“I thought we were useless”: K-skateboarding and socio-material pollution in Nanjido,Seoul

Abstract

This article discusses the enmeshment of skateboarding and pollution from an ethnographic perspective. It advances recent scholarship on “polluted leisure” by zooming in on Nanjido, Seoul. A former landfill and brownfield, the island was transformed into an ecological park in the lead-up to the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Performing athletic tricks on top of decades of chemical and radiating waste, skateboarders must attend to and live alongside the hidden anthropogenic materialities and invisible social histories of the eco-park. This ethnography provides evidence of the tactics that skateboarders use to navigate and mitigate the socio-material repercussions of pollution—from denial to fact-finding. The skatepark also marks a shift in the social discourse on skateboarding in South Korea. Historically, the practice is considered an ing-yeo-jit: a “useless” and wasteful youth activity—a social pollutant. Encapsulated in gentrification strategies masked as environmentalism, skateboarding is presented as a “useful” and “healthy” practice used to push the park's green and salubrious image.

Introduction

It is a breezy afternoon in April when I meet Min (pseudonym) for the first time. The owner of a digital printing service, he spends his lunch break at Nanjido skatepark. The reason? It is green and quiet, offering an instant escape from the incessant productivity he diagnoses in Korean work culture. Instead of the hurrying pressure of pali-pali (“fast-fast”), he seeks the creative ethos of skateboarding—punctuated by being antirank, self-regulated, and imaginative. During his breaks, carefree kickflips counterbalance industrial tasks, as much as remarkable landscapes atone for monotonous office spaces. In the weeks that follow, I meet him there on most workdays, as we go for a skate session and have lunch together.

Min introduces me to the concept of ing-yeo-jit: useless activities excluded from mainstream society (Kim, 2015; Park, 2016). Historically connected to fan culture and video games, he explains that skateboarding is also considered surplus: it's not productive and hardly a commodity, seen as a distraction from academic and professional pursuits. However, for Min, this isn’t necessarily a negative quality. Rather, he suggests, skateboarding offers an escape from external pressures by being a satirical reflection on society—cherishing “wasteful” and “useless” behavior in a labor market dominated by quantification and efficiency. By skating during his breaks, Min feels as though he can cool off from work and be unproductive for a minute. Skateboarding, to him, is prefigurative, being the change he’d like to see in society.

Performing an ing-yeo-jit is often associated with Hell Joseon, or the “expression of frustration with the social structure or political-economic regime in which individual effort cannot change or improve their precarious status” (Kim, 2015: 243). Considering their social status as hell-like and drawing connections between contemporary Korean societies and the infamous tyranny of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), an increasing number of youths seek ways to cope with the pressures of everyday life. Skateboarding offers such an escape: it fosters a horizontal, countercultural, and international ethos (Borden, 2019). Socio-spatially, skateparks carve out a small portion of space for performing such a value system: here, it's accepted to use informal speech levels, have body modifications, and perform queerness (Hölsgens, 2021).

Min seeks this ethos at Nanjido. At first glance, this makes sense: it is a skatepark located in a green park that is dedicated to leisure, sports, and relaxation. It is decidedly post-industrial, representing a fresh and progressive direction for Korean society. But Nanjido skatepark is obscured in a wide and deep history of divergent socialities and environmentalisms. A former landfill and brownfield (1978–1993), Nanjido Island was redesigned into an ecological park in the lead-up to the 2002 FIFA World Cup (Oh, 2023). After stabilizing the landfill in the early 1990s and allocating a location for the World Cup stadium, Seoul City aspired to dedicate “a considerable portion of the city-owned land for public use instead of immediately developing it for commercial purposes” (Kim, 2020: 138). The park aims to regenerate its natural environment—positioning the post-landfill landscape as a locale for sustainable leisure and well-being practices such as outdoor sports, hiking, and camping. However, its efficacy remains debated, for landfill-related pollutants and toxins are buried, yet not fully eradicated (Kim, 2020). If anything, invisible pollution remains a formless threat, known to some visitors, and effectively hidden from others. What's more, its indigenous communities are pushed out of the area, a prototypical outcome of gentrification and sustainable development. It is within this contested space that skateboarders like Min seek refuge from societal pressures and hegemonic cultural ideologies: in the lion's den.

