Skateboarding, Lived Experiences and Public Space : How Skateboarders Experience, Appropriate and Make Meaning Within Urban Space in Malmö

Sammanfattning

While existing research on skateboarding and urban space has largely focused on institutional frameworks and placemaking processes, the lived experiences of skateboarders themselves remain underexplored. Understanding these lived experiences reveals how urban belonging is produced and unevenly distributed and how practices like skateboarding can transform the meaning of urban space. This thesis examines how skateboarders experience, appropriate and make meaning within urban space in Malmö. It explores how repeated embodied engagement with the city produces place attachment, community and informal forms of spatial ownership. Malmö is chosen for this case study due to its highly recognized skate culture and institutional support, which removes many of the barriers skaters face elsewhere and makes both the possibilities and persistent challenges of urban belonging more visible. The thesis draws on theories of sense of place, spatial appropriation and the right to the city. The analysis is based on ten in-depth interviews with skateboarders of varying ages, skill levels and gender, complemented by two group interviews with six additional participants and two embedded fieldworks. The findings show that skateboarders perceive the urban environment differently due to their creative engagement with it. Strong social bonds and place attachments developed through repeated practice in shared spaces, yet access to that sense of belonging was not always equal. Some of the women navigated heightened visibility and an internalized pressure to justify their presence even within a community they largely experienced as welcoming. The thesis contributes to existing literature by shifting attention from institutional frameworks to lived experience. It also extends Relph's concept of insideness by arguing that belonging depends not only on familiarity with a place, but also on the social permission to remain and return to it without repeatedly having to re-earn one's legitimacy there.