Philadelphia To Sweden: Gustav Edén on Love (Park) Malmö

Images courtesy of gustav eden.

In early 2016, Philadelphia’s iconic plaza, Love Park, was remodeled to a flat walkway with a few trees and some grass, all intended to stop people from skateboarding there.

In March of this year, eight years later, photos of the ledge section from the plaza being reconstructed with the original tiles surfaced, with the Instagram account tagged being @love.malmo. The recreation wasn’t even in the States, let alone Philadelphia, but instead it was in Malmö, Sweden.

After seeing the initial Instagram posts my immediate response was, ‘of course they did this in Malmö’. Over the last fifteen years, the small Swedish city has become a skateboarding utopia, from their perfect spots, great skateparks, incredible scene, and even a skateboarding high school, Bryggeriet. My subsequent thoughts were, ‘How did they do this? Where do you even start on a project like this?’. I wanted to know more, so I reached out to Gustav Edén, a skateboarder who works for the City of Malmö and is at the helm of its creation to have a talk about how the project came to fruition.

I think the best way to start this is by talking about what you do at the City of Malmö. So, what is your role?

I am the project manager for Skate Malmö. I'm a council officer, but my role stems from an events role. Essentially the City of Malmö and Bryggeriet, the local skate organisation, started producing big skate events and a skatepark in 2006. Those events were produced annually and that sort of led to a role within the city as an event coordinator. I was hired to take over the role as the events producer. Since then, I have evolved that role to be more than just the events but to also use those events to generate value for the city, in partnership with the skateboarding organisation. That means that we’ve introduced a legacy strategy so that whenever we do an event somewhere, we always want to leave something behind. We’ve used that to develop street spots to evolve the opportunities for street skating in Malmö. If we hold an event, we will instead of buying wooden ramps you bring in granite blocks and you find an agreement with the city to keep those blocks for a set amount of time. The strategy is in place to help Malmö grow as a skate city.

That is really cool. How did it come up to do the Love Malmö idea, recreating part of Love Park in Sweden?

I'm a skateboarder myself and growing up Embarcadero was the centre of the world. Then when Eastern exposure dropped there was a huge cultural shift where the skateboarding world became interested in the east coast and in particular Philadelphia. The main stage for this new cultural wave in skateboarding was Love Park. Love Park then became a dream spot for everybody. It was on top of everyone’s bucket list to visit Philadelphia.

When I saw that LOVE Park was being redeveloped and demolished, I was working for the City of Malmö, and I have that experience working as a bridge between the skateboarding community and the city. I knew how to translate the value of the skateboarding culture to the city and what the city needs to do for the skateboarders. So, I thought that I'm kind of in a unique position to perhaps do something here, and I spoke to Chris Mulhern in Philadelphia. Then I called the switchboard of the city because I had heard that the skateboarders managed to salvage the material. When I called the city, I was put through to this Community Development Officer called Bob Allen. He was just super nice and really friendly. Essentially, he was like ‘Oh, yeah this sounds like a lovely project. We'd be happy to guide you.’. Then, I got in touch with the city and the material had been given to SkatePhilly, the skate organization there but any plans of doing a reconstruction of Love Park looked like it was very far away.

We were obviously keen to reintroduce Love Park in Malmö, but that's not the main point. The main point for us is that this is cultural heritage and we wanted to show that this is worth bringing back to the world, not just as to bring the skate spot back, but also to communicate the cultural significance of the Philadelphia skate scene. So, the project is mainly a homage to the Philadelphia skaters to be like, what you created at Love has had resonance all around the world. We're on the other side of the world, but we want to celebrate that. We also want to show cities around the world that skateboarding can add value to cities and urban life, and you don't have to separate it by building skateparks away from the city centre. In the right conditions, you can let skateboarding come in and be a driver for culture and in your city.

Did you talk to many people in the Philadelphia scene about how they felt about you guys rebuilding the Love in Malmö?

Yeah, I got in touch with Brian Panebianco from the Sabotage crew and Josh Nims for SkatePhilly. I really wanted to talk to them, and ask if we were overreaching, if this was a cheesy project, or if we were claiming Philadelphia's material, because that's the last thing we want to do. We wanted to highlight the sort of cultural heritage of Love Park. We have no claims to Love Park, we want to facilitate not claim so that dialogue was really important to me. They were happy with it all. The idea was that we would take some of the material, there's much more left to do like a kind of a symbolic section of Love Park and hopefully, that project could also be you know, the proof of concept that potentially somewhere in the world, a full Love Park reconstruction will one day happen.

