How skateboarders redesigned the city

In May 2013 Philadelphia opened Paine's Park, a skatepark built of granite pulled up from LOVE Park and Dilworth Plaza.¹ LOVE Park, opened in 1965, had become a favorite of local and visiting skaters, amateur and professional, for its ledges, railings and stairs.¹ The city banned skating there in 1994 and again in 2000, the bans led to arrests and heavy fines, and renovations in 2002 and 2016 destroyed some of the best spots.¹ The stone that was removed to stop skating became the stone of a place built for it.

That is the story in one object. To see why it happened, start with what a skater sees.

The edge as terrain

To most people a ledge is the place where a planter ends, a handrail is something to hold, and a set of stairs is how you get down. To a skater each of them is terrain: something to grind or slide or jump. The modern plaza, with its long stone ledges and open paving, was nearly ideal by accident.

That difference in reading matters because most edges in a city were never really designed for anything. They are what is left where one surface meets another. Skaters were the first large group of users to treat every one of those leftover edges as usable. Once someone uses an edge in a way its owner dislikes, the owner has to decide what the edge is for. Skating turned the leftover edge into a decision.

Armor

The first answer was to armor the edge. In July 1998, Christopher and Michael Loarie filed a patent, assigned to a company called Intellicept, for a "walkway abuse deterrent system": a part shaped to fit over a ledge or rail so that a skateboard or in-line skate cannot slide along it.² It was granted in July 2000.² The patent's background explains the problem it solves in the owner's terms: the "general tranquility was disturbed, property owners endured real property damage, local merchants observed reduced customer traffic," and there was "a perceived increase in liability."²

Devices of this kind, now a familiar sight on ledges and benches, are the most visible mark skaters have left on architecture. They are also a precise example of designing against one use. A knobbed ledge still holds back the soil of a planter. It is also worse to sit on, and nothing about it says so in the owner's accounts.

That is the asymmetry the patent records. Its list of harms is a list of costs that show up in someone's books: damage, lost trade, liability.² What a skated plaza gives back, a space in use with people watching it, shows up in nobody's. When only one side of a ledger is counted, the armored edge always looks like the sensible choice.

Adoption

The second answer took longer and went the other way: build the terrain on purpose.

Paine's Park is the literal version. Another is the undercroft at London's Southbank Centre, a space used by skaters. The Southbank Centre planned to turn it into retail units and build a new skating area under Hungerford Bridge.³ Skaters campaigned, and in September 2014 the two sides signed a binding agreement with Lambeth council to keep the undercroft open for skating and graffiti in perpetuity; in return the campaign backed the rest of the arts centre's redevelopment.³

Malmö in Sweden went furthest. In 2015 the city made skateboarding a municipal job, hiring a full-time skateboarding coordinator in its streets and parks department.⁴ Its planners describe designing skateable features into public space that deliberately do not look made only for skating: furniture and sculptures that also work as places to rest or things for children to play on.⁴

The same move twice

Armor and adoption look like opposites. One says skating does not belong here; the other says it does. But both do the same thing to the edge: they decide what it is for. The knobbed ledge is specified against skating. The skate plaza is specified for it. Malmö's dual-use benches are specified for both.

What disappears in every case is the edge nobody had decided about, the leftover space where an unplanned use could happen without anyone's permission. Skaters found those edges because they were looking for them, and in doing so taught owners to look too. A city where every edge has been decided is more orderly and, in one specific way, poorer: the next unplanned use will find fewer places to start.

Where this breaks

Skaters were not the only reason cities armored their edges. Benches with dividers and spikes under bridges are aimed mainly at people sleeping rough, and that history is separate. The patent shows that at least one line of products was designed specifically against skating; it does not show that skaters started defensive design in general.

The examples here are famous because they are unusual. Philadelphia, London and Malmö do not show what most cities did; most simply put up signs and fins. Malmö's approach is documented through interviews with six people involved in it, which describes the policy well but cannot show how it works for everyone else who uses those spaces.⁴

And the cost of armor is reasoned, not measured. No source here counts what a city loses when a ledge can no longer be skated or sat on comfortably, which is exactly the problem the piece describes.

What skaters did to architecture

The usual answer is that skaters damaged it, and some did. The more lasting effect is that they made the leftover parts of a city visible as places, and therefore as decisions. Owners who had never thought about their ledges had to. Some answered with fins, some with granite parks, and a few with benches built to be skated and sat on alike.

Those choices now shape public space in cities skaters will never visit. That is a large effect for a subculture that never set out to design anything.