CitySkate is a strategy document to aid in the design and implementation of amenities for skateboarding, as well as other small-wheeled sports, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It was adopted by the Vancouver Park Board (VPB) on June 6th, 2022 and developed through two phases of public engagement using a variety of outreach methods. The Park Board also formed a committee of community representatives from different skateboarding advocacy groups to advise in the strategy document, referred to in the strategy document as the Skate Advisory Group for Engagement (S.A.G.E).

Purpose and Problems

CitySkate was drafted and proposed in response to a growing demand for better skateboarding amenities in the city. The growing popularity of skateboarding and other small-wheeled sports in Vancouver had exceeded the existing skate infrastructure in the city, creating barriers for skaters to participate in safe, inclusive, and accessible ways. The phases of public outreach and the integration of S.A.G.E was a response to criticism that the Park Board had not listened to skateboarders when making decisions on skate amenities in the past.

Background and Context

The City of Vancouver has not had the best relationship with the skateboarding community in the past, despite having a very early and rich history with the sport; in the late 1970s, Vancouver and neighbouring municipalities built some of North America’s oldest skateboard parks, including the now-famous China Creek Bowls (Cheung, 2021). As the popularity of skateboarding continued to explode through the 1980s and 90s, tensions grew between the City and the blooming street skating community; for example, bylaws were passed to ban skateboarding from public spaces (City of Vancouver, 2025). It was around this time that the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition (VSBC) was formed, a collective of skateboarders who work to “influence policies, initiatives and decisions concerning skateboarding in Vancouver” (Vancouver Skateboard, About).

The formation of the VSBC allowed thoughts and opinions of the skateboarding community to be centralized into action. A voice was finally given to a community being silently pushed out by architecture and policy while also being recognized by the city. The VSBC advocated for spaces such as the Hastings Skatepark, the Downtown Skate Plaza, and China Creek skate park to support communities and networks of skaters across the city (Vancouver Skateboard, About). Representatives from the skateboarding community are elected to board positions to advocate for and engage with their community. Their engagement methods consist of conversations and meetings with community members to understand concerns people are having about their spaces. While starting out with informal means of engaging, the VSBC gained recognition with the City of Vancouver through repeated interactions. As a relationship between these groups formed, advocacy was invited through formal means such as hearings.

As the skate community continued to grow and efforts to organize against the City strengthened, some initial efforts were made by the City to work with skaters. The amendment to by-law 77A in April 2003 demonstrated how skateboarding “began to be recognized by Council as a sustainable and popular form of recreation and transportation” (Wilson, Administrative Report, 2005). This amendment to section 77A allowed a person to ride on non-monitorized skates, skateboards, or push scooters on any minor street or protected bike lane (Street and Traffic By-law, 2003). Although skateboarding was still confined to certain spaces in the city, this amendment demonstrated a first step by the City to recognize the importance of skateboarding in Vancouver. Conflicts, however, did not stop here.

In 2006, tensions between the skateboarding community and the City reached a boiling point when the Park Board recommended demolishing the historic and beloved China Creek Bowls, proposing to replace it with a playground for children, citing noise complaints from residents. The VSBC organised, and fought the Park Board in an attempt to keep the park open. Jeff Chan, the vice president of the VSBC at the time said “It’s frustrating. [The Park Board] didn’t take our opinion seriously” (The Province, 2006). Despite the initial hurdles, the VSBC won the battle and China Creek remains open to this day, and in 2022 the Vancouver Heritage Foundation recognized China Creek with a ‘Places That Matter’ Plaque (Vancouver Heritage Foundation, 2025).

This case demonstrated the need to involve the wider community when making decisions about skate amenities. In 2024, China Creek Bowls was majorly improved and revamped using guidance from CitySkate.

Why it Matters

The Skateboard Amenities Strategy is an important milestone for skating spaces and communities across Vancouver. It has the power to formalize skating for the City of Vancouver and provide guidance for implementation of future skate parks. Creation of the document is the result of years of community advocacy such as the case of China Creek in 2006. Community organizing through both formal and informal processes played a role in the creation of the Skateboard Amenities Strategy. Reviewing how these groups form and organize through formal and informal means is also important due to the understudied nature of skateboarding spaces. Understanding how to structure community advocacy groups can be used by both insiders to form their own advocacy groups and outsiders to guide engagement.

What Engagement Methods Were Used

The CitySkate engagement strategy primarily focused on online surveys and consultations with community advisory groups. In addition to this, the report also lists social media posts, open house events, pop-up skate events, public panel discussions, and video and documentary collaborations as additional forms of public engagement.

Online Surveys:

Two online surveys were administered, both hosted on the Shape Your City website, with over 2000 respondents each. The first survey ran from May-June 2021, and focused on why skateboarding was important to the respondents, and whether they were satisfied with current skateboard amenities.

