2024), 23. |
| ↑17 | Isaac Bjorke, Sailing the Concrete Sea (Unpublished Manuscript, 2025). |
| ↑18 | Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–37. |
| ↑19 | Borden, Skateboarding and the City, p. 24; Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 17–37. |
| ↑20, ↑24 | Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014), 11. |
| ↑21, ↑31 | Paese, “SPOTS”. |
| ↑22 | Henri Lefebvre, Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment, edited by Łukasz Stanek (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). |
| ↑23 | Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 192. |
| ↑25 | Bjorke, Sailing the Concrete Sea. |
| ↑26 | Sharon Dickinson, Andrew Millie and Eleanor Peters, “Street Skateboarding and the Aesthetic Order of Public Spaces,” The British Journal of Criminology 62, no. 6 (2022): 1454–1469. |
| ↑27 | Brian Glenney, “Skateboard Crime and the Pirating of Urban Space,” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 21, no. 2 (2025), 211–230. |
| ↑28 | Glenney et al., “Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play,” 11. |
| ↑29 | Borden, Skateboarding and the City, 218. |
| ↑30 | Dickinson et al., “Street Skateboarding and the Aesthetic Order of Public Spaces,” 1458. |
| ↑32 | Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology (Indiana University Press, 2010), 72–75. |
| ↑33 | Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” 5. |
| ↑34 | Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 45–105. |
Alia ElKattan is a PhD student at New York University, where she researches the sociopolitical implications of technology, particularly pertaining to its mediation of young people’s knowledge of and participation in political communication and participation. She also builds tech literacy experiences that demystify technology and its social impact for public audiences through creative storytelling, games, and interactive explainers. Her research and creative projects have been presented at conferences and festivals around the world, including in Cairo, Sheffield, Amsterdam, New York, and Pretoria. When not researching or building websites, she can most often be found cruising on a skateboard.
