002: Built Environment Inertia
Why skate parks are the way they are.
If skateparks are full of design flaws why doesn’t anyone try to fix, change or improve skate parks. How is it that these same styles of parks with these same design flaws get built and designed (by skateboarders) over and over again? While reading Welcome to Your World, by Sarah Williams Goldhagen I came across a few paragraphs that I think shed some light on this situation.
For many reasons, most people ignore cityscapes and buildings and landscapes. The two obvious reasons for this are that buildings, streets and plazas and parks rarely impinge on our conscious experiences. They change slowly if at all. And we are animals: neurologically wired to ignore all that is static, unchanging, nonthreatening and seemingly omnipresent.
We also mostly ignore our built landscapes because practically, we have no obvious stake or influence in their production. This aligns with our approach to other swaths of our daily experience and needs: for medical help we go to doctors; to repair our car, we visit the auto mechanic. Most of us implicitly or explicitly have relinquished control over our built environments, having entrusted our decision making about them to the putative or established experts: the city council members,the real estate developers, the builders and contractors, the product manufacturers and designers. Most of us perceive ourselves as helpless to make changes in the built environment. This very sense of powerlessness results in a paradoxical situation: real estate developers configure new projects based on what they believe consumers want, which they assess mainly by examining what previous consumers have purchased. But when it comes to the built environment, consumers gravitate toward conventional designs without thinking very much about them. So developers continue to build what they think people want. No one steps back to consider what might serve people better, what people could like, or what they actually might need.
Not only are consumers disposed to prefer familiar, conventional designs, they will prefer conventional designs even if those designs serve them very poorly—which as we have seen they often do. This is owing to a common psychological dynamic, namely that the more times a person is exposed to a stimulus, even if it does not serve her well, the more she will habituate to it such that she eventually will not only prefer it when offered other options, but will eventually deem it normative. In this way, people can and do come to judge inferior places that serve them poorly, or even harm them in covert ways, as indisputably, objectively good.
This closed feedback loop leads to what Goldhagen refers to as built environment inertia in our regular built environment and also in the environments (skateparks) skateboarders build and design.
So where did the design of skateparks that we have today come from in the first place and how did we get stuck in our own built environment inertia.
To answer this question I think we should look at the roots and factors that led to modern skatepark design. In my opinion the inspiration for the arrangement of obstacles in modern skateparks comes from two main sources.
One: late nineteen eighties skate contests.
Two: Burnside in Portland Oregon and the subsequent skateparks built and designed by the builders of Burnside.
As far as the particular obstacles in skateparks go I would say they have a multitude of influences but I think the following are the main ones. Street obstacles that appear in popular skate videos. Such as ledges, curbs embankments, stairs, handrails, etc.
Empty backyard pools
and halfpipes.
The park designer/skateboarders personal taste and the general public’s understanding of skateboarding play a role as well.
Other than a random car, launch ramp to wallride, a handrail and a few other miscellaneous obstacles the basic nineteen eighties street skating contest set up was; a fun box or pyramid in the middle of the park as the focal point. On either side of the pyramid there would be a quarterpipe or a large slant/ embankment or a roll in from which to get speed to skate the pyramid. A ledge height box of some sort off to the left or right side of the pyramid, and whatever side the box wasn’t on there would be a pvc slider bar. These contest courses were built by talented skateboarders for use by talented skateboarders. This layout was and is great for contests, demonstrations, and private skateparks for experienced skateboarders. The contest set ups were designed for contest runs. So they were designed in a way for skaters to hit obstacle after obstacle. This aspect of a park or contest set up is commonly referred to as the flow of a skatepark. A contest set up with good flow made it more entertaining to watch as a spectator and allowed the skaters to show a wide range of their abilities in a short amount of time. Many of the wooden skateparks built around this time had similar layouts and obstacles as the street contests.
Burnside, unlike the 80s contests set ups was built in a diy fashion. The entirety of the layout wasn’t designed all at once. It was built obstacle by obstacle as the skaters could acquire concrete and coping and all the means necessary to build each obstacle. The end result of this construction process mixed with the skaters personal tastes became a space that was almost exclusively transitioned obstacles. Quarterpipes with bowled corners surrounded the space on all four sides plus a bowl in one corner and another pit type of bowl close to another corner of the space. There were transitions going up the pillars in the space, a long low pump hump surrounded by transitions and the only non transition obstacle was a three sided pyramid made up of three steep slanted embankments with a curb going across the top. The flow of burnside blew the flow of the 80s contest set ups away. A talented transition skater could hit obstacle after obstacle with plenty of speed until they ran out of energy to do so. When footage and photos of burnside started showing up in videos and magazines the impact it had on skateboardings collective consciousness was huge. Especially because it was on the heels of the big pants small wheels era and, unlike the wooden skateparks and contest set ups of the late 80s, Burnside was all concrete and steel. Seeing some of skatings most talented and stylish skaters like Wade Speyer, Phil Shao,
Julien Stranger
and burnside local Mikey Chin
rip around burnside with speed and control made every big pant, small wheels, pressure flippin, slappy nosesliding skateboarder reconsider their whole approach to what they were doing. I would say it also reignited the interest of older skaters who despised the slow flip trick based skating of the big pants small wheels era and the ultra baggy clothing that went with it.
Plus skateboardings popularity was on the rise again in youth culture after a major lull that lasted from the late eighties until the mid nineties. The resurgence was mostly due to the successful marketing of skateboarding as an extreme sport via espn’s ex games, skateboard videos and Tony Hawks Pro Skater video game. As well as popular skateboard related television shows like Jack ass, Viva la Bam and Rob and Big. Skateboarding became popular enough that towns and cities were once again willing to spend money to have skateparks built. And the builders of Burnside had the skills necessary to build these skateparks. Hence the extreme influence of Burnside and the builders who went on to design many of the first era of new concrete skate parks.
One of the main problems with both the eighties contest layouts and the Burnside layouts is actually the flow. When a skatepark is designed with good flow in mind the designer is picturing just one skater using the park at a time. From the looks of most skateparks I’ve seen I would say the designer is picturing themselves or maybe their favorite professional skater(s) flowing through the park. As if the average skater is pro level on transition, ledges, bowls and any other number of obstacles that get clustered together in modern skateparks. This makes sense for a contest layout and for a diy that was built by experienced skaters to their own personal taste. However when a town or city is putting money into building a skatepark the expectation is that it will accommodate skaters of all tastes and skill levels. Instead the layout of the modern skatepark is more akin to a professional skateboarder contest course. Which when used by a mix of beginner, intermediate and advanced skaters becomes a crash course if more then a few people are skating the park at the same time. Every skater who’s ever skated a skatepark knows this. And we all just accept it as if it wasn’t skateboarders who made the layout of the park. We accept it as a part of skating when really it’s just that we’re skating a layout meant for a skate contest. Not daily casual skating or the process of learning how to skate. The design is to blame for the inevitable run ins to other skaters and the harsh competition for space and obstacle usage. The design is to blame for the frustration. Not the act of skating. Street skaters know this best because we skate a variety of non skater built environments that just so happen to better suit beginner and casual skating. But street skaters were not usually the ones building and designing skateparks. Street skaters were busy skating the regular built environment. So the layouts and obstacles of the contest set ups, diy’s and skateparks built mostly and historically by talented transition skaters became the reference point for building an environment for skateboarding.
The general publics lack of understanding of what skateboarding is also played a roll in the popularity of this skatepark design. Back in the mid nineties to the early 2000s (when the new wave of concrete parks we’re being built) if you asked someone who didn’t skateboard what they knew about skateboarding the response would most likely be “Tony Hawk”. If a kid was just getting into skateboarding at this time their first exposure to skating was likely via Tony Hawks Pro skater video game or Tony Hawk on the Ex games. Tony Hawk’s skateboarding is extreme. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game features various skate courses that consist of everyday skateable architecture (the type featured in skate videos) mixed with halfpipes, quarterpipes, and empty backyard pools that all flow seamlessly into each other. Which creates all kinds of opportunities for extreme video game skating. Something worth noting about the video game is that the skater flows through these courses by themselves. No need to wait for other skaters on the course to take their run. No run ins with other skaters in the video game world. Much like how it seems designers are picturing themselves or their favorite skater(s) when they design a skatepark. So when a parent had a child who was interested in skateboarding and a skatepark was going to be built in their town of course what they thought the park should be is an extreme contest set up like the courses on the Tony Hawk video game. When a rendering of the skate park to be built was released to the public it usually looked like a Tony Hawk video game course or an extreme games (or these days an SLS course) set up. By the looks of it the general public was satisfied. The problems didn’t come to light til the park was finished and started to be skated. That’s when the crash course and the issues of competition for obstacle usage due to poor layout and clustering of obstacles became apparent.
All of the elements of built environment inertia are there. We feel a lack of control over how skateparks are designed. People that build and design skate parks see that whenever they do build a skatepark it tends to get heavily used. Not necessarily because of how well it is designed. But usually because it’s the only option that allows skateboarders to use a space without being kicked out by security guards or police or having to compete with pedestrians for space. So the fact that the park gets heavily used leads the skatepark designer to assume the next one should have a similar layout. We’ve been exposed to these designs so many times that even though these places serve us poorly and harm us in covert and overt ways we still consider them objectively good. Just like we need to take a step back and reconsider the designs of our regular built environment we also need to take a step back and consider different designs, layouts, skateable objects and materials that would better suit the process of learning how to skate and the act of enjoying skateboarding.