Stop urban sprawl. Cut carbon emissions. Turn offices into apartments. There’s no shortage of ideas for how today’s architects and city planners might approach making the built environment better. To that ever-growing list of suggestions, I would add an unusually practical one: Pay attention to skateboarders.

If today’s urban planning tool kit is a series of lenses for shaping civic life, then a key skateboarder domain, the public skate park, is a remarkably rare arrangement of those lenses. In it we see crystal clear formations and ease of use: Everything is right where it needs to be, allowing for instinctive navigation, and seamlessly adaptive to a variety of activities. The skate park offers a timeless framework that’s much different than the confusing, shortsighted solutions that seem to prevail in most cities and towns. Generally speaking, skate parks are spaces that work.

What, exactly, do skate parks achieve? What inherent wisdom do they hold? The answers seem self-evident. But—as an avid skatepark user and skateboard business owner who has helped redesign and rebuild Southern California’s La Pintoresca Skatepark, and who has worked for several years with the Los Angeles’s Department of Recreation and Parks and the L.A. mayor’s office to create a range of skate park programming—I think the ways in which a municipality answers those questions reveals a lot of useful information about its relationship with its citizens, and the future that municipality and citizens will likely shape together.

A skate park isn’t only a collection of prefab ramps on an asphalt slab poured to create a profitable outcome for a contractor, or a series of skateable structures carefully integrated throughout a newly redeveloped downtown corridor. Such polar opposite interpretations of public skate architecture represent two among many scenarios, including Bryggeriets Gymnasium, a nonprofit high school in Malmö, Sweden, that uses skateboarding as a tool to teach students about the value of community and collaboration, and Connect, a festival that explores relationships between skate culture and urban planning. The festival’s inaugural event took place in Bordeaux, a city where Leo Valls—one of the world’s leading advocates of skate urbanism—has worked with skateboarders, lawmakers, and government officials to regulate and permit skateboarding citywide.

While the public skate space isn’t made of skate parks alone—streets and plazas offer more freedom and a connection to a place—they are great for building relationships and skills. Skate parks are sites where you’ll find people, as described by Olympic skateboarder turned architect Alexis Sablone at last year’s The World Around summit, who are more tuned in than they have historically been given credit for. “Skaters have cared more about the urban landscape than most people could ever imagine,” she said, adding that her designs stem from the notion that “love for a city forms when a person has agency, when a city becomes playable.”

There is overwhelming evidence of the benefits for people and communities who build and use skate parks. Studies have detailed numerous benefits for physical health, mental health and social bonding, and have earned nationwide approval and support of skate parks by police departments. These and other empirical and anecdotal truths make it clear: public skate spaces deliver much of what society needs right now.

Contrary to popular belief, before surfers got a hold of it, skateboarding was a spontaneous cultural phenomenon that occurred across the United States in cities where pavement was increasingly prevalent and kids were being left with less space to play. The crate scooters—formed by a wooden box with a roller skate attached to the bottom—that eventually evolved into skateboards date back to at least the late 1800s.

If skateboarding is from anywhere, it’s from cities where kids with no voice pushed back against a system that was erasing their play spaces or replacing them with poorly designed ones. If skateboarding is anything, it’s the product of kids who repurposed widowed footwear into crude instruments that transformed the banality of endless pavement into a canvas for open-ended exploration. Skateboarding is a rose sprouted from the concrete of the modern city, tended to by people guided by the human psyche at its purest: children.

It takes an exceptional municipality to cultivate that rose. In most instances, when a municipality decides to build a skatepark, it gets copious input from skateboarders and  involves them in the design process. But the municipality still handles all of the operational grunt work: filing forms, performing inspections, collecting documentation, and on and on. When a skate park gets made, it’s almost as if the municipality becomes a parent who draws from both Montessori and Waldorf schools of thought: How can I set the stage for your personal development without letting my ideas about what’s best for you get in the way?

In other words, the government basically opens up shop and lets a group of very othered people take the controls to produce an idealized environment of bizarre structures that are almost entirely illegible to the people funding them. It’s youth at the helm regardless of how old the skateboarders are, and their instincts are worth noting in the quest to get more humanity out of the world we have paved for ourselves.

After all, the foundation for a given locale’s fate is a lot like the foundation of skateboarding itself: what you do right matters less than what you do wrong. Which right way you choose is not so significant when it comes to supporting and improving a place, but choosing the wrong way can be catastrophic.

Public institutions that embrace skateboarding are willing to learn from and let go of the past, and to do the delicate dance of getting civic organizations that have only moved along the rigid grids of bureaucracy to embrace a functional, flexible, undulating future. Let them be a model for all urban planning to come.