City Mill Skate: Skateboarding Architecture and Community

City Mill Skate is a proposal for a set of incidental obstacles, or ‘skate dots’, to sit within the fabric of UCL East, a new campus development in East London due to open in 2022. It will form a series of interlinked architectural punctuations, akin to a sculpture trail. This article describes our thinking about the project in which we contrast the totalised and singular environment typically associated with contemporary skatepark design with archoitecctural interventions that are incidental, we use the term ‘skate dots’. Skate dot is a recently coined term that plays on the established label of skate spot and describes an incidental piece of architecture that lends itself to the act of skateboarding. This article describes our methodology: a hands on, participatory design process. We discuss how this approach is essential as this is a local project in which skaters’ active participation is sought alongside professional fabricators of skateable structures.