An urban beach, or urbeach,
is defined as a space that includes an intellectually, artistically, or culturally sophisticated water feature

Fountain

A fountain is a piece of architecture which pours water into a basin or jets it into the air either to supply drinking water or for decorative or dramatic effect....

 that is also an aquatic play

Aquatic play

Aquatic play is play activity involving water. Aquatic play facilities are commonly installed in neighbourhoods, in the form of splash pads, "spraygrounds", urban beaches, or other aquatic play equipment such as hydraulophones.-Splash pads and spraygrounds:...

 area, and is located within a culturally or artistically significant area of a city

City

A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...

. In this sense, urbeaches differ from the splash pad

Splash pad

A splash pad is an area for water play that has no standing water. This is said to eliminate the need for lifeguards or other supervision, as there is practically no risk of drowning. Splash pads have been around in the commercial industry for decades....

s and "spraygrounds" that are also found in city centers, in the sense that the urbeach aquatic play area is designed to appeal to people of all ages, not just to children. In this sense, the urbeach has taken on a social function similar to the village well, pump, or the social dynamics of the watercooler. Typically urbeaches are important architectural landmarks that run 24 hours per day, for most or all of the year, not merely playground

Playground

A playground or play area is a place with a specific design for children be able to play there. It may be indoors but is typically outdoors...

s that run only during the day.

Many cities include more than one urbeach. For example, Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

 has four urbeaches: a rooftop urbeach on the roof of the Existential Technology Research Center (ETRC); Dundas Square

Dundas Square

Yonge-Dundas Square is a commercial junction and public square, situated at the southeast corner of the intersection of Yonge Street and Dundas Street East in Downtown Toronto...

; The Teluscape Hydraulophone

Hydraulophone

A hydraulophone is a tonal acoustic musical instrument played by direct physical contact with water where sound is generated or affected hydraulically. Typically sound is produced by the same hydraulic fluid in contact with the player's fingers...

 facility and water maze; and, most recently, the HTO project.

Urbeaches may include sand, but many do not include sand, since urbeaches are often in civic spaces where large numbers of people pass through or where sand would otherwise cause problems. Urbeaches may be used for beach

Beach

A beach is a geological landform along the shoreline of an ocean, sea, lake or river. It usually consists of loose particles which are often composed of rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles or cobblestones...

-like activities in a city space that would not usually allow for those activities. Urbeaches need not be built close to a natural body of water but almost always consist of some water feature that is suitable for aquatic play as at least one of its uses.

Differently from a waterpark where people go mainly for aquatic play, an urban beach is a multi-use space where people can engange in several activities such as sunbathing, relaxation, reading, aquatic play (to swim or to frolic in a water feature), walking, or jogging. An urban beach is a playful and relaxing place in the inner city where people can wear beach attire and splash around without being in violation of the laws and standards of appropriateness that otherwise may exist within the formal downtown setting.

Origins

Perhaps the first large urban beach was created in North Adams, Massachusetts

North Adams, Massachusetts

North Adams is a city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 13,708 as of the 2010 census, making it the least populous city in the state...

 by artist Eric Rudd. In July 1999, 250,000 pounds of sand were brought in to a narrow historic street, curb to curb, for the entire block for the first Eagle Street Beach event. Hundreds of families came out to make sand sculptures, and prizes were handed out. Many regional newspapers wrote about the event. This one-day urban beach event has continued for ten years and is an annual event in the city of North Adams.

An important seminal work in urbeach culture was that of William Masie, associate professor of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...

, who created an exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 PS1 space, entitled "Playa Urbana", which explored the sensuality of "surf" and "surface". Masie's work builds upon a tradition at MoMA's PS1 space of challenging the traditional boundary between the formalism of a gallery/museum and the playfulness of a beachlike space in the museum in which shirts and shoes are not required.

The central element of the project is a group of three shallow reflecting and wading pools made of foam covered by plastic with a phosphorescent sheen....When unoccupied, the surface of the still water reflects the light and color of the sky, uniting the natural and urban landscapes....Walls made of evenly spaced PVC tubing undulate throughout the courtyard in shapes that echo waves, providing shade. In the smaller courtyard is an enclosure in which visitors can shower.

MoMA is largely responsible for the introduction of the concept of blending beach culture with formal "high culture" by introducing a number of courtyard exhibits in 2000, 2001, and 2002, of which Masie's work is one example.

An important philosophical dimension of the urban beach is to challenge the pre-conceived notion that formal civic life/work and play should be separated. Whereas traditionally playgrounds are relegated to areas apart from the more formal cultural, civic, and business core of a city, urbeaches like Playa Urbana, Dundas Square, and Teluscape break down this boundary by thrusting aquatic play right into the epicenter of formal civic life.

Sustainable development

The use of silicon instead of sand was explored as an artistic design element and architectural concept in which an urban beach has recently been reported in the literature, in which flexible photovoltaic roof membranes provide electricity from building "skin". Since silicon

Silicon

Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. A tetravalent metalloid, it is less reactive than its chemical analog carbon, the nonmetal directly above it in the periodic table, but more reactive than germanium, the metalloid directly below it in the table...

 and sand are related, silicon provides the clean grit-free medium for the beach surface.

Design

Some urban beaches consist of an area of beach sand and beach furniture

Beach furniture

Beach furniture is furniture designed for use with or in an urban beach or natural beach.-Standard beach furniture:Typically beach furniture is made of plastic, concrete, or of stainless steel....

 with a park and grass area adjacent to them in order to recreate a beachlike environment similar to a natural beach.

