City Re-Write

 Hi! Helloo, (that was on purpose) welcome to the final AP from STEAM in my junior year.  This year has been a whirlwind of new worries, troubles, excitement and boredom. Specifically in STEAM equations have been the hardest and work projects (making things) have been the best. In my current AP I have both to do. As the class name suggests, (Urban Planning) I will be planning a new area in my neighborhood. Because there are many open lots around me, I chose these two lots next to each other to put a skate park. 

Satellite Screenshot, CDH, 2021

When looking in Google Maps with satellite mode you see they are in a good location, being near a bus stop, school, small business, and train stop a few blocks away. As I got into skating this year, I realized there are many people who skate, many people who would want to learn and few places to do so. When I was explaining this to my mother, an active member of the community and community outreach, she said it would be a great idea. I asked for a quote to which she said "I think our community needs a skate park so that kids have something to do in the community in the summer. We need to be able to teach kids skateboarding to learn a new skill and make more friends." 

The next step was to find a good layout. I looked at many examples online as well as the way Grant Skate Park is laid out with many lines of traffic, places for more or less experienced skaters, and places to set your stuff down while you skate. The other place I looked at was SMP skate park in Shanghai, the largest bowl park in the world with its crazy ramps and bowls shaped in every direction. When doing so I drew and modeled but I then realized that scale is important so I had to change and add a few things when doing a more real layout with a dot representing a human's size. It went from this:

Layout Model, CDH, 2021

An architectural model hand crafted and designed by yours truly and glued by a friend of mine KH. It was made with my original idea in mind before thinking about scale. Because of that lack of proper scale, it was next to impossible to fit a piece of paper to represent a ramp in the two bowls on the left side of the image. 

To this:

Proposed Skate Park, CDH, 2021

It took a few hours but myself and ALL, another friend of mine, put this together. We tried to scale as best as possible but could maybe use some tweaking. As you can see, the tan is the base floor on sidewalk level, the gray would be rails and flat spaces, the blueish purple + grey show for ramps, and the green shows where planters would be placed to make the area less barren. In specific places (behind ramps on the side of the bars and even if painted, on the ramps) there would be room for art to be displayed to again add to the feel of the park. The whole park is about 4,056sqft. The planters would have a 4ft diameter and 3ft high (37.7 ft^3) and the bars would be roughly be 12ft x 4ft and 16in  and 5in high
(B1: 62.4ft^3 B2: 20ft^3). 

In the case of the SDGs, it goes without saying that a skate park would be perfect for targeting SDG 11 in that it is an open place for people to come and share common interests whether it be biking, skating or (scooting?) riding a scooter. That would be to speak to 11.7, "By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities", and 11.3, "By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries." 

I think seeing as how a serious career goal of mine may be architecture, I loved thinking about how to structure the area and also working on modeling the place in a semi professional manner and being able to meet several people currently in architecture school to get first hand thoughts, opinions, and experiences from them. Overall this project was an amazing experience with a major time crunch to overcome but I had fun. I hope to work on similar things in the future and look forward to my last year in high school.

-CDH

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