Esther Sayers, Head of MA Arts & Learning Programme and Senior Lecturer in Education, Goldsmiths University.
How we share and invest in our public spaces says a lot about the society in which we live. A community coming together to invest time in making common land better for everyone is a powerful narrative. This is a tale of creative placemaking, impactful because it engages young people in the process of urban renewal. Such community engagement is not simply about teaching someone to become an active citizen, but about enabling people to come together to invest in their communities.
Changes to the urban environment that nurture ownership and belonging have infinitely more sustainability than off-the-shelf regeneration. A Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach has always been a part of skateboarding: making adjustments to existing architecture, fixing degraded surfaces. These interventions are imperceptible to non-skateboarders, and they are usually done without the explicit ‘permission’ of governing authorities (Kazi-Tani, 20141). Arguing about ‘what public space is and should be is a rite of passage for skateboarders’ (Howell, 20052).
City Mill Skate is a creative consultation with skateboarders to determine the design of skateable obstacles at UCL East, the new campus for University College London on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. Commissioned by UCL Culture, this is inclusive placemaking and active cultural engagement; aimed at exploring and engaging with skater led initiatives in the area and involving young skateboarders in envisioning the kinds of architecture that they would like to use in the future.
Crucially, it is research in action, using approaches that allow for the materiality of design processes and social models for evaluating the success of the designs. Data are gathered through a combination of participatory design, questionnaires, qualitative interviews and live evaluation by research participants. Through these methods, we want to improve our understanding of the public who will skate the future City Mill Skate sites.
During lockdown we sent out skate dot making kits. Originally intended as face-to-face workshops, these kits were an adjustment to enable us to carry on doing this research in a socially distanced way. So many experiences in lockdown were digital, it was important to provide an alternative, a way of thinking and designing with materials.
Skate dots
A skate dot is an architectural object that is skateable; more incidental than a skate park, less ‘in the wild’
than a skate spot. Something similar to a sculpture on a sculpture trail, it is rideable by skateboarders,
but also by roller skaters, BMX riders and adaptive skaters.
There is a sensory experience that comes from making with stuff, rather than just designing in theory. And that echoes the experience of skateboarding where the physical act of riding overlays the understanding of a trick in theory – you have to experience the feeling of riding through your body. In the designs, surface quality, height and accessibility are all important, as well as elegant shapes and structures that sit, not within endless acres of concrete, but within a planted landscape.
We are gathering testimony from the skate dot makers and will bring their models to life by building some obstacles to allow us all to skate and evaluate their designs.
Participatory design
What is vital is that all skate dots are designed by riders with riding in mind; ideas must come from all sections of the skate community, including adaptive skaters, roller skaters and BMX riders as well as from the wide mix of ethnicities, gender and age categories who form the contemporary urban skateboarding community.
Placemaking presents problems of how to engage with new publics and communities; not by inserting those ‘outside’ the existing order into it, but as a more disruptive process that gives participants a voice in spaces where they had not previously been heard. This approach grows out of creative art practice, empowering young people to act as cultural ambassadors and teachers. It speaks to Page’s (20203) notion of pedagogical praxis by giving young people the opportunity to understand who they are in relation to where they are.
In neighbourhoods bordering the City Mill Skate site, the right to public space is becoming increasingly transactional through a plethora of coffee shops and the sale of commodified lifestyle leisure (Sayers & Griffin, 20204). Our pilot research has shown that skateboarders are already reclaiming unused local spaces on the periphery of the recently redeveloped Olympic Park, for their own leisure. The appropriation of public space under a flyover makes useless space useful through the skateboarders’ habitation; an alternative space without commercial value, sited away from zones of gentrification.
Skateboarding can be used as a positive catalyst for local young people seeking to construct an identity outside of the structures of consumer exchange. It allows them to create a sense of self as individuals, but also in cohesive groups. It provides an inclusive alternative in which they can influence and change the culture of their local area.
References
1. Kazi-Tani, T. (2014). ‘(Un) DesiredSpaces. DIY Skate Spots as Critical Participatory Urban Design.’ Presented in the TRADERS conference.
2. Howell, O. (2005). ‘The “Creative Class” and the Gentrifying City: Skateboarding in Philadelphia’s Love Park.’ Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 59, No. 2 (Nov., 2005), pp. 32-42. Taylor Francis Ltd.
3. Page, T. (2020). Placemaking. A new materialist theory of pedagogy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press:
4. Sayers, E. & Griffin, S. (2020). City Mill Skate: Skateboarding, Architecture and Community in Callan-Riley, T., Holsgens, S., Campkin, B., Ross, R. Urban Pamphleteer #8: Skateboardings. UCL Urban Laboratory: UK.
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City Mill Skate is led by Dr Esther Sayers and Sam Griffin both researchers, artists and themselves skateboarders. They are working with UCL Culture, the Bartlett School of Architecture, Urban Lab and the east London skateboarding community to develop, test and ultimately create a range of skateable architectural elements to be embedded into UCL East’s social spaces.
More information: citymillskate.com
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This article was first published in 2021 in Vol 126 of the NAEE journal which is available free to members. This edition was an arts-themed special, written with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination.