Urban sports & culture are thriving in Brabant

Urban sports & culture are thriving in Brabant, in the railway zones and beyond. Thanks to a lively urban culture scene on the city streets and the province’s four indoor skateboard parks, including Area 51 in Eindhoven, which is the largest park of its type in the Benelux.

Trial and error: that is how a BMX rider or skateboarder practices loops and other tricks on ramps, half pipes and bowls. So good training locations, preferably easily accessible and with that unorthodox urban atmosphere, are extremely important.

Brabant has a lot to offer in this respect. The World Skate Center in ‘s-Hertogenbosch for example, where skateboarders perch on their boards and dive from a height of about four metres into the bowl of the vert (half pipe).

The World Skate Center has the only really good indoor half pipe in the Netherlands, suitable for European competitions. “People from all over the Benelux come here to train”, says coordinator Jos Sleegers. “Because the park is built from wooden units, it can easily be adapted to suit changing competition requirements. Which explains why training sessions for the Olympic Games are now also held here.”

Railway zones as exciting locations

Urban sports & culture have developed rapidly in recent years in the cities of Brabant, particularly in the railway zones. This is due to a fortunate combination of circumstances to some extent, as the railway zones in Breda, Tilburg, ’s-Hertogenbosch and Eindhoven have undergone spectacular transformations. These changes have resulted in cool and exciting locations, which skateboarders and urban athletes quickly flocked to.

This early invasion by skateboarders attracted other creative people active in design, dance, fashion, media and graffiti. The skateboarders are often also members of a music band or artists. “They act as ‘placemakers’ and attract interesting people to new places, often on the rough fringes of the city”, says Ruth Giebels. “Their arrival makes these areas hip and viable.”

Giebels is a planner working for the Urban Ambition Brabant Core Team. Together with representatives of the Brabant Urban scene (B5UP), BrabantSport, the five cities in the BrabantStad collaboration and the provincial authority of Brabant, she focuses on taking urban sports & culture a step further.

Outstanding skateparks have been created, each with its own specialisation, in and close to the railway zones of the four major cities. For the best vert (half pipe) you go to 's-Hertogenbosch, Area 51 in Eindhoven has the best bowl, Ladybird Skatepark in Tilburg has ‘Park’ as its major speciality and Pier15 in Breda is the place to go for ‘Street’.

Fertile breeding ground

The urban scene is characterised by a strong ‘Do it yourself, but do it together’ mentality. This is reflected by extensive collaboration with all the cultural institutions, grassroots sports associations, youth work and many other parties. Together with partner Univé, BrabantSport set up a school tour that inspired 1,000 children to safely participate in urban sports.

The urban scene is also proving itself to be a rich breeding ground for crossovers and innovations. The Urban Sports Performance Center in Eindhoven develops innovations for both top athletes and recreational users. One of these innovations is a tracking system with sensors, which accurately registers the moves of the skateboarders and BMX riders to allow further analysis and improvements.

Giebels dreams of an international ‘hackathon’ in close collaboration with other parties such as TU Eindhoven and the bio-based business cluster in West Brabant. “Maybe we can invent the urban sports equivalent of the ‘clap skate’ here”, she says, referring to the most important and successful skating innovation of recent years.

Urban hotspot

For Van Eggermond, the point of the exercise is not just sport but also bringing together an entire culture. We all have the same DNA: we are open-minded and pretty unorthodox. We all have the same mission to create urban hotspots that act as a breeding ground and stage for our culture. This is an immensely powerful instrument for professionalising and creating a solid foundation for our scene.”

The skateparks unite sport, events, art and music under one roof and have developed into bustling hotspots. Besides being an indoor skatepark, the World Skate Center in 's-Hertogenbosch is also a stage for pop music and an exhibition space. “We develop all kinds of new initiatives ourselves”, says Sleegers. “So we are also creators of platforms for new talent.”

Municipalities and other institutions understand the value of what we do. For example, there were plans to move Area51 away from Strijp-S to make room for new real estate developments. However, housing association Trudo realised that Strijp-S would become just another soulless and faceless area without the indoor skatepark. The new apartment complex is now being built over the indoor skatepark and has been aptly named Haasje Over, which means leapfrog in Dutch.