Skateboarding, here, represents a leisure activity with—as skate scholar Brian Glenney (2023: 1) writes—“moral and material ambiguity that disrupts categories of health, harm and pollution.” In Nanjido, anthropogenic materials (and smouldering waste in particular) are the phenomenal foundation for a landscape tailored to sustainable leisure activities. Performing trick play on top of decades of chemical and radiating waste, I argue throughout this article, is a meaningful expression of how skateboarders navigate polluted spaces. The emerging field of skate studies expresses a growing interest in environmental and ecological issues, including grey spaces (O’Connor et al., 2023), brownfields (Glenney, 2023), and DIY environmental practices (Duester, 2023; Kaufman, 2021). My ethnography adds to this discussion by, first, exploring how skateboarding intersects with governmental ideologies on ecological diversity and nature restoration, second, showing how skateboarders become aware of their polluted environs, and third, scrutinizing a Korean case study in a predominantly European and Northern American discourse. I do so by referring to skateboarding in South Korea as “K-skateboarding,” following discourse on Korean pop culture.

This article starts by introducing the concept of polluted leisure and the theorization of grey spaces in leisure and skate studies. I then present Nanjido as a case study highlighting how skateboarders are harnessed in the ideological and socio-material transition from undesirable browns and greys to desirable greens. I support this with ethnographic vignettes based on four months of participant observation and speaking to a lifelong pursuit as a skateboarder. Precisely because ethnographic investigations on skateboarding remain relatively sparse, especially beyond the USA and UK, emic perspectives like the ones presented in this paper hold a generative potential: the meanings practitioners in specific contexts attribute to their social world complement the broader theorization of sports. My argument is that skateboarding at Nanjido manifests itself as a contested leisure activity—oscillating between the grey and green, the informal and regulated, the salubrious and toxic. As such, I compliment Brian Glenney's (2023) recent work on the rise of skateparks on superfund sites and brownfields in the USA. More specifically, I show how this relationship between skateparks and polluted spaces plays out in the context of Seoul, South Korea.

Method

This article draws on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork at Nanjido, and about 20 months of additional research at other major skateparks in Seoul. My fieldwork included a “rolling ethnography,” a skate researcher's equivalent to participant observation with an emphasis on sensory data (McDuie-Ra, 2023). This social scientific approach—where the researcher draws upon their own involvement in the skateboarding community to make engaged and reflexive claims—is utilized by multiple skate ethnographers (McDuie-Ra, 2023; O’Connor, 2019; Willing and Pappalardo, 2023). This ethnographic methodology reflects the researcher's experience as a skater, often providing easier access to a skate community and breaking away from the idea of the unfamiliar observer. Skating alongside one another is a key methodological tool for building rapport, but also for acquiring a more embodied understanding of the issues at play. More broadly, the rolling ethnography builds upon recent developments in sensory ethnography, with an emphasis on both “the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and contextual nature of research participants’ sensory practices and also seek to comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that informs how people understand their experiences” (Pink, 2015: 15). As such, a rolling ethnography aims to understand a skateboarder's sensory world. Positioning my own experiential understanding of skateboarding vis-à-vis those of my interlocutors resulted in an embedded positionality, mediated by the skateboard as a technological device and the praxis of sideways movement. Overall, this immersive approach (Matthews, 2021) can enable researchers to scrutinize the discursive and textual alongside the affective and experiential, resulting in a holistic insight into complex material and socio-political developments. All participants consented verbally to this research and requested to use pseudonyms.

Review of literature: skateboarding and pollution

The modern city affords a playground for urban practitioners: the reduced costs of construction practices—symbolized by the omnipresence of the concrete mixer—correlates to the drastic growth of leisure activities like graffiti, parkours, and skateboarding (cf. Borden, 2019; Rabeneck, 2012). Rather than cobblestones or patchwork roads, modern cities are marked by smooth surfaces, globally generating paved paradises over the course of the twentieth century (Grabar, 2024). Pavements and sideroads offer a training ground and playground for skateboarders, whereas curbs, bridges, and ledges provide affordances for play and exploration. Functionalist design—everyday street furniture including ledges, curbstones, benches, memorials, traffic signs, and waste receptacles—operates as the main parameters for the efficacy of urban practices like skateboarding. Urban planning prioritizing wheeled transportation is particularly suitable for cruising around on a skateboard. Similarly, architectural design tailored to the median human scale (e.g. handrails, staircases, benches) enables trick play, not least because of its standardized measurements. Once a trick is learned on one handrail or bench, it can be transferred to another, engendering a mindset of scanning spaces for skateable obstacles. While such street furniture may differ in terms of length and width, designers’ consideration for accessibility needs results in a generalizable parameter for the practice of trick play. In short, the leisure typology of urban sports may not have existed without the modern city.

