From Baghdad to Bangalore, these designers are building many cities’ first skateparks

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When he was 17 years old, Arne Hillerns moved from his small village in Northern Germany to spend a year in Wausau, Wisconsin. For a brief period of time, he felt like the foreign exchange high school student that he was: “People look at you [and think,] ‘Who’s that kid?‘“ he recalls. Just a year prior, Hillerns had discovered skateboarding, and the skate scene in Wisconsin was buzzing. Within three days or so, he had found a community of skateboarders. “Skating made me so much more open in my personality and gave me confidence,” he says. “It was a very easy entry to this new world for me.”

Fast-forward 25 years, and Hillerns’s passion for skateboarding has spread across almost every continent. Hillerns is now the founder of an NGO called Make Life Skate Life, which works to make skating accessible to underserved youth all over the world. Over the past decade, his team has designed and built more than a dozen skateparks in countries including Laos, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Brazil, and Morocco.

[Photo: courtesy Make Life Skate Life]

Earlier this month, they completed the first-ever skate park in Baghdad, Iraq. Five years in the making—the longest it’s ever taken them to build one—Baghdad Skatepark features a variety of ramps and obstacles tailored to people of all skill levels. One ramp was even designed to look like a magic carpet (which locals are yet to paint) as a nod to the 2019 Disney movie, Aladdin, which is set in a city based on Baghdad. (Even Disney’s 1992 animated Aladdin was initially to take place in Baghdad, but for the First Gulf War, which broke out in 1991.)

[Photo: courtesy Make Life Skate Life]

“We like to have local elements that represent the culture or the country,” Hillerns tells me. In Taghazout, a coastal city in the south of Morocco, they incorporated a quintessentially Moroccan arched door. In Inukjuak, an Inuit community in Northern Quebec, they built a structure resembling an igloo.

Hillerns founded Make Life Skate Life in 2013, but the seeds for the NGO were sown a year prior. By then, Hillerns had returned to Germany, where he’d spent five years “looking up how to mix concrete” and ultimately transforming a post-industrial site in Hanover into what became one of Europe’s biggest DIY skateparks.

In 2012, he set off for India in an attempt to share his learnings—and try to replicate the community he had built. “Not everyone has the possibility of skating in front of their house,” he says. “For me, it comes down to having a space to skate.”

Bangalore [Photo: courtesy Make Life Skate Life]

After crisscrossing the country looking for skateboarders, Hillerns and the two friends he was traveling with finally came across a group in Bangalore who had found a patch of land but didn’t know how to turn it into a skatepark. With Hillerns’s help—and funding from Levi’s Skateboarding—India’s first free skatepark was born. (Due to legal issues in the residential area where it was built, the skatepark shuttered a year after it opened, but Holystoked, the local group, has since constructed more than 20 skateparks in the country.)

After that first build in Bangalore, Hillerns founded Make Life Skate Life, and projects grew organically in places like La Paz, Bolivia, where the team built the city’s first skatepark and Amman, Jordan. Hillerns says there is no set formula for the way each skatepark evolves, but the action plan is usually the same: find a skating community, find funds, find land.

[Photo: courtesy Make Life Skate Life]

An eager community is the easiest to find. (Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, for example, has a thriving skate scene and it is where Hillerns hopes to go next.) Funds often come from a combination of crowdfunding, corporate sponsorships, and help from local embassies. In the case of Baghdad, the park was financed with the help of the German and French Embassies, as well as a local NGO that did a round of fundraising a few years ago. But the original idea for the park never materialized because they couldn’t find land. Which brings us to the land problem.

[Photo: courtesy Make Life Skate Life]

A typical skatepark is only as big as two-to-four tennis courts, but that much land isn’t always easy to find, especially in parts of the city that are easy to access. Some years ago, the team struggled to find such spot in Laos, but ended up making an arrangement with a private individual who agreed to let them build a skatepark on his own land and open it to the public. They also tried building a skatepark in Kathmandu, Nepal, but the project fell through because, again, they couldn’t find land.

In Baghdad, the team’s search could’ve been met with the same fate, but Hillerns says they refused to give up. In 2018, Make Life Skate Life built Iraq’s first skatepark in Sulaymaniyah, 165 miles north of Baghdad. Suli Skatepark was such a success that kids living in Baghdad spent six hours on a bus just to go skate there. This motivated Hillerns and the team them to keep looking.

[Photo: courtesy Make Life Skate Life]

Hillerns blames expensive land and corruption for delaying the process. Eventually, the team managed to secure a patch of land on the Ministry of Youth and Sports complex near Al-Shaab International Stadium. The city required security guards on site to ensure that nobody “misinterpreted” the skatepark for something else; but it is well-located, and in a city where so-called third places are virtually nonexistent. It’s a place that Iraqi kids can make their own.

Now, Baghdad’s first skatepark has made international headlines, and Hillerns is hopeful it will help change the way Baghdad is portrayed in the media. He dreams of a world where, much like foodies travel to eat, and cyclists travel to bike, skaters would travel to skate. “You wouldn’t think of Baghdad as a tourist destination, but it’s very easy to get into the country and it’s a city like every other city,” he says.

A skating pilgrimage to Baghdad would’ve been unthinkable even a month ago. Now, it’s a distinct possibility.

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