In 1990, a group of skaters started pouring concrete under the east end of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon. They had no permission, no permits, and no funding. They had bags of cement, scavenged rebar, and a refusal to wait for the city to provide what they wanted. Three decades later, Burnside is one of the most famous skateparks in the world and a template for a movement that now spans every continent.
DIY skateparks are a story about urban autonomy, craft, and what people build when institutions don’t. The aesthetic is rough, the engineering is sometimes self-taught, and the result is consistently more loved by skaters than the contracted parks that come later.
Burnside set the legal and cultural template
Burnside survived because the skaters who built it kept building, kept skating, and kept the area more useful and less crime-ridden than the empty lot it replaced. The city of Portland, faced with a fait accompli that had also become a community asset, eventually granted retroactive recognition rather than demolition. That pattern — build first, defend through use, negotiate later — has become the unofficial DIY playbook. The legal status of these parks is usually murky for years. They sit on city land, railroad easements, abandoned industrial sites, or under highway overpasses that nobody is paying close attention to. Visibility comes slowly enough that, by the time officials notice, removal would mean removing something the neighborhood has already absorbed.
FDR and the second wave
Philadelphia’s FDR Skatepark, built starting in the mid-1990s under I-95, took the Burnside template and pushed it further. The city had built a small concrete pad as a sop to skaters displaced from LOVE Park; skaters extended it, added bowls, ledges, and quarterpipes, and over years transformed a token gesture into a sprawling park that the city did not fund and largely does not maintain. FDR is famously rough — patches of bad pour, exposed rebar, sections built by less experienced hands — but the rough parts are part of the identity. The park is a record of who showed up with a mixer and a vision on what weekend, and skaters read it like a layered text.
The movement went global and stayed local
DIY parks now exist from São Paulo to Glasgow to Yangon, and the local versions reflect their cities. Some are tolerated, some are shut down repeatedly, some have been adopted into formal parks systems. What stays consistent is the labor model: a small core of dedicated builders, donations of cement and tools, weekend pours that pull in dozens of volunteers, and an ethic of fixing what gets broken without asking permission. The parks that endure are the ones with that core. The ones that fade are the ones that got built fast and lost their builders.
The bottom line
DIY skateparks are infrastructure made by users, on land they didn’t own, for a sport that institutions have always misunderstood. They work because the people who build them keep showing up. That’s not a metaphor. It’s how cities have always actually been made, just usually by other people.
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