Ironically, the modern and functionalist design practices affording urban play are now under siege, not least by municipalities who aspire or are pressured to create a green and eco-friendly city. The modern city is made to sustain human life, yet increasingly leads to its counterparts: pollutants, toxins, chemicals, and waste. This brings about a kind of perverse pleasure: “Skaters depend on and find joy in the kinds of materialities increasingly associated with the annihilation of human and nonhuman life: asphalt, iron, granite, steel” (Hölsgens and Glenney, 2025: 1). From its origins in 1950s Southern California onwards, skateboarding has been a “polluted leisure,” taking place in and relying on grey cityscapes (Evers, 2019; O’Connor et al., 2022). Put differently: pollution, as Brian Glenney (2023: 3) writes, “not only affords certain leisure practices, it makes them pleasurable, providing participants with meaning and satisfaction likened to the therapeutic benefits of surfing's salubrious blue spaces.” But, increasingly, such spaces of pleasure become an uncomfortable decorum for skateboarders. Put differently: skateboarding is modern and therefore complicit to ecological damage, or is at least made suspect.

Why is this an important insight? On the offset, it says something about skateboarding as an embodied practice. By repeatedly performing tricks in the built environment, skateboarders acquire a peculiar set of bodily skills (Hölsgens, 2024). In particular, they develop a “skater's eye” (Borden, 2001), or the multisensorial capacity to instantaneously assess whether architectural space is skateable or not. Recent research expanded this emphasis on skilled visuality via studies on auditory skills (Glenney et al., 2023), kinesthesia (Nowodworski, 2023), and performativity (Abulhawa, 2020). All these studies highlight the multi-layered and skill-driven entanglements between skateboarding and the built environment. This enskilment corresponds to the practice's contested socio-political position. Skateboarding's recreational use of public spaces often remains illegal (Borden, 2019), resulting in a heightened awareness among security guards (Howell, 2008) and defensive architecture shaped as “skate stoppers” (McDuie-Ra and Campbell, 2022). Skateboarders hold psychogeographic knowledge as to how to navigate such surveillance politics and socio-material hostility: they are intimately aware of when a square is actively surveilled by guards, cameras, or residents. Brian Glenney (2023: 19) describes how “abandoned, toxic, and anti-social spaces are skateboarding's flower and field.” There is a parallel, Glenney suggests, between the polluted spaces that are particularly suitable for skateboarding and the societal and governmental view that skateboarding is a polluting activity—socially, morally, and materially.

In other words: there is a case to be made that skaters are disproportionately affected by pollution, precisely because they are drawn to marginalized spaces, which are often neglected or exist in close proximity to the top emitters of a city, including harbors, factories, and highways. Simultaneously, skateboarding itself is regularly depicted as a social pollutant—similar to what my interlocutor Min calls an ing-yeo-jit, a “useless activity.” Simultaneously, skateboarding is being harnessed as a symbol of the future city, representing wellbeing, urban culture, social mobility, and sustainability (Book and Svanborg Eden, 2021; Ohlson, 2024). Not unlike landscape architects, municipalities prominently use the imagery of skaters in their three-dimensional renders of urban redevelopment projects. This imagery is frequently presented against the backdrop of a remarkably green and desirable built environment, as though skateboarding coincides with a more sustainable and (eco-)friendly future. Cities like Rotterdam even have a department for urban sports, so as to work towards a cityscape that actively facilitates leisure activities like parkours, BMX, and skateboarding. Importantly, this narrative of municipal support coexists with a discourse of illegality and hostility: within a city, there can be conflicting policies and enforcement, positioning skateboarding as both a friend and foe.

Recent research on skateboarding and pollution centers on spatial typologies such as brownfields, construction sites, parking lots, and harbors. But what about skate-friendly spaces that are lauded for their environmental value, for being green spaces? Or, more specifically, how do we make sense of a large-scale nature restoration project like Nanjido, which hosts a purpose-built and formalized skatepark? As a post-industrial landscape park, Nanjido “intends to promote the sustainable use of nature for the public's leisure activities” (Kim, 2020: 142–143). In what ways does skateboarding here reaffirm or contest the notion of being a polluted leisure? Contrary to the grey and brown spaces exemplified in recent studies, Nanjido is part of a green ideology, designed in response to what Benjamin Duester (2023) calls “green pressure”: the green dimension of parks is expected by citizens, practitioners, and corporate stakeholders. Nanjido is a material and symbolic turn to bright green environmentalism, foregrounding technological and social innovations to push for a more sustainable future (Gallo-Cruz, 2021). However, the socio-material remnants of the toxic and radiating landfill underneath the skatepark are nevertheless present, hinting at yet another ramification of polluted leisure. So, how to make sense of skateboarding—regularly positioned as the opposite of mainstream culture—in lieu of such a multimillion-dollar project? It is to this question that I now turn.

