This summer my boyfriend and I have planned a tour of the local skate parks. I'm doing this project, because I've always loved skateboarding, despite not really being able to skate with any confidence. Anyways, I've already put together the map below to outline our sites and begun identifying the key components we'd like to measure. My boyfriend has been skating since he was 8, so I'll be relying on his expert knowledge to provide further insight into components like the flow of a park. There's definately a few terms that need to be defined on our part, and a scan of the available literature. I'll be collecting all relevant aspects of the project below for my own enjoyment. And you the reader, if you're even there haha.
The sites highlighted in green were visited in 2025, while the sites in purple are yet to be visited.
Okay so the Metholody has slowly become more solidified. After each of the visiting the parks, I fill out a google form to get the majority of my observations down and then follow up by adding some approximate distances and area measurements completed through google maps. Of course, all of these measurements are very approximate and to be honest, quite crude, but I still believe it provides an opportunity to compare parks in interesting ways and provide some novel reflections. I'm also really inspired by the interviews that have been completed by Jenkem Magazine with regular park users. In an improvised/unplanned turn of events Mitch started making mini skate videos of some of the parks we visited which honestly is scratching this itch for now...
Mitch spontaneously decided to film at one of the parks we visited where there were some locals (who were not children lol). It's so fun to see these come together and I love the way they kind of drive home the wonky/ grounded/ reflective approach I've taken with the project thus far. Go on site visits!
I can't help but reflect on some of the insights I've gained from just being on the gound at the parks. These feel like the most novel outcomes that I've developed through this personal project.
SPACE: this almost sounds stupid, but quite literally the space between FEATURES of the park is so important and contibutes to FLOW and further impacts the SKILL LEVEL associated with each FEATURE. something that i've noticed is that there are so many parks that are cramped up by just having too much s t u f f. I think a really beautiful component of the art of skateboarding is the ability to project creativity onto any surface. You don't need stuff to skate. Even just having a few "easy" features won't prevent a really skilled skater from hitting a feature, in fact it might produce a more creative output.
FEATURE "COUNT": One of the parametres I thought that I would attepmt to record during site visits was counting the number of FEATURES on the site. I found really quickly that this was like... a completely futile task that was not going to convey how the park is actually used. Quite literally anthing can serve as a feature, and even the edges of pedestrian walkways where features in thier own right (See Mitch's 50/50 grind in the Turner video). To get around this, I have noticed that some municipalities have tried to kind of provide a more thematic explaination for what's at the park, such as a XYZ metres of steel coping and ABC square metres of cast concrete VERT or TRANSITION. Oh yeah... let me come back to that.. I've been having more thoughts on municipal parks and VERT.
OKAY! Data! A little bit of approximate data! We visited a total of 5 different parks this year, which is a lot less than what we were hoping for but, we are busy people. Here is the break down of where we went and some of the interesting stories that came about.
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Unsurprisingly, the temperature had a huge impact on how many people were at each park. The sites we attended at mid-day although they were very cool, Port Colborne especially, we only saw people in parks where the temp was lower and the sun was not beating down as hard. I would love to visit these sites again at different times and see if I can meet the locals.
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Again, Port Colborne was really interesting - the park is ship themed and is right beside a locke in the Welland Canal, which is a really impressive HUGE piece of infrastructure. Pretty much all the parks were colocated with other amenties and uses.
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A pretty obvious compoenent of the park is how poeple even get there. Hamilton comes out on top - as both Valley and Turner are in the Hammer. Another note about Valley, it's the only park I have come across so far where park uses have access to a button that turns the sports lighting for the park on and off.
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Most of the parks we visited where adjacent to a community centre, or were in a park where there where also public bathrooms. The Lincoln park gets an extra shoutout as the public water fountain was outside and within just a few metres of the park itself.
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So park size varied pretty widely. Smithville was pretty interesting because of the small size and big focus on transition skating. The other parks all had reasonable mixes of transition, vert, and street style features. The two largest parks also included seperate bowls from the typical mix of ramps, rails, ledges and hubbas.