Parkour Practitioners Research Articles

Parkour-Related Death: Case Report and Review of the Literature

Closely related to free running, parkour is a running sport that aims to traverse the environment as efficiently as possible, and may involve such stunt-like maneuvers as jumping over urban obstacles like benches, scaling walls, and even jumping from rooftops. We report a case of a young adult aficionado of parkour who suffered a fatal head injury from a short-distance fall while attempting a wall-hop and spinning maneuver in which he missed his grip on a railing. An autopsy was performed at the Medical Examiner's Office, with findings of blunt force trauma of the head. To our knowledge, this is the first case of parkour-related death reported in the medical literature, and we propose that this case may represent a prototype for the pattern of injury (i.e., severe blunt head trauma) that could prove fatal to a practitioner of parkour. Despite the seemingly apparent danger of these stunts, review of the medical literature reveals only a handful of reported cases of parkour-related injury. These injured parkour practitioners tend to be adolescent to young adult males, typically with fractures of the distal extremities (hands, feet, radii, and tibias) and clavicles. Finally, another forensically relevant feature of parkour-related death is the potential for difficulty in determining manner of death, distinguishing accident from suicide or even homicide, depending on the circumstances.

Parkour – at skabe steder med kroppen

Parkour – a placemaking practiceParkour is a relatively new movement-culture that has evolved rapidly in Denmark since 2005. In the academic field of scholarly work on parkour the movement-culture has been interpreted as a subversive bodily strategy for the subject to handle architecture, space and power. The movements of the traceurs are being ”read” for their cultural significance on a discursive level. The traceurs does not follow the social norms for how to move in public places, but balances on the back of benches, jumps over rails and crawls down stairs. In Denmark the interpretation of the movements of parkour as a critical practice meets oppositions. The first specialized facility for parkour was built in 2007 in cooperation with both the peoples academy ”Gerlev Idrætshøjskole” and practitioners of parkour. Today over 47 facilities for parkour exist. A problem lies within present studies’ point of departure which stems from abstract ideas about the city and political resistance instead of departuring in the bodily practice. What do the practioners actually do, when they practice parkour? This article seeks to answer this particular question and tries to do so based on the authors own experience and ethnographic fieldwork with practitioners in their daily training. Parkour is played out in the streets as well as in specialized facilities. What binds these places together and constitute parkour as a movement-culture, is a dynamic pattern of movements and a practical knowledge about the spatial and adaptive dimensions of these. These movements and the knowledge are incorporated into the bodies of the practitioners. By utilizing a theory of affordance by James Gibson and Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge the dynamic pattern can be understood as perceptual skills that opens up a new relation to the surroundings; in urban spaces as well as specialized facilities.

An existential phenomenological examination of parkour and freerunning

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the embodied experiences of practitioners of parkour and freerunning. Phenomenological interviews were conducted with 11 (9 male and 2 female) intermediate-to-advanced traceurs (parkour practitioners) ranging from 18 to 33 years old. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach, which focuses on bodily perspective, was used to uncover and describe the meaning of these experiences. Following lengthy in-depth phenomenological interviews, two dimensions emerged: bodily experience and interactive experience. Several supporting themes also emerged, including play, movement and risk within the bodily experience dimension, and community, public and world within the interactive experience dimension. The findings of this study provide new perspectives of the experiences and meanings associated with participating in parkour and freerunning, and both support and contradict previous academic work on parkour.

Parkour, The Affective Appropriation of Urban Space, and the Real/Virtual Dialectic

Parkour is a new sport based on athletically and artistically overcoming urban obstacles. In this paper, I argue that the real world practices of parkour are dialectically intertwined with the virtual worlds made possible by information and communication technologies. My analysis of parkour underscores how globalized ideas and images available through the Internet and other media can be put into practice within specific locales. Practitioners of parkour, therefore, engage their immediate, physical world at the same time that they draw upon an imagination enabled by their on–screen lives. As such, urban researchers need to consider the ways that virtual worlds can change and enhance how individuals understand and utilize the material spaces of the city.

