Zombie Cities

Abstract

This chapter offers a theoretical appraisal of our contemporary hyper-regulated urban spaces situated against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, the shift to consumer economies and the rise of the creative city paradigm. While existing work has characterised urban space as dead and asocial spaces bereft of life. This chapter opts to think our city centres as ‘Zombie Cities’: cities which have been eviscerated the social but are forced to wear the exterior signs of life through the injection of economically productive but artificial modes of culture and creativity. This sets the stage for explaining why parkour is inconsistently included and excluded from urban space, and how it attains spatio-economically contingent legitimacy and inclusion into urban space that problematises existing theoretical perspectives around a revanchist urbanism.

Citation

Raymen, T. (2018), "Zombie Cities", Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography (Emerald Studies in Deviant Leisure), Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 85-99. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78743-811-820181005

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