The second survey ran from October-November 2021, and went into more depth about what improvements or amenity changes respondents would like to see.

Community Advisory Groups:

The community advisory group consulted, the Skate Advisory Group for Engagement (S.A.G.E.), was created to bring together various skating community leaders from different stakeholders groups to provide feedback on the Skateboard Amenities Strategy. Members of the SAGE included voices from the VSBC and other community groups around Vancouver to give them a voice seen as representative. In addition to the S.A.G.E, a one-time Youth Workshop was also held, in order to incorporate youth voices into the plan.

S.A.G.E was composed of representatives from different skateboarding or small-wheeled sports community organizations in Vancouver, and included the following groups or communities:

1. Vancouver Skateboard Coalition (VSBC)
2. Nations Skate
3. The BMX community
4. The roller skating community
5. Vancouver Queer Skate / LGBTQ+ Community
6. The longboarding and skate as transportation community
7. The East Van Skate Club
8. Under Toe Skate
9. The Late bloomers/Takeover + Adult Skate Club
10. Skate Canada

The SAGE was tasked with bridging the gap between the City of Vancouver and skaters. This was a more formal and invited space to participate. Engagement was controlled through meetings held between the SAGE and City of Vancouver yet the extent of influence the SAGE held is not disclosed through the plan. While the SAGE was the primary source of consultation it was not the sole source, the VSBC was still included in some conversations to gain more insight.

Participation Frameworks

Cornwall’s Invented and Invited Spaces of Participation

The City of Vancouver and VSBC both conducted public outreach for comment on the CitySkate plan, and both tended to rely on invited spaces of participation. When speaking about earlier advocacy efforts, Jeff Chan noted that VSBC and unaffiliated skaters engaged with the city through parks board meetings and surveys, which are classic city-led invented spaces. Skateboarding organizations such as Flatspot and VSBC did attempt to make the experience of commenting more comfortable by providing resources (linked below).

VSBC, as an organization attempting to represent the voice of skateboarders, likewise reached out to the community through invited spaces. The VSBC holds a monthly, in-person community meeting at Antisocial skateboard shop on Main Street. In contrast to the City Hall meetings, these were placed in more familiar settings like a store that skateboarders would frequent. The city, in their outreach for CitySkate, also hosted pop-up skateboarding events where public comments were collected. While an invited space, these pop-ups may have provided a more familiar atmosphere to skateboarders and their family members, although Jeff noted that conducting outreach in a skateboard-centered atmosphere may make non-skaters less likely to comment.

Jeff Chan mentioned that when he participated in invented spaces as an adult leading VSBC, he was sometimes dismissed as a legitimate voice for the skate community because of his age, while skateboarding is associated with youth. He also mentioned that one of the goals of the VSBC monthly meetings is to represent the voices of youth so that they don’t have to take on the work that adults should be doing to ensure that they have access to places to skate.

The VSBC also invented spaces to push for greater input to the city’s processes. A key topic that skateboarders have historically requested and still request today are skate parks that are sheltered from the rain, indoors, or otherwise robustly weather-protected. The CitySkate report appendix notes that a petition was started by skateboarders for these facilities. This is a kind of invented space since it was a grassroots way to approach authorities who did not specifically request that this information be shared.

Jeff Chan identified another kind of relationship that doesn’t fit neatly into the invented and invited spaces framework. Some members of the Parks Board and VSBC had an ongoing relationship that somewhat blurred the distinction between “city” and “community members.” He mentioned former Councillor Al de Genova who was a VPB member who reached out to VSBC to alert them of upcoming public meetings or other invited spaces, to increase the likelihood that VSBC could comment.

International Association for Public Participation / IAP2

The International Association for Public Participation has published guidelines that are well-known among many municipalities and consultants who conduct public participation on behalf of a city. It is a non-hierarchical framework that outlines the intensity of involvement for members of the public during potential engagement opportunities, but is more of a framework whereby cities can communicate what level of involvement they chose for a particular event rather than prescribing what events that cities should choose for a project.

Importantly, IAP2 only considers invited spaces. It is clear that the CitySkate public participation process reached the level of “involved,” whereby the city is able to identify stakeholders, hear and aggregate their concerns, and reflect the aggregated concerns in city-led decisions in response. There is no fundamental transfer of decision-making power, but to reach this level, the decision-making body’s potential actions should be delimited by the preferences and concerns expressed by participants. To reach the next level, “collaborate,” the city would need to delegate some level of decision-making power. The most obvious candidate to defer power to would be S.A.G.E since it is a focus group of experts that met regularly to provide input. It’s unclear exactly how much decision-making power that S.A.G.E held, but we infer that its influence was limited.