Context: Nanjido, from wetland and landfill to eco-park

South Korea's rapid industrialization and modernization are distinctly exemplified in the transformation of the Nanjido region. In the 1970s, the wetland and farmland—a city island within the Seoul metropolitan region—was turned into a landfill, a consequence of the City's attempt to centralize waste disposal and ensure “physical and social sanitation” elsewhere (Kim, 2020: xiii). As the City owned the overwhelming majority of the land, and purchased some more at heavily reduced rates, Nanjido was selected as one of the region's principal brownfields. Ecologically diverse and fertile, and home to Indigenous farmers, Nanjido shifted to becoming a large-scale waste facility “where organic materials decompose under biochemical processes, releasing a mixture of synthetic materials that pollute the natural environment” (Kim, 2020: 3). Originally below sea level, the wetlands and streams were filled by the mid-1980s, resulting in plans being made for the closure of the landfill. However, the city government prolonged the land's use as a waste disposal—giving rise to artificial mounds over ninety meters tall, filled with toxins, radiants, and pollutants.

In the late 1980s, a vision for a post-industrial and globalized Seoul started to emerge (Cho, 2003; Hong, 2011). Simultaneously, a global recycling market limited the need for landfills like Nanjido. Following the country's democratization in 1987 and the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games—South Korea's symbolic entry point into a global and neoliberal economy—a range of urban renewal projects were initiated (Lee and Hwang, 2012; Yun, 2011). Part of segyehwa, or globalization efforts, such projects had the aim to contribute to an increased appreciation of cultural heritage, human rights, ecological diversity, and well-being (Hölsgens, 2018). For Nanjido, these global and regional developments strengthened the intention to stabilize the landfill and, more generally, resulted in a new zoning plan. Following the decision that South Korea and Japan would host the 2002 FIFA World Cup, Nanjido was selected as the location for the country's main stadium, accompanied by a World Cup Park and a development plan for the wider Sangam-dong area (Lee, 2019).

The World Cup Park—also known as Nanjido's post-landfill park—consists of five sub-parks, including stabilized landfills, housing complexes, and leisure facilities. Influenced by global landscape architecture, these sub-parks advance design practices structured around discourses of environmentalism, nature restoration, and the wellbeing of residents and visitors (Lee, 2021; Pak, 2024). Through urban renewal, the pollutants “accumulated in the land, water and air throughout the landfill period” (Kim, 2020: 128) were intended to be cleaned. Particularly concerned with the odor of leachate and gas, some of which are hazardous, the city government (a) pushed remaining farms to use chemical fertilizers, (b) built pipelines across the park, and (c) invested in the rehabilitation of diverse botanical microhabitats (idem). Resulting in a mixture of native flora and faunas, remnants of the brownfield, and global landscape architecture, Nanjido was designed to appeal to international visitors and local residents alike.

These processes of detoxification, internationalization, and beautification coincided with nationwide sports and health-related policies, and “sports for all” initiatives in specific. ¹ In 1991, in the aftermath of the 1988 Olympic Games, the Korean government founded the National Council of Sports For All. The 1997 Asian financial crisis, by contrast, produced the national Korean slogan to “remain healthy for a comeback,” encouraging displaced workers and unemployed university graduates to continue taking care of their physique in anticipation of future professional opportunities (Dax, 2015). There was, in short, the need for a disciplined body, perhaps no longer by—as was initially the case in post-war Korea—discouraging long, punk hairstyles, but certainly by staying fit. By 2005, the national government pushed the 7330 campaign, encouraging Korean citizens to exercise at least three times a week, for at least 30 minutes. Such plans and campaigns were intended to cultivate the health and well-being of the Korean nation, and coincided with the shifting discourse from being a developing, industrial country to a prosperous, post-industrial society.

This transformation also resulted in an increased appreciation of leisure and recreational activities, as these were said to contribute to the country's welfare society while lowering healthcare costs. Pushing a healthy lifestyle by making sports available to all citizens is a universal policy strategy for stimulating the transition to a democratic, post-industrial welfare state—and South Korea is by no means an exception here (Chang, 2002; Hong, 2010). What's more, these health and sports policies coincide with the rise of skateboarding in the region. Gaining popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, K-skateboarding is historically enveloped in sportification strategies. More specifically, the widespread construction of purpose-built skateparks took place alongside the emergence of a skate community. So, as much as skateboarding is broadly perceived as a “useless” activity, in Seoul alone, there were as many as 75 skateparks by 2021. This paradoxical statistic is telling: K-skateboarding is both highly sportified and deviant, emphasizing the need for more empirical insights in order to understand what's specific and contextual about Korean skateboarding. Early studies suggest that the collective experience of “ing-yeo-jit” (and Hell Joseon; see below) and regional mobilization through associations and crews are noteworthy characteristics of K-skateboarding (Byun et al., 2024; Hölsgens, 2021). My paper complements these understandings by teasing out how skateboarders engage with a contested socio-ecological space, as this highlights how they perceive and formalize their own societal position.

