Canada’s chillest university just installed a skatepark, brah

skatepark

Residents of Vancouver, are you ready to “get radical”? University of British Columbia administrators certainly hope so. UBC opened the first campus-located skatepark in North America last week and hopes the city’s legions of skateboarders “and other action sport enthusiasts” will flock to the new space.

The park boasts many presumably typical skatepark features, among them a cantilevered quarterpipe and stairwell with handrail and the more ridiculously named “open snake-run bowl” and “angled slappy bank.” All skateboarders smoke weed, right? How do names like this exist otherwise?

In a bid to remind people the park is at least nominally tied to a place of learning, the defining feature is a “stack of large books made of concrete and steel, which riders can shred, grind and jump off and onto.” Not as subtle as some might have gone, but they’re trying. University administrators are generally less “radical” than the skateboarders they’re now desperately courting, so any effort is to be commended.

According to the university’s press release, the book stack (which is one-of-a-kind!) “reflects UBC’s academic environment and is engraved with a fitting quote: ‘One must work and dare if one really wants to live,’ from Vincent Van Gogh.”

If there’s anything skateboarding youth are motivated by, it’s hamfisted attempts to shoehorn academia and inspirational quotes into their once-rebellious activities.

Still, spending $500,000 on a skatepark is better than cutting the arts faculty’s graduate budget by 20 per cent, which the University of Alberta will do for the 2013-14 year. With budget cuts and austerity measures rampant across Canadian universities, it’s nice to see an administration doing something with students in mind.

University of British Columbia