Reviving Community Life through Skate Parks

Skate parks are areas with designed facilities for skateboarders, BMX riders, and roller bladers such as bowls, ramps, steps, poles, pipes, tracks, and paved areas. Skate parks were first planned and designed by premier skate park architect Ken Wormhoudt. The architect was best known for his collaborative design approach to parks by asking skateboarders to sculpt their dream layouts on clay. Skate parks are ideal examples of urban park facilities that are part of a larger city or district park. Skate parks are also integrated with public art installations such as free-standing sculptures, reliefs and outdoor furniture.

Being urban parks, skate parks are often very popular, community-gathering spaces. Skate parks have contributed to the vibrancy of several local communities in the US and around the world due to the positive involvement of young people, the city council, parents, corporate sponsors and artists in their design. Some popular skate parks include the Ken Wormhoudt Skate Park in Santa Cruz, California; Bishan Skate Park in Singapore; Wave House in Durban, South Africa and Hollenbeck Skate Park in Los Angeles, California. The Hollenbeck Skate Park in Los Angeles has a ‘Raise the Bar' program committed to gender equality and continued participation of girls and women in sports.

Skate parks are open to the public and are usually maintained by the city. Privately-owned skate parks charge a minimum entrance fee to use the park facilities. Upkeep of the park encourages stewardship, pride of place and forging of community ties. Promotion of these parks can be achieved through fundraisers, corporate sponsorships and printing of promotional flyers, brochures and posters. Promoting public parks can be challenging. Printed materials can serve as effective mediums and online printing is a reliable and affordable choice. Online printers such as UPrinting offer discount coupons through an online discount coupon site. It also maintains popular pages on Flickr and YouTube.

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