In Nanjido's sub-parks, top-down investments in leisure and sports are palpable, not least because of the presence of the World Cup stadium and accompanying training grounds. Next to the SeMA arts residency, one can also find a range of picnicking and (overnight) camping sites, golf, tennis, and gateball courses, a baseball field, walking trails, a pool, and a skatepark. This is not uncommon for skateparks in Seoul. ESP Korea—the biggest construction company of skateparks in the region—regularly designs parks adjacent to sports facilities, advancing the idea that skateboarding is enveloped in the above-mentioned health paradigm. However, while most trails and flower fields in Nanjido are freely accessible to the public, a range of leisure activities is tailored to and affordable for middle class visitors. Not only are camping sites and most sports facilities pay-per-use services, working class Seoulites have limited access to information about the park and its facilities (Kim, 2013). Instead, at Nanjido, sports and leisure coincide with the city's green ideology,” distinguishing “the appropriate from the appropriate using the criteria of cleanliness and the degree of the natural environment's conservation and sustainability” (Kim, 2020: 144). What's appropriate—and hence visible—is a green environment designed for healthy activities. What's inappropriate are the histories and materialities of the brownfield: garbage and waste are literally and figuratively buried under the park's green surface, “making the unsightly invisible and burying the unsanitary, or the inappropriate, into oblivion” (Kim, 2020: 149).

Findings: skating at a former landfill

Nanjido skatepark exists against the backdrop of the area's contentious socio-material context. It is one of the few sports and leisure facilities freely available to the public, surrounded by wildflower fields, walking trails, a popular camping site, and the Han River. Largely built with concrete, granite, and steel, it is also a visible pocket of grey space in a symbolically and physically green and blue environment. Put differently: the skatepark seems somewhat of an outsider in the eco-park, not least because it was constructed over a decade before skateboarding was formally announced as an Olympic sport. Widely considered an ing-yeo-jit, a useless activity excluded from mainstream society, skateboarding became enveloped in policies and design tailored to (a) sustainability, (b) public health, (c) globalization, and (d) sports-for-all. Following popular discourse at the time, it is a culturally “useless” activity in a socio-politically and economically “useful” environment.

Nanjido Skatepark is stunning to look at. Its blush-red surface offers a stark contrast to the greens of the surrounding eco-park. A variety of obstacles—from ledges and banks to staircases and ledges—are immaculately designed and built, suggesting this is a high-priority training ground for skateboarding. What's more, the presence of a small convenience store, some camping sites, seating areas underneath canopies, and well-maintained greens make this one of the most comfortable and user-friendly skateparks in Seoul, for skaters and spectators alike. Rather than being tucked away at a university campus (Hanyang University skatepark) or roofed by a subway track (Banpo and Seobing skateparks), Nanjido is in the public eye.

Besides a plethora of facilities suggestive of a sportification strategy, Nanjido is peculiar in yet another way. Its construction is unlike most other skateparks in Seoul. At popular meeting spots and training grounds for skaters, like Ttuksom and Cult, skateable obstacles are predominantly made with lumber, plywood, and masonite—resulting in a slight flexing and bending of the obstacles that affords a surf-like experience. The concrete, polished granite, and timbercrete used in Nanjido increases the park's durability: whereas wooden materials soften and weather down, composite binders can sustain the repeated performance of tricks (and organic wear and tear). Opting for wood over binders is hardly ever influenced by the skateability or ecological sustainability of the materials. Rather, it is primarily an economic and pragmatic decision. Building wooden obstacles on top of asphalt is decidedly cheaper, for two reasons. First, the material costs are lower; second, wooden obstacles come in prefabricated and standardized shapes and sizes, reducing design costs and increasing the possibility for easy deconstruction in case a skatepark is no longer wanted or needed.

