1. Originality. The book offers an original lens to explore Asia's urban growth and its new urban frontiers. The presence of skateboarders in the region is constant, and the circulation of the images and footage produced by photographers and filmers of skateboarders at skate spots transmit Asia's urban landscapes to millions of consumers of skate culture worldwide, producing new knowledge of the region in the process. This is a reinterpretation of urban Asia, a re-mapping, that both aligns and diverges from dominant global mobilities and networks of culture and capital. 2. Approach. Endless Spots animates Asian cities through an innovative methodology that is both adventurous and accessible.
Endless Spots uses spots as the central analytic. Spots are assemblages that may appear banal and inconsequential arrangements in the urban landscape, yet for skateboarders they are magnetic, desired, vital. Endless spots draws on the ways urban landscapes are experienced and represented through the utilisation of spots. As such, it explores spots as they appear in skateboarding film, video, clips, and photographs; as stories and memories talked about by skateboarders and filmers and photographers in interviews and articles; in ethnographic material from spots and urban landscapes in Asia; and as represented visually on websites, mapping software, mobile phone apps and other forms of peer-to-peer circulation. 3. Scale & Breadth. Endless Spots may appear to be a book about a singular activity, skateboarding, yet this activity and the ways it is captured and circulated draw together multiple strands of contemporary scholarship on urban growth in Asia (and the perceived decline of the US), cities, landscapes, alternative mapping, digital geographies, encounters between skateboarders and authorities and publics, and vernacular cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, the book offers analysis of varied urban environments at varied scales.
Thus the content ranges from the ways cities as varied as Fushan (China), Kathmandu (Nepal), and Kabul (Afghanistan) are experienced and represented as skate spots in global circulation.