Introduction

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights (Harvey, 2008: 23).

According to scholars such as Harvey, the rights of citizens are being displaced by the rights of the consumer. The renegotiation of rights can be related to the continuous process of spatial capitalist restructuring, which informs and is informed by social, cultural and democratic challenges including calls for ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’, however understood and interpreted. Urban activism has been foregrounded in the global public consciousness, with nok events including, the uprisings culminating in what is now referred to as the Arab Spring and anti-capitalist demonstrations initiated in New York (‘Occupy Wall Street’), which subsequently spread around the world (‘Occupy Movement’). The causes are complex and various, and the objectives diffuse, including revolts against political oppression, social exclusion, and the tyranny of economic liberalism and predatory capitalism. Such movements are helping to reframe the rights of citizens and reenergise debates, particularly at the city scale. They are concerned with spatial justice and fairness and expressed through notions such as the ‘just city’ (Fainstein, 2014).

Drawing inspiration from the renegotiation of the rights of global urban citizens and new theoretical deliberations (Soja, 2010; Fainstein, 2014; Marcuse, 2014), we seek to explore the right of a particular subculture – urban sports activists and specifically skateboarders – to produce space. Skateboarders are often represented by city authorities (including politicians, local government officers, city centre managers, police officers and security guards) as ‘unruly elements’ (Harvey, 2008), which infringe the rights of consumers and do damage to the urban fabric. But, members of urban sports communities – urban sports activists – including skateboarders, free runners and BMX bikers – can also be perceived as producers of urban city space as they reimagine, use, consume and transform cities through distinct spatiotemporal patterns.