However, many urbeaches are instead surfaced in specially textured and easy-to-clean granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

, crumb rubber

Crumb rubber

Crumb rubber is a term usually applied to recycled rubber from automotive and truck scrap tires. During the recycling process steel and fluff is removed leaving tire rubber with a granular consistency. Continued processing with a granulator and/or cracker mill, possibly with the aid of cryogenics...

, or other materials that provide a clean grit-free and grime-free alternative to beach sand. Therefore they can be used without necessarily needing to clean oneself afterwards. These "clean" (sand-free) urban beaches can be enjoyed spontaneously for a few minutes, unlike natural beaches or oceans, lakes, pools and waterparks that usually involve planning a day trip. For example, a trip to an urban beach might be as short as a minute or two when people run through the sprinklers to cool off, and then proceed on to another activity. Urbeaches have the unique attribute of facilitating visits as short as a minute or two as people walk through the space as they take a short-cut through a part of a city. Because urbeaches are often located in a civic center or as part of the main entrance to a building, many see continuous traffic. For example, the main architectural centerpiece of the Teluscape urban beach is an aquatic play feature that is located right in the center of the main walkway leading into one of Canada's landmark architecture sites, the Ontario Science Centre

Ontario Science Centre

Ontario Science Centre is a science museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, near the Don Valley Parkway about northeast of downtown on Don Mills Road just south of Eglinton Avenue East...

. Because of the high foot traffic right through the center of this urban beach, the introduction of sand is not practical.

Urban beaches provide an urban oasis that is often incorporated directly into what is known colloquially as the city's "concrete jungle". Urbeaches afford places to relax, contemplate and congregate. Ideally they are located within walking distance of workplaces, so that users can spend their lunch hour there to enjoy a break from the city. Typically water features also create white noise

White noise

White noise is a random signal with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency...

 that masks the sounds of traffic

Roadway noise

Roadway noise is the collective sound energy emanating from motor vehicles. In the USA it contributes more to environmental noise exposure than any other noise source, and is constituted chiefly of engine, tire, aerodynamic and braking elements...

 and other city noises.

Urbeaches can also have spray features such as fine mist, which are designed to be moderate enough for young children to play in. Other urban beaches have more vigorous splash fountains designed for older children and adults, e.g. for joggers or concert goers to cool off. The splash fountain in Toronto's city center, Dundas Square, features 600 spray nozzles that shoot water straight up through stainless steel grilles set right in the middle of the main walkway. The nozzles rise and fall in unison, like the waves on a beach, so there are times when the water level is low enough for children to also play in the water. The heights of all the fountains rise and fall in unison, in a sinusoidally time varying manner, so that users can wait for the fountains to reach a desired height before passing through them.

The Dundas Square fountains are maintained to a high quality of cleanliness ("pool water or better" standards, according to the maintainers of the facility) because, unlike most city center fountains, these were designed for waterplay, in addition to their excellent architectural beauty and effect (soothing city noise-masking). Special nonslip granite slabs were installed to ensure the safety of children and adults alike who splash in the water.

Controversy

Urbeach culture often challenges the formalism of the city, and the traditional "separation of work and play" ideal (i.e. that work/business areas and playground/waterplay areas should be separated). One common concern is that people in beach attire (i.e. people in swimsuits or their underwear) might not be in keeping with the implicit formal dress code of the urban space in which the urbeach is located. However, current trends are toward making the city fun, rather than formal. In the past, there has also been a common belief that architectural landmark fountains are to be seen but not played in. Dundas Square, for example, underwent an adjustment period in which the security staff thought that the fountains were only decorative and thus kept people from playing in them, when in fact the space was originally designed and envisioned by Brown and Storey Architects and artist Dan Euser

Dan Euser

Dan Euser is a Canadian artist, sculptor, designer, and landscape architect specializing in water features. His works include various dynamic water sculptures for landmark architectural installations.-Most famous works of art:...

 as an urbeach.

Recently, amid plans to upgrade the fountain in Washington Square Park, City Councilmember Alan Gerson threatened to withdraw $16 million dollars in funding if any restrictions were made that would prohibit people from continuing the age-old tradition of playing in the fountain, or if any changes were made to the fountain that would make it less desirable, safe, or suitable to play in.

Surveillance

Natural beaches provide some measure of privacy in the sense that, although crowded, an individual bather (sunbather or person swimming or frolicking in the water) is afforded some form of symmetrical privacy in the sense that most of the others present are also bathers. The culture at natural beaches tends to have a negative view of both surveillance and sousveillance (i.e. those who come only to watch or take pictures).

Video surveillance on natural beaches has been a controversial topic, as natural beaches have often offered some seclusion and a sense of privacy outside the urban core. However, urbeaches fall more within the surveillance-based tradition of city centers, where sousveillance is mostly unstoppable.

Swimwear

Misunderstandings often create strange rules on certain urbeaches that do not normally apply on natural beaches or in waterparks. For example, at PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...

, swimwear is not allowed:

On a visit to the fountain recently, however, we got more of a chill than we were expecting. According to a security officer who approached us, individuals must wear street clothes. No swim attire -- even for small children -- is permitted. We were surprised because our children in the past had worn swimsuits there. The officer indicated the rules are out of respect to the tenants of PPG Place.