Use this thread to post photos and links to your favourite DIY initiatives and share building tips.
The Power of DIY Urbanism: How a Group of Skateboarders Changed the City: This is a cool story from Finland I stumbled across.
CASE is a super-organized grassroots urban planning initiative from Calgary, Canada. They helped the city develop a skateboarding strategy and open 8 new skateparks in the last 10 years.
Here are two articles about the DIY skate and arts scenes in Athens, Greece:
thank you so much!! Really useful atm :)
Here's another really great, recent article by Chris Lawton from Skate Nottingham called 'Skateboarders are Saving your City'
"In less than a year, skateboarding will make its debut in the Olympic Games in Tokyo. It’s an international sport with an estimated 50 million participants—but, more than that, skateboarding’s DIY ethos and strong ties with art, music, and the built environment make it an unlikely asset for cities.
In the past, skateboarding was seen as an antisocial activity: a swath of by-laws imposed restrictions in cities across the U.K.—including in my own city of Nottingham, where it was banned in 2000. But today, a growing body of evidence shows that skateboarding can help attract investment, reclaim public spaces and create resilient communities."
These are great articles and I appreciate all that are working to set this forum up and keeping our community communicating. I sent some info via email a couple months back, but I want to share what is happening in Boulder, CO with The Green Block Project... a community skate space created and fostered by a local skate shop, Satellite Board Shop.
The city of Boulder is now recognizing Green Block as a "Skate Space" and working to keep the site maintained. That is truly remarkable. Here is a link to the city's write up of the space which also includes plans to accent the space with an official city-built skatepark.
The project is gaining momentum, thanks not only to the skaters and Satellite, but also due to the press that it's been getting. This article here sums things up pretty well.
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing, Brian! Really inspiring example of a local shop helping to advocate for getting more permanent skate spots. My old local shop in Vancouver, Canada (Antisocial Skateboard Shop) has also done tons in terms of helping to get DIY spots like Leeside approved as permanent skate spaces by the city, and advocating with the local Parks Board for more skateparks around the city.
This highlights the value that local skate shops bring to communities, which means putting these shops out of business via online shopping could impact how many skateparks and skate spaces our communities have!