skateboarder as flâneur

"Benjamin noted a contradiction at work in the figure of the flâneur, however - that, while he subjected the urban world to an 'individualising' gaze (ie., his own), he simultaneously assisted in the erasure of individuality by reducing what he saw to a series of statistical points" (Gelder, Ken (1994) 'Vampires in the (Old) New World: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicals', Reading the Vampire)

"In this sense, skaters see the city as a set of objects. Yet cities are not things, but the apparent form of the urbanisation process, and are in fact filled with ideas, culture and memories, with flows of money, information and ideologies, and are dynamically constitutive of the continual reproduction of the urban. To see the city as a collection of objects is then to fail to see its real character. And this is exactly the failure one could say of skateboarding, which does little or nothing to analyse the processes which form the urban; instead, the phenomenal procedures of skateboarding rely entirely on the objectival nature of the city, treating its surfaces – horizontal, vertical, diagonal, curved – as the physical ground on which to operate." (Borden, Iain 'A Performative Critique of the American City: the Urban Practice of Skateboarding')

What the quotes say, really. Looking at the failures rather than utopian possibilities of skateboarding; need to be recognised and interrogated. Argument for more 'concrete' forms of urban transformation ie. skateparks? Problems with visualist description of flâneur abound; not really willing to take this further. But contradictions both quotes speak to are important...