Fung’s Democracy Cube

Fung’s democracy cube identifies the “openness” or “closedness” of a particular engagement strategy to the wider public and to decision-making power. Unlike Cornwall who seems to imply a power dynamic in their framework but is really about the typology of a participatory event, Fung includes an explicit consideration of the proximity to decision-making power to create a chart with 3 axes.

Rather than stopping at a typology, Fung seeks to understand its usefulness towards what he proposes are three reasons why a government might seek to use public participation in its decision-making process: effectiveness of a policy, perceived legitimacy of a policy or overall government, and perceived justice of a policy or overall government.

The CitySkate process used a number of methods that would fall in different regions on Fung’s cube. For example, the surveys conducted were very open to any member of the public to respond, but they resulted in a relatively low level of engagement. While the surveys did somewhat translate to policy and built forms in the manner of the “quick wins,” survey respondents did not have final say over the CitySkate report itself, as final decision-making power seemed to be held by the city. The process also included more closed participations, including the creation of a “mini-public,” S.A.G.E, which had a relatively high level of engagement. This is where skaters who also led community groups or were considered “experts” (pro skaters) met to discuss the city’s proposals, although again this group’s input on the direction that the City should take was limited and did not seem to necessarily hold direct power over the direction of the CitySkate plan.

The community engagement that was conducted did identify the skate community’s needs enough that CitySkate could provide effective amenity policy based on the participation that occurred. A major priority that emerged is the lack of covered or otherwise weather-protected skate spaces, and a desire for the city to help develop more. The distribution of existing amenities was also a concern, with skaters looking for more spaces to be made available in south and east Vancouver, and improvements to be made to existing amenities. Finally, constructing transportation infrastructure with skateboarders in mind was highlighted since the lack of awareness that skaters can legally occupy some roads, paving texture, and grade of many routes were identified as concerns. However, the limited non-skaters involvement raises questions around whether their concerns around noise and stigma associated with skateboarding spaces could be perpetuated which would make the policy less effective.

The legitimacy of this process and policy also seemed to be reinforced by the public participation that occurred. Flatspot skate shop and VSBC both posted calls to engage with the public hearings and surveys on their respective websites. Despite the communities’ sometimes uneven relationship with the city, their engagement in these city-led participation processes nods to their openness of collaborating on skate-specific goals. In this way, CitySkate could be seen as an opportunity to make progress on skate communities’ wants and needs for skate infrastructure, legitimizing the participation methods and trying to play an active role in the process.

Lessons and Possibilities

The Vancouver CitySkate Amenities Strategy demonstrates how municipal governments can leverage long-standing community networks – in this case, the Vancouver skate community – to inform public-space planning. Yet the process also raises important questions about how institutionalized participation interacts with, and sometimes unintentionally constrains, the grassroots organizing that helped initiate the process in the first place.

The Vancouver skate community has a decades-long history of advocacy and self-organization. (About Here and Vancouver Park Board, 2022). Drawing on Miraftab’s framing of invited and invented spaces of participation, the community has consistently mobilized both formal and informal arenas to advance access to safe, equitable skate spaces (Miraftab, F., 2004). Their ability to move fluidly between these spaces has seemed to contribute to their political successes.

Against this background, the VPB’s introduction of more formalized structures, such the S.A.G.E, raises a generative question: What might the process have looked like if the City had entered the community’s participatory ecosystem, rather than the community entering the VPB? Such a reframing may have preserved more of the community’s invented, self-determined practices, and potentially created a different kind of power-sharing arrangement between municipal staff and grassroots leaders.

This tension became clear during Survey 2. While the VPB distributed a formal survey as part of the engagement process, the skate community simultaneously launched its own independent petition calling for an indoor skate facility. With more than 3,800 signatures – nearly double the total responses to both VPB-run surveys (City of Vancouver, 2022, January) – the petition demonstrates that community-led tools remain powerful, trusted, and deeply embedded in skate culture. Even while engaging with the City’s process, the community continued to organize through its own invented spaces. Whether this reflects limited trust in municipal processes, or simply the fact that community-led tools are culturally embedded and effective, remains speculative, but it is nonetheless an important insight.

These dynamics suggest opportunities to explore alternative leadership models in future planning:

1. What if the VPB resourced the Vancouver Skate Coalition or S.A.G.E to design and lead the engagement process themselves? This would position the community not only as participants but as facilitators (which they already are), shifting ownership of both process and outcomes.
2. What if VPB and City staff served as advisors, supporting policy fit and internal coordination, while the community authored the plan?

Such approaches would not erase existing power dynamics, but they could redistribute influence, build trust, and align engagement with the community’s well-established participatory practices.

Ultimately, the coexistence of a VPB-led process and a large community-led petition exposes both inefficiency and potential. Communities with strong organizing capacity, like Vancouver’s skate community, may offer opportunities to blur the boundaries between invited and invented spaces, testing new models where planning processes are genuinely community-driven, and institutions take on a supporting rather than directing role.

Conclusion

The participation methods used for the Vancouver CitySkate Strategy comes from a long history of tension and triumph for skaters and the City in fighting for skateboarding and skate infrastructure in Vancouver. Through the uneven past of participation in skateboarding decision-making, the VPB attempted to engage a more representative group of skaters and wheeled-sport participants in the city (City of Vancouver, 2022, p. 7). While many participation strategies leaned toward informational and consultation methods with the public, such as online surveys, pop-up events, and social media posts, the formation of S.A.G.E. and the youth workshop seemingly attempted to strengthen participation methods and distribute collaboration efforts between the Parks Board and various skate communities.

The VPB (2022) identifies S.A.G.E. as “a committee of representatives from a variety of community organizations that collectively form the heartbeat of skateboarding and small-wheeled sports in Vancouver” (p. 37). S.A.G.E was significant for recognizing the diverse users of skateboarding and wheeled activities in Vancouver and working to distribute collaboration efforts evenly throughout these communities. The S.A.G.E. stakeholder engagement sessions demonstrate how the VPB attempted to strengthen their relationship with skate communities amidst their history of differing views on skate activities and infrastructure. However, it also raises skepticism over how influential this advisory committee was beyond providing feedback on already developed strategies. In other words, while the breadth of communities invited into collaboration spaces was large, the depth of participation with these groups in transforming feedback into action remains unclear. Pursuing public participation in spaces with complex histories, for example between the City and community-led organizing, requires more than merely widening the scope of engagement. Having transparency over decision-making powers and engagement expectations is significant for ensuring effectiveness of participation and achieving just futures for impacted communities.

An additional method of engagement led by the VPB that widens the scope of participation throughout the formation of CitySkate were their youth engagement efforts. This is significant for understanding how deeply skating impacts youth and families. The Strathcona youth workshop in October, 2021 brought young skaters into these engagement spaces and contextualized the importance of skating for the city’s youth and community-building across demographics (City of Vancouver, 2022, p. 10). Importantly, youth participation can be viewed as a success for the strategy in highlighting the ways youth interact with skate amenities in the city and identifying existing barriers to safe, accessible, and equitable skate infrastructure.

The Vancouver CitySkate Strategy also begs the question of how participation methods can push back on misconceptions around skating. Publicly engaging youth skaters through workshops can be viewed as a mechanism by the VPB to address common misconceptions of skateboarding such as how dangerous it is, relation to crime and disruptions, and its gendered associations (City of Vancouver, 2022, pp. 15-16). Demonstrating how youth engage, and want to engage, in skateboarding in ways that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for their physical and mental health rewrites misconceptions around skating that non-skaters or the VPB may possess. Significantly, this engagement method can be viewed as a clever strategy on behalf of the VPB for not only widening their networks with youth and future skate generations, but also as a way of correcting misconceptions around skate activities by showing the usability of skate parks for youth and highlighting its importance for inclusivity and community-building. Thus, seeking successes in participation has the opportunity to extend beyond the legitimacy, effectiveness, or justice served through Fung’s (2006) democracy cube, to address wider systemic (mis)understandings of activities such as skating that have been integral to the city for decades.

References

About Here and Vancouver Park Board. (2022). Why Vancouver changed its mind about skateboards. About Here. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5MJQsPeMIo

Cheung, C. (21 Oct. 2021). How Vancouver Learned to Love Skateboarding. The Tyee. thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/10/21/How-Vancouver-Learned-To-Love-Skateboarding.

City of Vancouver. (January 2022). Skateboard Amenities Strategy – Survey 2 Engagement Summary. https://syc.vancouver.ca/projects/skateboard-amenities-strategy/skateboard-amenities-strategy-engagement-summary.pdf

City of Vancouver. (2025). CITY OF VANCOUVER BRITISH COLUMBIA STREET AND TRAFFIC BY-LAW NO. 2849. bylaws.vancouver.ca/2849c.PDF.

Miraftab, F. (2004). Invited and invented spaces of participation: Neoliberal citizenship and feminists’ expanded notion of politics. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461674032000165913

The Province. (18th October 2006). “Boarders want bowl to stay” The Province.

Vancouver Heritage Foundation. (24 Jan. 2025). “China Creek Bowls Skatepark • Vancouver Heritage Foundation.” Vancouver Heritage Foundation, placesthatmatter.ca/location/china-creek-skatepark-bowls.

Vancouver Skateboard. “About | Vancouver Skateboard Coalition.” Vancouver Skateboard, www.vancouverskateboardcoalition.ca/about.

Willson, T. (2005). Skateboard, In-Line Skate and Push Scooter By-law - Report Back. https://council.vancouver.ca/20050315/a8.htm.

External Links

Notes

This entry was created as an assignment for PLAN 500 by students in the School for Community and Regional Planning.