TRACING THE CITY: PUBLIC SPACE DISPLACEMENTS IN THE URBAN PRACTICE OF PARKOUR

Abstract

Parkour or the “art of movement” is an urban sport that alters the normative uses of the city and challenges the static view of space. For its practitioners (traceurs), public space does not pre-exist movement, but emerges, is made and performed through an embodied practice. In this essay, inspired by their displacements, we shift our gaze on public space. This research reveals that neither citizenist and universalist theoretical approaches –which see space as an accessible and non-conflict entity– nor those drawn from Marxist critique –which reify space as a given ideological reality that can only be resisted– are enough to understand performative, affective and un/stable urban practices such as parkour. These sports allow us to rethink space, beyond these modern readings, as a conjunction of bodies and materialities in becoming, rather than as a fixed, independent and predetermined entity.