Tag: philadelphia

• Mapping where people run

  I’ve been meaning to write this post for about a week now. I stumbled upon a set of maps via FlowingData that used public running data to plot where people run in various cities around the world. And since I love maps, I couldn’t resist.

  Here’s Toronto:

  

  Here’s New York:

  

  Here’s San Francisco:

  

  And here’s Philadelphia:

  

  For the full set of maps, click here.

  What’s interesting is how people tend to gravitate towards the water rather than the parks. In the case of Toronto, High Park is barely touched, which may have something to do with the fact that it’s too far from downtown. The data could also be skewed based on the type of people who make their running data available and where they happen to live.

  Either way, a neat set of maps.

  2014.02.12

• SKATE city videos

  Two weeks ago I wrote a post called “Skateboarding and the city.” If you liked that post, I recommend you take a look at this 5 minute video called SKATE Toronto. It’s part of a series where local skateboarders provide a guided tour of their city.

  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEb4QvJzFVU&w=560&h=315]

  You’ll find similar videos for New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Hong Kong, etc. What I like about them (other than the skating, of course) is that they clearly demonstrate the unique way in which skateboarders examine and engage with cities.

  2014.01.04

• Please don’t walk on the grass

  The blog of Gehl Architects, called Cities for People, wrote a post this morning called, “Reflecting on Urban Play in Denmark.”

  It’s a good follow-up to the post I did a week ago called, “Skateboarding and the city”, because in many ways, the example I gave (LOVE Park) is an extreme case of what Cities for People is talking about:

  “This sign, and other familiar signs such as “Please Don’t Walk on the Grass” characterize a common understanding of the urban landscape and its features as something to visually admire from a distance rather than interact with. While play and physical interaction with our surroundings is an intuitive social behavior, playful uses of the urban landscape and its features are often regarded as an illegitimate use of city space.”

  It’s the equivalent of buying a sofa, covering it with plastic, and not letting anyone sit on the damn thing. What’s the point?

  Fortunately, Copenhagen seems to be bucking that trend. Here are a few examples.

  2013.12.28

• Skateboarding and the city

  Yesterday during lunch with a colleague, the topic of skateboarding came up. And I was reminded of how much I used to love it. There was a time when I used to skateboard everyday. If I missed a day or two, I felt rusty.

  What I loved about it was how incredibly challenging it was to learn and perfect new tricks. And there were always ways to continually push yourself to the next level, whether it was the number of boards you could ollie (jump) or the number of steps you could ollie down. You’d start with 3 stairs. Then it was 4. Then 5. Then 2 sets of 5. And so on. Once you mastered those, you could then introduce a kickflip to make it even more challenging. The possibilities were endless. And so—to borrow Daniel Pink’s terminology—it was all about mastery for me.

  Here are a few of my old skate decks (they’re on the wall in my apartment):

  

  But in addition to teaching me that there’s no substitute for discipline and practice, skateboarding also helped shape my love of cities (either that, or I was a born urbanist and skateboarding was a symptom). 

  Street skating is an inherently urban activity. There’s no defined field or rink. The entire city is at your disposal. And so as a skateboarder, you’re always on the look out for interesting things “to skate.” You want steps, ledges, edges, and changes in grade. You also look for sequences. What tricks can I string together across this urban landscape? You wouldn’t believe how exciting these features can be to a skateboarder.

  In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that skateboarders are probably some of the finest surveyors of public space around. How many people do you know go around counting stairs, examining railings and measuring ledge heights? Skateboarders do.

  But as much as street skating is all about the city, that relationship is often an acrimonious one. Skateboarding is viewed as a property destroyer, an annoyance and, in some cases, a criminal activity.

  A perfect example of this is the story of LOVE Park in Philadelphia (it was a public plaza, not a park). LOVE Park was a legendary space in the skateboarding community. It put Philadelphia skateboarding on the map. It was iconic. If you skated during that era, you knew about LOVE Park.

  However, on April 25th, 2002, the Mayor of Philadelphia ordered that the park be closed off and remodelled to remove all the elements that skateboarders loved about it. It was decided that skateboarding was not an acceptable behaviour in an urban public plaza.

  That act made a huge dent in the Philadelphia skate community. And the park became essentially a homeless shelter. 

  As a former skateboarder, urbanist and ex-resident of Philadelphia, this always baffled me. Cities all around the world spend a great deal of time and money trying to create spaces that people will actually use. And here you not only had an intensely used one, but one that spurred a grassroots global phenomenon. It’s precisely what makes cities so great.

  Thankfully, many cities have woken up to the benefits of street skating by building purpose built skate parks. But in my view, those spaces lack something that places like LOVE Park had. LOVE Park was authentic. It was about a serendipitous repurposing. It had a sense of place.

  2013.12.14