Toronto skateboarders carve out space in park design
The city of Toronto’s Skateboard Strategy features plans to consult the Toronto Skateboarding Committee.

thestar.com
By Jonathan Forani
Jan. 29, 2017

For years, the only skate park Ariel Stagni had was the concrete and metal of the financial district.

Its railings and stairwells transformed into the perfect space for kick flips, grinds and ollies - until, inevitably, a security guard appeared with the typical scolding.

“There was a lot of ‘Don’t do that here’ and ‘You can’t skateboard here.’ Me and my buddies were like, ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ ” he recalls. They instead turned inward to their garages and converted plywood and junkyard finds into their own makeshift skate parks.

“That was the experience of a lot of people skateboarding,” says Stagni, now 41 and a skateboard consultant. “A lot of it was finding a place or making a place.”

But now, as the public park movement grows to become more inclusive of varying demographics and cultures, Stagni and his community are seeing more spaces for themselves. There are now over a dozen skate parks spanning from Etobicoke to Scarborough.

The movement has gathered steam in recent months, with the city’s October unveiling of a Skateboard Strategy, which outlines how the city can transform spaces into a skater’s paradise. One of the key features is the inclusion and consultation of groups such as the Toronto Skateboarding Committee, of which Stagni is a founding member.

For his part, Stagni gave a face to the movement at Saturday’s Park Summit, Park People’s annual community event in its seventh year.

“It’s all part of inclusivity,” says Dave Harvey, executive director of Park People. “With the skateboard parks we’ve seen around Toronto - they’re packed. It’s not just about having them use the parks, but have them design them.”

While there are more skate parks than ever, Toronto still lags behind other Canadian cities, according to city research, and they aren’t always built the way the skater community would like. The otherwise much-lauded Underpass Park, an initiative by Waterfront Toronto unveiled in 2012, is one of those spots.

“Nobody likes it. It is what it is,” says Migs Bartula, another member of the Toronto Skateboarding Committee.

As far as Bartula and Stagni are aware, no one with skateboarding expertise was consulted for the project, which is maligned among Toronto skateboarders. Many complain that the contraction joints made in the concrete to avoid random cracking are too wide and too many and that the ramps are prefabricated instead of permanent concrete, which many in the skateboarding community prefer.

“It falls short of what skateboarders are expecting now,” Stagni says, which is why inclusivity in all stages is key in park development. “As a permanent installation, we don’t think it does the skateboarding community justice.”

Still, the atmosphere at the Park Summit was spirited and optimistic among the hundred attendees, including community members, visitors and city councillors, filling the hall at the Daniels Spectrum building. City councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon called it “the most uplifting, euphoric event you could ever go to” and similar to a “legal high,” she joked.

Also among presenters were an African sing- and dance-along performance from local performers Lua Shayenne and Walter Maclean, in support of bringing the arts to city parks, and an emotional presentation from members of Vancouver’s parks board about indigenous inclusion.

At one point during the summit, an old phrase flashed on the screen: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

For Stagni, that’s precisely what his community has been doing for decades, with or without its own parks.

“It’s about seeing spaces differently. There are all these rules, but skateboarders show up and ask, ‘What can I do with that bench?’ They take a utilitarian approach,” he says. “Toronto is such a gem - there is such a rich of concentration of awesome spaces for skateboarding.”