Although wooden obstacles require more regular maintenance than their concrete counterparts, Nanjido is preserved and cared for in a more profound way than any other skatepark in Seoul I’ve visited. On a weekly basis, the entire park is deep-cleaned: the canopies are spruced up, the seating areas decluttered, and the obstacles greased and smoothed out for prolonged use. As a result, the skatepark is more or less spotless—the only traces of skaters and BMX’ers being some skid marks on its ramps, rails, and ledges. As such, Nanjido affords a peculiar spatiality. Its skateable greys are submerged in the greens of its surrounding environs. What's more, skateboarding is sportified rather than illegalized or marginalized, receiving resources and maintenance similar to other sports facilities in the area. This is in contrast to a skatepark like Cult in the Dongdaemun area, which is constantly under threat of being closed by the city's Jung-gu Office (Byun et al., 2024). And, yet, skateboarders in Nanjido are deeply entangled in the socio-material repercussions of the Anthropocene, precisely because they perform tricks on top of an unsanitary and toxic brownfield, complicating the binary between the built and natural environment. If, as O’Connor et al. (2023) claim, skateboarding is a polluted leisure, requiring a bodily skillset to negotiate and give meaning to its brown and grey spaces, Nanjido may generate meaningful insights into this relationality. So, how to understand skateboarding as an actant in an eco-park dedicated to nature restoration and wellbeing?

It's noon. Min just finished some simple stretches in preparation for a short, intensive skate session. He opens his backpack and takes out a small plastic bag. In it are black, worn-down sneakers, the sides of which are scuffed. Using an absorbent paper tissue, Min cleans both shoes, as if to compensate for the eroded soles and splintered laces. Then, another skater rides up to the benches. It's Kaito (pseudonym), a Japanese environmental science student based at one of Seoul's many universities. Blending Korean and English, he asks: “Mate! Why are you cleaning your shoes? Don’t you know about this place? The real pollution is underneath your soles.” Min, somewhat taken aback, stops his daily ritual. He knows Kaito quite well, not least because of his skilled abilities to perform impressive tricks at nearly all obstacles. But they hadn’t had this kind of conversation before. This is not surprising. As the anthropogenic materialities and social histories of the landfill remain nebulous to many skateboarders and visitors, the park effectively discourages a critical take on its greenified spaces. And yet. While invisible toxicity and pollution may escape a gaze, it is an effect: “felt without verification” (Rubaii, 2023: 99). Min responds to Kaito: “I know something was off, but I didn’t know what it was. Is it really this… oyeomdoen [polluted/dirty/contaminated]”? Without catching his breath, Min continues to ask questions. “I understand that they [the government] do not take us that seriously. It's easy to ignore an ing-yeo-jit. But this place is made for the wealthy, for people like them… Don’t they mind? And what about those people camping over there? Are they aware of this history, of the stuff under our feet?”

In the years preceding this encounter, I engaged in various intricate conversations with skateboarders in Seoul. The subjects discussed include political scandals, everyday racism, and social class. However, this was the first instance where an ecological concern was being raised. Furthermore, my interlocutors identified a concern that directly correlates with the physicality of a skateable space, not just a broader, more abstract societal phenomenon. A few days after Kaito and Min had first discussed the history of Nanjido, I return to the skatepark. Min, perspiring profusely after an hour of skating, is taking a bite of his kimbap, a rice cake wrapped in seaweed. Still chewing on the snack, he hastily addresses me: “Sander, you must hear this! I’ve been researching this place. Did you know that the hill over there is not natural at all: it's all waste covered up by some greens! And the farmers who lived here… you know, they had to leave their homes so that this place could get cleaned up!” Min, visibly affected by Kaito's comments and his own research on Nanjido, starts to share his sense of unease by skating here. He is particularly concerned about the involvement of skateboarders in the processes of urban redevelopment, as much as he questions the rationale behind the construction of a skatepark in this location. He also raises his doubts about the symbolic meanings of skating here: “But why exactly is there a skatepark here? I thought we were useless. Can I still justify skating here during my lunch breaks? Sander… is it still okay that we are here?”

This is not an unusual concern; rather, skateboarders in Seoul are acutely aware of their social position. This exceeds the playful notion of ing-yeo-jit. Some skateboarders have tattoos and piercings on visible parts of their bodies as a form of resistance against the monopoly of Korean conglomerates, where it's not allowed or frowned upon to have such body modifications. As such, they make themselves “unhireable,” decidedly positioning themselves on the margins of the mainstream labor market. Others openly express their wish to leave the country for Australia or Aotearoa, as they feel as though they don’t belong in the Korean society they grew up in (Hölsgens, 2021). Still others take to the streets to protest against gender inequity or lobby for more diverse use cases of public space, including street art and urban sports. Some invoke word-of-mouth activism with the hope of preserving skateparks like Cult (Byun et al., 2024). Research on skateparks is usually tailored to inquiries into community and identity formation (Clark and Sayers, 2023), pedagogical practices (Sayers, 2023), social etiquettes (O’Connor, 2016), and skill acquisition (Hölsgens, 2019). Throughout my fieldwork, I also came across examples of a growing political awareness. Although some skate communities are punctuated by the apolitical mantra to “shut up and skate,” a substantial portion of my interlocutors consider their identity as skateboarders as an interface for addressing societal issues. Being a skateboarder, here, is a political stance—in this case closely connected to issues of environmentalism and governmental policies on sustainability.

Discussion: sense of unease

In the following weeks, my research participants and I have several discussions on the relationship between skateboarding and its physical environs. These conversations fixate on the topic of how to build a skate-friendly city, which—unanticipatedly—is haunted by the notion of greenwashing. Some participants go on scavenging hunts for clues about the eco-park's history as a landfill. They stumble upon gas transportation pipelines, information signs, and topical artworks made by residents of the SeMA Arts Space. To these skateboarders, their findings engender an uneasy sense of place, as if it's no longer possible to just skate for fun. Leisure, here, is increasingly experienced as a kind of social responsibility—a need to familiarize oneself with the complex moral, environmental, and material decisions made by those designing and funding the skatepark. Some consider any critique of governmental policies excessive and inflated; to them, a skatepark surrounded by the greens of trees, grasses, and camping sites is an obvious improvement over the stench of burning fuel or the ubiquity of high-rise apartment complexes. These skateboarders particularly appreciate the municipality's investments to make the area biodiverse and salubrious. For this group, this is marked by the decision to shut down the landfill and build an eco-friendly park to replace it: while perhaps imperfect in some ways, improvements are noticeable and laudable. Still, others recognize in Nanjido stories they have heard from international friends, where skateboarders are intentionally utilized to make a contested place more attractive for a peculiar demographic. This speaks to an insight by urban historian Ocean Howell (2008: 485), who describes that cities actively support skateboarders to skate in contested urban spaces because their presence “can deter vandalism, drug use, prostitution, and homeless encampments.”

My participants engage with such mechanisms on two interrelated levels. First, they are certain that the skatepark was introduced to appeal to local youth- and subcultures. For a skatepark like Tueksom in the Hangang Park, this is a given: it is easily accessible by metro and is conveniently located next to an entertainment district. However, this does not apply to Nanjido. The park is located at a considerable distance from popular universities. From the nearest metro station, “World Cup Stadium,” one still has to walk a couple of miles before you get to the actual eco-park. Skateboarders, to paraphrase Howell (2008: 485), are acting as “unwitting troops” to make Nanjido more attractive. This is a classic gentrification strategy. Offer artists a studio in an unwanted neighborhood and watch the district become more popular. However, Nanjido mainly attracts wealthy tourists, sports enthusiasts, and middle-class Seoul residents on day trips. The presence of the skatepark (and initiatives like the SeMA Arts Residency) has a different goal: making the area more appealing to students, artists, and an assemblage of subcultures. This also aligns perfectly with the nationwide “sports for all” initiatives, encouraging all citizens to develop a healthy, sustainable lifestyle. Rather than only appealing to middle-class locals and international tourists, the skatepark invites a more diverse demographic into a purportedly green, eco-friendly environment.

Second, a growing number of skateboarders who took part in my research project expressed their concern about the park's ecological sustainability. A shared question arises as to whose account is accurate and to whom they can turn for reliable information. Such skepticism is linked to the idea of Hell-Joseon, or the lack of trust that a significant proportion of Korean youth has in their society and government. Upon inquiry as to the source of this distrust, interlocutors typically cite a series of incidents, including the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol, the corruption scandal surrounding former President Park Geun-hye, and the inadequate measures taken to address the illegal use of spy cameras to film women. The mere possibility that the eco-park in Nanjido may be less environmentally friendly than proclaimed is a significant reason for concern among this cohort of skateboarders. The visible greenery, it is sometimes suggested, may conceal another reality—of pollution or otherwise. In other words, my findings do not necessarily give an insight as to whether skateboarders care about biodiversity and nature restoration, but especially highlight the distrust expressed with regard to government-led initiatives and policies. The main concern is the following: is skateboarding used as an oblivious youth culture to advance a political ideology of bright green environmentalism?

This kind of concern complements findings in existing skate literature on polluted leisure and grey spaces. This discourse is predominantly structured around the research on perceptible pollution in places like harbors, brownfields, and city centers. As a case study, Nanjido resonates with the oceanic blue spaces used by surfers. These spaces appear clean and salubrious, but surfers are intimately aware of marine pollution (Evers, 2021). But it's not just about a polluted ocean or a grey skatepark. In his ethnographic investigation of surf culture in Fukushima, Japan, Evers suggests that the Tōhoku region has historically been subordinated as an internal Japanese colony. This not only “legitimized” the building of 14 nuclear power plants, but also resulted in the representation of its people as “uncivilized, immoral, indolent, and unsanitary” (Miyazawa in Evers, 2021, online). Surfers in the Fukushima prefecture are thus doubly affected: after the 2011 earthquake renders the ocean nearly unsurfable, as much as they experience discrimination.

