Cityscapes as Play Sites

Free Running and Parkour

In the literal and figurative border zones created in this way, hybrid forms of play often thrive, as most remarkably with so-called Free Running and Parkour (an activity with the goal of moving from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using mainly the abilities of the human body). Free runners and Parkour practitioners, called traceurs (male) or traceuses (female), use their athleticism to move at speed through cityscapes, where walls, fences, gaps between buildings, and so on, are obstacles to be gracefully negotiated.

Largely young person's pursuits, Free Running and Parkour exist in a liminal zone between childhood and adulthood and typically reclaim the cityscape for a pure form of playfulness, uncompromised by the tension between adult-only interests and children's safety. It does not matter to a free runner or traceuse whether the cityscape being traversed is the rooftops of a downtown red-light district or a children's playground in the suburbs. The cityscape is reduced to obstacle course, undif-ferentiated by socially determined meanings.

With worldwide numbers of practitioners limited, not least by the extraordinary level of agility required, Free Running and Parkour are revealing instances of an extreme transformation of cityscapes into play sites that is partly explicable as a cultural response to the compromising of more conventional play sites by adult fears about unsafe urban environments. Free Running and Parkour resonate as distinctive early 21st-century cultural inventions because they transcend such tensions by reducing the cityscape to an abstraction. Meanwhile, media-based leisure pursuits, especially the playing of computer games, have moved most children indoors and out of the real public cityscapes.

Trend toward Indoor Play

The widespread relocation of play indoors throughout the developed world was an inexorable trend of the late 20th century, as technologically mediated forms of play developed from the growing attractions of burgeoning mass media and then accelerated exponentially in the era of the computer and internet. For a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these technologies also underpinned the explosive development of video arcades, which concentrated new forms of semipublic electronic play in urban spaces, leading in some societies to a “moral panic” about the supposed effects on young people and the associated risks of congregating in these places, reinforced by sensationalized stories of long hours spent on obsessive or addictive behavior.

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