By Taylor Richards
Unknown to many urban planners, city residents, politicians, and more, skaters have a deep connection to the built environment. Unlike other sports, skating is intertwined with the physical elements that make a city or a town. The intersection between urban planning and skating reveals the resilience of the sport, marked by skaters’ dedication to carving out spaces for themselves. Skaters have a unique way of seeing and shaping the world around them: they identify underutilized spaces and reclaim them for their sport and community. Often disregarding property laws, they function as tactical urbanists within our prescriptive world.
Ben Berkowitz is a prominent skate advocate in New Haven, Connecticut. He has been instrumental in the building, renovating, and legalization process for numerous skateparks and skate spots across the small city. A few years ago, Berkowitz and other skate advocates were looking to activate a street-level section of a massive parking garage in downtown New Haven for skating.
“We showed up to a meeting with the head of the New Haven parking authority who controls the garage, which is a quasi-municipal organization,” he recalled. “The mid-level manager said that he didn’t know why we were even asking for permission [to use the space], and asked why we don’t just skate the basement of the garage instead?”
The garage is managed solely by the parking authority, but, since the organization is quasi-municipal, governance also belongs to private businesses connected to the garage. Following this meeting, Berkowitz and other skaters started filling portions of the basement with skate obstacles like ledges and rails. Despite the parking authority telling them it was fine, the space was still unofficial and security guards started regularly kicking out skaters. They asked permission, were granted it, and skaters were still shown the door.
Some skaters accepted that they couldn’t use the space anymore. But Berkowitz and Douglas Hausladen, the Board Chair for the New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation, continued to seek legal approvals to skate the basement. Liability issues held up approvals for a couple years. The ceilings are low and this isn’t a park run by the Parks Department—it’s a parking garage. Injury laws for parks, that are applicable to outdoor skateparks, didn’t apply here. The parking authority ended up hiring an insurance consultant for a different space, and utilized them to get proper signage and legalese written up for the basement. Eventually, Berkowitz, Hausladen, and New Haven skaters got their win: a legitimized DIY skatepark protected from the elements.
longer kick out skaters.(From X account of Ben Berkowitz)
The parking garage basement in New Haven encapsulates the ongoing struggle skaters face when trying to create space for their sport. Most sports require some kind of facility: basketball needs a court, baseball needs a field, swimming needs a pool. One can argue that a skater needs a skatepark. While true, the resilience of the sport is marked by skaters’ ability to take it wherever there is a hard enough surface for the wheels to roll.
Following the governmental process of constructing skateparks can be antithetical to the ethos of original skaters, which involved taking spaces for themselves, regardless of who owned the property. When the sport came to prominence in the 60s and 70s, facilities for it barely existed, forcing early skaters to get creative. For decades, skaters trespassed schools, offices, and private residences to utilize the landscape for various tricks. This planted the seeds of the sport being considered a counterculture. For decades, skaters were kicked out of these spaces, fined, or arrested. They tested the concept of private property and followed their own rules. In response to their lack of dedicated space, skateparks were built en masse to hopefully keep skaters off private property.
Today, skateboarding is in the Olympics, and skateparks are ubiquitous across the country. This couldn’t have happened without the resilience of the counterculture for decades. Yet this resilience is still required today—the fight has moved from the streets to city hall. Due to the sport’s origins in counterculture, along with the high costs of the design and construction, building a skatepark today requires knowledge of the bureaucratic process and patience with potential Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) resistance. The Public Skatepark Development Guide, written by Peter Whitley, lays out the hurdles skaters need to jump through to advocate and secure funding for the construction of a skatepark– in 66 pages.
“Skateparks don’t happen on their own. They always require an energetic, committed team of advocates with members from the community, the City, and Parks Department. The team requires support from the local business community and the larger population of non-skaters,” said Whitely in the guide.
As we saw with Berkowitz, the legal route can quickly bog down an energetic advocate. Even when he asked for permission, it wasn’t a guarantee for access. Often skaters will stick to their tactical urbanist roots and forego the entire bureaucratic process. It’s common for skaters to create DIY spots in underutilized parcels by pouring concrete for ramps and building ledges, with or without permission. Despite plenty of skateparks existing, skaters still create these spaces because they enjoy the challenge of skating somewhere that’s not perfectly smooth like a concrete skatepark, along with being away from skatepark crowds.
The fate of DIY spots is dependent on how pertinent groups handle their existence. Sometimes a DIY spot will get dismantled by a disgruntled authority, whether it’s the owner of the property, security, or city workers. Sometimes it will be ignored by authoritative parties and left indefinitely to enjoy. Other times, advocates will work to legitimize an existing DIY spot by navigating legal protocol, such as what Berkowitz did in New Haven.
Creating official spaces for skating, like skateparks, requires determination and patience to navigate bureaucratic hurdles. Creating unofficial spaces for skating, like DIY skate spots, requires gall to trespass and transform underutilized urban space. The sport of skateboarding (or other types of skating) toe the line between official and unofficial, legal and illegal, accepted and prohibited. Being a skater is not a single-note story of rebellion and resilience; it’s about reclaiming space and navigating the invisible boundaries that shape our cities.
Taylor Richards is an urban planning graduate student whose primary interests include land use planning, urban design, walkability, and accessibility. She currently works in the Land Use and Transportation divisions at Westchester County Department of Planning. Taylor has skated for 5 years and her passion for the sport directly informed her piece. Other interests include cooking, biking, playing geoguessr, and thrifting.
Sources:
Larry Lanza, “The DIY Parks Built During COVID,” Jenkem Magazine, November 30, 2020, https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2020/11/30/diy-parks-built-covid/.