Skateboarders in Nanjido engage in a similar kind of polluted leisure. They have ringside seats to the redevelopment of Seoul, including the social repercussions of sustainability policies. Even though the current ecology of Nanjido has improved dramatically compared to the state of the landfill in the late twentieth century, including the government's statement that the area meets safety measures (Kim, 2020), its socio-material history of pollution and exclusion resonates. The moral sense of unease felt by a substantial group of skateboarders alike can be attributed to this hidden past—to the stark contrast between the brown biomass underneath the earth and its green surface filled with grasslands, trees, and plants. These two geological layers stand in for a range of binaries: dirt versus cleanliness; wanted versus unwanted; leisure versus labor; and middle-class visitors versus Indigenous farmers.

Nanjido Skatepark shreds these binaries asunder. First, K-skateboarding symbolically represents physical and social forms of sanitation. It comes with the prejudice of being a “useless” activity, a social pollution. And yet, skateboarders are usefully useless, being a broom to sweep away the dirt of Nanjido's history. While not fully accepted as a social practice, skateboarders are part of a gentrification toolkit, doing the dirty work to make a space more salubrious or sanitary. Second, K-skateboarding contributes to environmental pollution. As discussed above, Nanjido is a concrete island amongst a plethora of (bright) green. Any salubrious effects or health accretion of being a sports is being afforded by a polluted history, which includes the invisible (and possibly dangerous) remnants of the landfill and the construction of a grey skatepark. Despite the promotion of a green eco-park, environmental pollution is a possible threat—and is increasingly recognized as such by local skateboarders. Put differently: skateboarders must learn to live with this polluted socio-material history, including its invisible yet felt repercussions for the current eco-park.

Conclusion

An inquiry into skateboarding offers a generative lens for understanding shifting leisure-environment relations in Seoul, South Korea. Recent literature suggests that skateboarders predominantly depend on the visible greys of the modern city: harbors, bridges, and parking lots. The study presented in this paper draws attention to another monochromatic topology: the bright greens of eco-parks. At first, this appeared a paradox: why incorporate a practice like skateboarding—often called an ing-yeo-jit, a “useless activity”—in a multimillion-dollar, prestigious project like Nanjido? However, this study confirms that the city's green ideology facilitates such an unforeseen conjunction. Nanjido's green environment is designed for healthy activities, including camping, tennis, swimming, and walking. The area's history as a landfill is metaphorically and materially hidden underneath the park's green surface. The skatepark is, first and foremost, a means to attract youth to the area. What's more, precisely by actively reaching out to a politically engaged community and offering playgrounds for urban sports, attempts are being made to turn skateboarding into a formalized sport. Given skateboarding's history of socio-political activism in South Korea and abroad, sportification strategies are effective in monitoring and tempering such developments.

For skateboarders, Nanjido Skatepark holds a peculiar position in their psychogeographic and somatic knowledge of Seoul. Unlike other skateparks in the city, it is not easily accessible—requiring a lengthy metro ride and a subsequent walk or skate throughout the eco-park. Perhaps more importantly, an increasing number of skateboarders is aware of Nanjido's history, from its recent use as wetlands and farmlands prior to the mid-twentieth century to its transformation into a landfill in the 1970s. A shared concern is how “clean” and “green” this eco-park really is: what's the invisible and hidden pollution that their presence is trying to cover? While this has not resulted in any protests or formal inquiries, skateboarders partaking in my study do wonder: is the “useless” activity of skateboarding used for the political purpose to make Nanjido more “useful” and attractive to youth? Does the presence of skateboarding unwittingly contribute to rendering this undesired history, and its anthropogenic materials, invisible? The growing sense of unease among skateboarders contributes to a broader understanding of polluted leisure: while practitioners like surfers, skiers, and mountain bikers are at times intimately aware of their polluted environs, there are limited empirical insights into skateboarders’ perspectives. The main environmental concerns of skateboarding and the built environment are those of academics and critics. A recent exception is Brian Glenney's (2023) study of skaters who build their own skateparks on remediated superfund sites and brownfields in the USA. While such self-initiated practices of environmental care result in an enskiled engagement with polluted spaces, skateboarders in Seoul are hard-pressed to figure out that the seemingly green environs of Nanjido are masking the unsanitary and toxic. As such, this paper shows how skateboarders struggle to relate to the environmental context of Nanjido Skatepark: it's a place for skill acquisition, but also for the reorientation of values and ethical considerations with regard to sustainability and leisure. This is my invitation to fellow researchers: studying how skateboarders may be utilized as shock troops for not just gentrification, but also bright green ideologies.