Misuse of The Monument: The art of parkour and the discursive limits of a disciplinary architecture

Lamb, Matthew D.

doi:10.1386/jucs.1.1.107_1

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…On their own, these methods are insufficient, because as we will see, what is shown of and said about parkour in the media, on the internet and by practitioners themselves is not equivalent to the in-situ practice of parkour. Ethnographies, usually with participant observation [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] are more fruitful methods to get acquainted with a situated and embodied activity like parkour. However, this focus on qualitative research also means that there is a dearth of systematic quantitative data.…”

Section: Social Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How is parkour new and singular? A narrative review across miscellaneous academic fields.

PAGNON¹,

Faity²,

Maldonado³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Parkour is a growing sport that mostly involves jumping, vaulting over obstacles, and climbing in a non dedicated setting. The authors gathered all known relevant literature across miscellaneaous academic fields in order to define parkour with regards to other sports disciplines.Parkour is a lifestyle sport, and as such provides an alternative to mainstream ones, away from strict rules, standardized settings, and necessary competitions. Traceurs (parkour adepts) consider the city as a playground and as an outlet for their creativity, but they also have a strong taste for hard and individualized challenges. They usually train on non specific structures, at ground level. Although their social background is not clear, they are mostly young and male.Traceurs are stronger than recreational athletes, especially in eccentric exercises. However, their endurance skills may be below average. One of the core specificities of parkour is its precision constraint at landing, which turns a standing long jump into a precision jump, regulated on-line so as to prepare for landing. The running precision jump follows the same landing pattern, and its flight phase contrasts with long jump techniques. Injuries, which are not more frequent than in other sports, often occur at reception and on lower limb extremities. This risk is coped with targeting the landing area with the forefoot instead of letting the heel hit the ground like in gymnastics, or with rolling in order to dissipate the impact. Overall, parkour focuses on adaptability to new environments, which leads to specific techniques that have not yet been extensively addressed by the literature.

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Section: Social Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How is parkour new and singular? A narrative review across miscellaneous academic fields.

PAGNON¹,

Faity²,

Maldonado³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Similar to skateboarders, practitioners of parkour use the urban landscape in unintended ways. Exploring the potential of misuse as a form of empowerment, Lamb (2014) discussed how parkour challenged the disciplinary power in the built environment. Parkour, known as the art of displacement, could be defined as an art of movement focusing on both original and creative ways to negotiate city spaces (Bavinton, 2007, p. 392).…”

Section: Alternative Urban Engagementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Parkour, known as the art of displacement, could be defined as an art of movement focusing on both original and creative ways to negotiate city spaces (Bavinton, 2007, p. 392). Lamb described parkour as a practice that “displaces restricted and conventional uses of space with creative, free-flowing or playful movements, which challenges social expectations of use” (Lamb, 2014, p. 109). In a similar vein, Højbjerre Larsen (2015) illustrated how parkour in Denmark has been transformed from a self-organized, freely flowing practice to an institutionalized practice that is planned, organized, and performed.…”

Section: Alternative Urban Engagementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagining and Making Material Encounters: Skateboarding, Emplacement, and Spatial Desire

Bäckström

Sand

2019

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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In this article, we draw from and develop existing ideas of spatial desire and emplacement to explore skateboarders’ skilful mobility and perceptive competence. By combining findings from Swedish and Danish ethnographic studies, we illustrate how skateboarders imagine and make new material encounters both in urban environments not originally built for skateboarding and in skateparks. These imaginations and makings include memories of previous material encounters and are a part of ongoing social negotiations, but they also have a component of imaginary novelty. Making and imagining are discussed as materialization and formation, which include the idea of active materials and sentient practitioners. Two types of material encounters were imagined and made: transitions and smooth lines. Subsequently, two characteristics of these types of encounters were described: “kind” and challenging. The processes of imagination and making took a mutual understanding for granted and deeply engaged the body in the ever-changing material environment. We argue that a conceptualization of spatial desire as emplaced and highly imaginable is fruitful for research on skateboarding and other movement cultures where engagements with materials come to the fore.

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“…But I want to suggest here that it could equally apply to the sense in which a posthuman politics does not presuppose either the body or the space appropriate to it. Urban exploration, in common with parkour, is a mis-use of urban monuments (Lamb, 2014); a psychogeography which deliberately defies the biopolitics inherent in the Vitruvian paradigm. We may not yet know what posthuman bodies can achieve but we can make use of the new imaginaries which the idea of posthuman selves makes possible to subvert the architectonics of the city and re-invent the conditions of everyday life.…”

Section: Posthuman Urbanismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban space and the posthuman imaginary

Shaw¹

2018

The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries

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As the technologies which now largely determine what it means to be an embodied subject bring into doubt who 'we' thought we were, the world is becoming increasingly urbanised. What then is the relationship between the production of contemporary urban space and the new descriptions of bodies emerging from the biological sciences? What effect do new informational technologies have on how we conceive of cities and the way in which they are experienced? This chapter will explore the way that urban architectures and infrastructures have, since the nineteenth century, contributed to a cartography of exclusion and how 'posturban' cities of the twenty-first century have, under the terms of neoliberal capitalism, inherited and escalated these tendencies. The proposition will be that new paradigms of corporeality point the way to a posthuman politics which recognises the contingency of boundaries and requires the imagination of new urban forms and different modes of inhabitation.

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Misuse of The Monument: The art of parkour and the discursive limits of a disciplinary architecture

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

How is parkour new and singular? A narrative review across miscellaneous academic fields.

How is parkour new and singular? A narrative review across miscellaneous academic fields.

Imagining and Making Material Encounters: Skateboarding, Emplacement, and Spatial Desire

Urban space and the posthuman imaginary

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