The Parkour City

Abstract

This chapter uses ethnographic data to explore the embodied aspects of parkour’s practice and how traceurs move around and navigate the city. It draws upon a blend of non-representational theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the attraction to parkour’s intensely embodied, effective and risk-taking practice. It then looks at how the traceurs exist in the interstices of hyper-regulated urban spaces and develop an alternative cartography of the city, which is generated from their situated knowledge and the temporal rhythms and flows in the city centre’s consumer economy. It is argued that this alternative cartography constitutes a spatio-bodily transgression that violates the hyper-regulated city’s command for its subjects to be passive bodies who accept the dominant cartography of the city geared towards consumption.

Citation

Raymen, T. (2018), "The Parkour City", Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography (Emerald Studies in Deviant Leisure), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 101-123. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78743-811-820181006