Tracing the city – parkour training, play and the practice of collaborative learning

The article examines how parkour training is constructed and transmitted amongst localised peer groups known as ‘traceurs’. It concentrates on training practices that develop as a result of peer interaction in open, public spaces rather than formal training sessions that take place within a gym or as part of a regulated coaching programme. Drawing on extended interview material from a range of parkour practitioners with varying levels of experience and expertise, the article investigates the traceur's perspective on group training and how this relates to cognition and processes of learning. Using traceurs' own reflections the research will identify how physical obstacles, mental challenges, fear and risk are handled through repeated actions that then result in deeply embedded somatic responses to the built environment. The repertoire of moves that is shared between traceurs offers a patterned way of learning that, in turn, provides a route to embodied knowing. The research demonstrates how group training sessions in parkour can be conceived as collaborative learning and how that relates to theories of social learning (Bandura 1977, Lave 2009, Wenger 1998). The article argues that the efficacy of play as an approach to training provides a vehicle for active learning that chimes with the utilitarian aspect of parkour practice where to know and overcome obstacles represents the knowing and attainment of freedom.

Parkour: creating loose spaces?

.Parkour is a spectacular and highly mediatized new way of movement that challenges conceptions of acceptable or appropriate behaviour in urban public space. This article will examine the potential of parkour to “loosen” urban spatial texture by applying recent thinking on loose and tight space by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens to data gathered through in‐depth interviews with parkour practitioners (traceurs) in two Finnish cities. When practising in urban public spaces, the traceurs we interviewed often caused confusion among other people. We explore how they negotiate their right to public space in the face of these reactions, either by evasion or with a combination of legal and moral arguments. We argue that parkour is not only a playful and confrontational practice with a potentially subversive character, but that the process of loosening space constitutes a complex dialectic, which may also involve a certain degree of tightening in the public space for other unexpected or unintended activities.

Everyday aesthetics in action: Parkour eyes and the beauty of concrete walls

Parkour is a physical discipline practised in public and semi-public spaces, most often in urban environments. In this article, the potential of parkour to open up new perspectives on everyday surroundings will be considered. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which practitioners of parkour (traceurs) build unique and highly embodied relationships with their daily space. Emotions that they attach to their environments and their aesthetic appreciation of mundane surroundings will be explored. The interpretations are based on in-depth interviews with traceurs in two cities in Finland, Helsinki and Jyväskylä. For them, the most inspiring environments combine different heights with solid structures that provide a good grip. Concrete is considered the ideal material, and suburban landscapes, which are often thought of as boring or even ugly by other urban dwellers, are highly valued among traceurs. Traceurs speak of ‘parkour eyes’, a specific way of looking; gradually, places which have not previously been seen as attractive or appealing start to reveal interesting details and opportunities for inventive practice. Although parkour does not leave any physical traces on the environment, it has the potential to make mundane environments visible as well as to reveal some of the aesthetic potential imbedded therein. In doing so, parkour questions established ideas of interesting and valuable environments and reassesses the aesthetic values of our everyday environments.

Playing with fear: parkour and the mobility of emotion

This article engages debates on emotional geography and non-representational theory by considering fear as a distinctly mobile engagement with our environment. Parkour, or freerunning, has exploded into public consciousness through commercial media representations and films. It is depicted as a spectacular urban sport that either can or cannot be done. Through ethnographic research with groups of parkour practitioners I consider what has been excluded from these representations: the emotions involved in trying, experimenting, and gradually learning to be in places differently. In parkour places are ‘done’ or mobilised in tentative, unsure, ungainly and unfinished ways which can be characterised by a kind of play with architecture. I argue that this play is contingent upon an array of fears, which, rather than being entirely negative, are an important way in which practitioners engage with place. Here fears can manifest differently, not only restricting mobility, but in some cases encouraging imaginative and playful forms of movement.

Discourses of Subversion: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Capoeira and Parkour

This article will examine the notion of subversive discourse found in both the Brazilian dance-martial art known as capoeira and the recent urban phenomenon called parkour, looking in detail at the origins and influences of the two disciplines. With reference to capoeira, I will argue that the linguistic structure which underpins the game provides the space for each capoeirista to develop his or her own creative expression or ‘personality’ within the framework of the discipline. When looking at parkour, I will consider the ways in which it embodies both the notion of flesh in Merleau-Ponty's later writings and how through such an understanding of their bodies and the space around them, practitioners of parkour, known as traceurs, are able to engage in what Foucault refers to as ‘technologies of the self’.

Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour

Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour