(in)formal everyday practice, visual design, and the urban landscape

6 Dec. 2017

Reina Imagawa, an MFA student in Media Design Practices at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena presents her ongoing research surrounding (in)formal everyday practice, visual design, and the urban landscape.

“If your city doesn’t have a decent skate park, your city is the skate park” is the mentality behind street skating, an exciting sport that radically transforms a city into a playground. Street skating however is often in confrontation with the spatial politics of the city, encountering tension and pushback in the form of regulations, citations, and even physical barriers such as “skate stoppers”. How could this power dynamic shift, and make room to carefully examine the value of street skating, if we thought of skaters as landscape architects? We’ll explore the different kinds of physical, social and visual landscapes that are produced through humans and skateboards in the built environment." - Reina Imagawa