Traceur as Bricoleur. Poaching public space through bricolent use of architecture and the body

Abstract

This paper emerged from many months of regular participation in the parkour community in Indianapolis, Indiana. First, this study looks at the art of parkour as a bricolent engagement with architecture. Acts of bricolage, a sort of artistic making-do with objects (including one’s body) in the environment, play with(in) the dominant order to “manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them” (de Certeau, 1984:  xiv). Second, this study investigates architecture’s participation in the production and maintenance of what de Certeau calls, “operational logic” (p. xi). That is, how architecture acts as a communicative mode of space; one, which conveys rationalized or acceptable ways of being in space. This critical ethnography, then, takes to task the investigation of how traceurs, the practitioners of parkour, uncover emancipatory potential in city space through bricolent use of both architecture and the body.