LANDSCAPING SELVES: PARKOUR AS URBAN MOBILE PRACTICE

Abstract

As an urban mobile practice that involves bodily adaptation to, and dynamic interaction with, the prevailing environment, the continuous doing of parkour has the potential to generate both imaginations of the urban landscape and reconfigure understandings of oneself for its practitioners. This thesis utilises multiple go-alongs to examine how these reconfigurations of the self and imaginations of the urban landscape are closely intertwined through the practice of parkour. Given that parkour is a contingent practice that is engaged with the immediate materialities of the urban landscape, I argue that the production of such imaginations and realisations is imbricated in a continuous process of landscaping. Firstly, I consider how parkour requires practitioners to comport their bodies creatively to the urban landscape to overcome its material constraints. In doing so, practitioners reject the conventional routes that urban fixtures seek to create. Such ways of moving, then, can help practitioners to reconfigure their ways of seeing or imagining the urban landscape. Secondly, I examine how practitioners’ engagement with the urban landscape through parkour is conditioned by their biographies and social circumstances. Ultimately, such reconfigurations of the urban landscape and the self cannot be considered without recourse to interpretations of parkour as a constellation of physical movement, bodily practice and its philosophies. This thesis seeks to pull together various strands of work from cultural geography. Firstly, I leverage on, and bring two bodies of literature – mobilities and landscape – together in an attempt to more effectively elucidate body-landscape relationships through embodied movements. Secondly, I make the case for theoretical continuity between representational and non-representational geographies. Segueing between phenomenological and discursive approaches to mobilities and landscape enables a dual emphasis on both corporeal experience and the representational frameworks that create and/or regulate such mobile practices with the landscape.