Parkour and urban politics:

citizenship and the ‘gift’‘

Dr Paul GilchristSchool of Environment and Technology

University of Brighton

ESRC seminar, Brighton, 25 Aril 2015

Content

• The spaces and places of parkour in the UK• Parkour and citizenship• Reasons for investment and facility development• Perceived risks and social benefits• Parkour practitioners in local and global contexts• Trajectories of development (division?) for a

diverse lifestyle and informal sport

Research on parkour

• Phase 1: Spatial regulation and urban politics

• Phase 2: Local cultures and practices (body and environment)

• Phase 3: Mediatisation, visual style

• Phase 4: Policy, place and participation

• Phase 5: Health and injury

• Phase 6: Comparative and historical dimensions

Critical research into parkour• A critical spatial practice and urban intervention that ascribes new meanings

to places as parkour practitioners, traceurs, extend mobilities in the city through viewing everyday material objects – benches, railing, fences, lampposts – as ripe for tactile engagements that generate new place-meanings (Saville, 2008).

• Juxtaposition between the fluid movement of the traceur and the negotiation of ‘striated’ urban space (Mould, 2009).

• Hyper-awareness of the environment and urban landscape, and an exercise in ‘post-sport’ subjectivities defined by morally-oriented, community-centred, green and anarchic physical cultural practices which can generate an aesthetic-spiritual realisation of the self (Atkinson, 2009).

• Space and body...not place

Research sites:UK-based parkour parks &training facilities

•Coatbridge•Clayton Brooke•Leicester•Rugby•Norwich•Westminster•Reading•Basingstoke•Crawley•Newhaven•Taunton

Typology of parkour facilities and spaces in the UK, 2015

Public order problems

• Nuisance• Trespass• Damage to property• Anti-social behaviour• (Police misinformation)

• PCSO recommendations

Petitions and campaigns

Citizenship

Othering• Socio-spatial delineation of belonging• Aspiration vs. dystopia

(gangs; disengaged; delinquents)• Positive youth development and active

citizenship

Gift relationships

• Social power in the gift

• Indebtedness and gift accrues interest (Mauss)

• “a complex network of obligations, commitments and blurred identities” (Moore, 2011: 5)

• Power relations between givers and receivers

Becoming and imagining• Entrepreneurialism, lifestyle careers, social

enterprise• Youth futures in austere timeSensing the global• Glocalisation• Social media and sites of judgementPlace-making• ‘Transition fantasies’ and the creative class• Putting the local on the map• Destinations (and pilgrimages)

Mainstreaming and (in)corporation?

Typology of parkour facilities and spaces in the UK, 2015

• www.paulgilchrist.net• www.brighton.academia.edu/PaulGilchrist • @paulgilchrist