Skate Spot Porn: Copenhagen, Denmark

“Four skate spots and one skatepark all on the same street — I can’t tell which is the skatepark.”

By the third or fourth day, Copenhagen begins to feel like a colossal joke. Coming from the classic American “if you get hurt, you’re gonna sue us”-disposition, almost every spot is met with a “What the hell were they thinking when they made this?” You don’t get kicked out much*, and the general public seems way too concerned with enjoying their chill lives to tell you you’re ruining some slab of stone. On top of everything, there’s a canal full of swimmable, clean water dividing the city — sorta like if the Hudson was unpolluted and safe enough for a swim after you got done with a summer session on the Westside Highway. There are a thousand beautiful girls riding by on bikes, and even the pizza is mysteriously better than you ever thought Danish pizza had the ability to be. It’s an expensive playground for adults, but not in a hookers/drugs/”tonight we’re getting fucked up“-kind of way.

[*In the two weeks I spent there last summer, we got kicked out once by a knife-wielding hash dealer who said we were scaring off his customers. He promised to kill us if we stayed at the spot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Better safe than sorry?]

Jarmers is the Tompkins of Copenhagen. It contains two highish ledges, good-yet-razortail-inducing flatground, and a nice ledge for sitting, drinking beers and watching hours go by, not unlike some green benches we have quite an affinity for. If you watch the Skate Europe episode above, you’ll see a snapshot of the attitude that has allowed Copenhagen to become one of the most skate-friendly cities in Europe: “They cleaned the ledges every week…every week we’d have to re-wax them. We actually met the architect [who built the plaza.] In the beginning, he was almost crying, ‘You’re ruining my plaza.’ We [told him], ‘Nobody is using the plaza besides us, you should be happy.’ [He says] ‘Maybe you’re right,’ and I think after that, they stopped cleaning [the ledges.]” Now, there are even cheesy lil’ ads on the screens at Jarmers depicting some of the locals who skate there. It is worth noting that all of this takes place adjacent to a financial building at a major crossroad of the city, and not in some tucked away outskirt.

Also in that episode, which was created in 2010, they mention how there are two spots in the city: Jarmers and this Venice-esque path alongside the beach with a long concrete ledge. Quite a lot seems to have happened since then.

Copenhagen has undergone a bout of urban renewal this past half decade. This is well-documented in the design community, as the city has become somewhat of an international poster child for forward-thinking public space. Unlike American public parks, which are built with a crippling fear of lawsuits in mind, the people designing these plazas have acknowledged how easy it is to adapt skate-friendly obstacles into any corner of their creations. Every new park is multi-use; nothing is simply a playground, a basketball court or a skate plaza. If the space is there, why limit it? Basketball courts thus become surrounded by banks, and playgrounds bordered with ledges. Nothing is built merely to be sat on and left alone after lunch-hour.

It would seem that for a Danish architect, there’s nothing sadder than an underutilized space (it helps that their other mantra is basically “fuck cars”) — and they figured out who exactly has spent more time in ledge and incline-lined spaces than anyone else these past twenty years. Some of the older Jarmers locals even said that they were approached to be consultants when several of these parks were being planned. The city is so welcoming for your skateboard that it begins to feel like the bizzaro world. “Why is no one yelling at me?”

These places are consistently being built. I spent a week here in mid-June 2014, and returned for a week in late-July. The spot above, Israel’s Square, opened up that time, only reiterating the city’s absurd level of adherence to common sense when designing a modern public space. Imagine if Washington Square had a three-foot-deep pool (the article describes it as a mini skatepark for “younger children”…it may be better described as a dreamland for people who suck at transition), and a neighboring set of stadium ledges that the parks department didn’t mind you waxing. You’ll start to get the picture.

Copenhagen isn’t cheap. A bottle of water will run you the equivalent of $4 and a coffee could get up to $8. And you’re dropping cash if you go out drinking one night. It’s not a city like Barcelona where you can get by living in some flophouse, handing out rave flyers one day a week to make a bit of money. Everyone here has their shit together, so it’s far from an ideal brokeboy skater getaway. It is, however, a place unlike anywhere else, where you can spend a week skating incredible spots without ever having to get into a car or a train. Put it on your bucketlist.

We’ll leave you with this square flatbar into rubber:

Past QS Travelouges: San Juan, Tempelhof, Shenzhen, Barcelona