{"id":333477,"date":"2025-10-26T08:59:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T08:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/333477\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T08:59:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T08:59:25","slug":"philly-had-the-answer-to-the-manosphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/333477\/","title":{"rendered":"Philly Had the Answer to the Manosphere"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, the New York Times published a piece by Willy Staley<\/a> about a skatepark in Malm\u00f6, Sweden that was built from pieces of Philadelphia\u2019s former LOVE Park.<\/p>\n

\"\"LOVE Park, back in the day. <\/p>\n

Located at the center of Philadelphia\u2019s downtown, Love Park\u2019s granite benches and ledges improbably turned a public space into a skateboarding mecca. But because Philadelphia in the 1990s and early 2000s was trying to jumpstart a downtown rebound, envisioning a city that appealed to white collar workers, the City thwarted skateboarding at every turn, first banning skateboarding and then eventually renovating the park in the mid-2010s. (I highly recommend this photo essay<\/a> about the original LOVE Park\u2019s last days.)<\/p>\n

Now, that same, board-scratched granite \u2014 having reached icon status in the skateosphere \u2014 is serving skaters 4,000 miles away.<\/p>\n

A decade since it was transformed into a boring, graceless, placeless plane,<\/a> it\u2019s been easy to be nostalgic for and romanticize the public space as a grimy grotto. But one thing no one can deny about the old LOVE Park: Young people \u2014 especially young men \u2014 wanted to hang out there.<\/p>\n

Maybe in the past we spent too much time catering to men in our public spaces. But now, as I\u2019ve written about the cult of brightly-painted movable chairs,<\/a> our public spaces are increasingly centered around sitting rather than physical activity, around consumption rather than hanging out \u2014 and around ensuring that the \u201cwrong people\u201d don\u2019t use them. Few of our public spaces seem to be speaking not just to young men \u2014 particularly less affluent and educated young men.<\/p>\n

At the same time, there is now great concern that these men are drifting into the online manosphere, losing their money in online sports betting, watching AI porn, experiencing brainrot. (Maybe an exaggeration of the situation, maybe not.) But for all the Scott Galloway<\/a> podcasts I\u2019ve listened to and Richard V Reeves<\/a> and Aaron M. Renn<\/a> posts I\u2019ve read about the problems of young men, I\u2019ve yet to hear any of them mention urban planning, placemaking, or retail as part of the solution. As if the places where we connect (or don\u2019t) with other human beings play no role in our societal unraveling.<\/p>\n

\"RobertRobert Indiana\u2019s iconic LOVE sculpture, the unofficial namesake of JFK Plaza in Center City, Philadelphia. We <\/b>can<\/b> get young men back outside<\/b> <\/p>\n

For a long time, we\u2019ve been trying to make cities safer and more amenable to women \u2014 and with good reason. Women in cities are more likely to be verbally and physically harassed (or worse). They\u2019re also more likely to navigate the city with children. I\u2019m in agreement that we need policies that make city life easier and better for women.<\/p>\n

But while we may have built cities that work well for men to take transit or walk late at night, it can also be true that we haven\u2019t done a particularly good job of building public spaces for boys and men to build social connections.<\/p>\n

We could be thinking more about how to integrate spaces that are naturally compelling to young men. As Staley writes, Malm\u00f6 has been incorporating skateboarding into the city:<\/p>\n

One minor but fascinating element of Malm\u00f6\u2019s postindustrial turnaround has been an effort to incorporate skateboarding into the fabric of the city. Even more tolerant urban governments in the United States tend to cordon skaters off in parks, sometimes very nice ones, but in southern Sweden, they\u2019ve been trying something different: treating skateboarding like a unique source of vitality rather than a nuisance to be managed.<\/p>\n

For fun, try reading this passage again, but replacing \u201cskateboarding\u201d or \u201cskaters\u201d with \u201cyoung men.\u201d<\/p>\n

What might that look like? Sports certainly seems like an easy entry point. Basketball courts, handball courts, ping pong tables all can be incorporated into cityscapes easily.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Shepherd Project, Detroit, MI. <\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve written,<\/a>\u00a0The Shepherd project in Detroit has a skateboarding park as part of a larger cultural complex that includes an art gallery, hotel, and restaurant.<\/p>\n

\"\"Tom Lee Park in Memphis, TN. <\/p>\n

At Tom Lee Park in Memphis, basketball and pickleball courts are integrated into a 30-acre city park.<\/p>\n

But what I think the Malm\u00f6 example is suggesting is a mentality of embracing \u201cnuisance\u201d as vitality. San Francisco\u2019s U.N. Plaza, which (on point) embraced skateboarding<\/a>, has transformed a desolate expanse into a skateboarding community destination perhaps with this mindset.<\/p>\n

\"\"Skateboarding on granite from the old LOVE Park in Malm\u00f6, Sweden. <\/p>\n

Would simply designing spaces with young men as one of the desired users be enough to change how we build our public spaces?<\/p>\n

Conor Dougherty<\/a>\u2019s piece also notes that catering to a specific group of people has re-inhabited U.N. Plaza:<\/p>\n

What the transformation of U.N. Plaza does show, however, is that attempts at urban revival can go a long way for relatively little money when they attract a natural constituency of users.<\/p>\n

When you think about the most habitually used public spaces these days, many of them are places for dedicated users: the dog park, the playground, the community garden. Those are places that have specifically been built with the needs of dog owners, kids, and gardeners in mind. No shame about that. It also sounds like the hobby economy<\/a> could be useful here.<\/p>\n

We may not need a whole placemaking movement just for young men, but we do need to recognize that we have been creating few spaces that are giving men opportunities to hang out, and that this is one more thing we should be doing if we truly want men to get off their computers and video games and reengage with the real world again. What that looks like in the 2020s, we\u2019ve yet to figure out.<\/p>\n

Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter,\u00a0The New Urban Order.<\/b><\/a>\u00a0Sign up for the newsletter\u00a0here.<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\" MORE FROM THE NEW URBAN ORDER<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, the New York Times published a piece by Willy Staley about a skatepark in Malm\u00f6, Sweden…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":333478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,165320,1448,42755,2830,1311,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-333477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-urban-order","10":"tag-pa","11":"tag-parks-and-recreation","12":"tag-pennsylvania","13":"tag-philadelphia","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-united-states-of-america","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115439650539942148","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}