When did you first get in contact with the City of Philadelphia?

It was in 2016 and we had the tiles in Malmö in 2017.

What was the importance of you having the original tiles from Love?

The point of this is having the real material that was used at Love and have an interactive monument to the skaters. You participate in the Love Park monument by skating it, not by looking at a statue of the architect.

What did the city think when you told them that you wanted to buy the tiles?

The leadership within the city were very much in support of the project.  They thought it was a fantastic idea to show how Malmö is supporting the value of skate culture and bringing something of cultural relevance back. I had strong support, unfortunately, one of the reasons it's taken so long to make it happen is that we've gone through three reorganisations in the city, since we got the material. Just a bunch of things happened which pushed the whole Love Malmö project to the side.

How was it finding a space for the project? I saw a walk through you posted on Instagram recently and it is right in the middle of the city super close to the Svampen ledges.

For this project the site needs to be right in the heart of the city. Love Park was in the middle of Philadelphia, it was where you come out of the trains, the central parking garage, the subway, the bus lines all converge at Love. It was surrounded by other spots like City Hall, Muni, and the Penn centre. So, it was really important to us to place Love where there are other spots to skate around it. It was really hard to find but the spot we’ve got now is perfect, it is right at the heart of Malmö’s skate history. It is right where Bryggeriet started, it’s close to Svampen ledges and right by the church where everyone skated in the 90s.

You are only recreating a small part of Love. How did you decide on the part you were going to create?

The material we had kind of dictated what we could do. We had essentially the square flat, the larger slabs, the ones that you tilt, the smaller slabs and ledges, so it was essentially going to be a ledge section. None of the ledges that we had, had been skated before either, they were from the outer walls. We didn’t want to claim any of the blocks skated before. We wouldn't want to claim Centre Block, or anything like that because that feels like it belongs to the Philly skaters or even in a museum.  

For sure. What is it like living in Malmö, having a city that is so supportive and encouraging of creating as many public spaces for skateboarding as they can?

It wasn't always like this, you know. The story of Malmö is one of how you build something that is not there. From the DIY crew with Pontus [Alv] to Bryggeriet getting organised and through that building the skateparks, then starting the skate high school and doing the events. It has all evolved. What's it like to live here? It's honestly great. It's a small town, but there's this really strong, quite large skateboarding community.

The skaters that are the most driven in the scene are people that move here from other places because they’re used to not having anything and working for it. They also know that if you’re in Malmö and have ideas you can realise them.

We’ve made it this way and that’s cool. What Malmö has is it has a strong community and a lot of people working with skateboarding. I think it is a mistake to think of Malmö as the spots we have, the point is we have the skate organisation Bryggeriet and all these individuals who have contributed to the scene and had ideas which have been realised. All those things combined become the Malmö skate scene and I hope that living in Malmö as a skater is more than just an opportunity than skating the skate spaces and hanging out but also having a way to contribute to the skate scene.

To wrap this up, if you had any advice that you think that cities around the world should take from Malmö’s approach to skateboarding, what would it be?

They need to understand that the skateboarders know skateboarding, and that you need to trust them. Cities have to understand what they don't understand. You can't hire someone who's not a skateboarder to build the skatepark, because you're going to get robbed. It is the same thing when it comes to producing the events, you can't don't hire someone outside of the community thinking that they're going to do better, work from within the community and help it grow.

One mistake a lot of cities make is that they focus on the physical skatepark. Skateparks are great because they can start scenes, but they can also end them. Once a community struggles to get a skatepark, and they have it built then there's nothing else to fight for them, they skate, they get bored with the park just being the same every day, they quit and then that's the end of a generation of skaters.

Whereas, what I would say to councils is to yes, work with the physical spaces, but also have a strategy to work with the community. How are you going to activate the skate park? How are you going to change the skatepark? How are you going to work with integrating skateboarding in the city? How are you going to help the skate organisation, be more inclusive to different user groups? Think of the community and the people as what you're trying to build, as opposed to getting rid of the community by giving them a skatepark.