Parkour and the City

Parkour and the City PDF Author: Jeffrey L. Kidder
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813571979
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In the increasingly popular sport of parkour, athletes run, jump, climb, flip, and vault through city streetscapes, resembling urban gymnasts to passersby and awestruck spectators. In Parkour and the City, cultural sociologist Jeffrey L. Kidder examines the ways in which this sport involves a creative appropriation of urban spaces as well as a method of everyday risk-taking by a youth culture that valorizes individuals who successfully manage danger. Parkour’s modern development has been tied closely to the growth of the internet. The sport is inevitably a YouTube phenomenon, making it exemplary of new forms of globalized communication. Parkour’s dangerous stunts resonate, too, Kidder contends, with a neoliberal ideology that is ambivalent about risk. Moreover, as a male-dominated sport, parkour, with its glorification of strength and daring, reflects contemporary Western notions of masculinity. At the same time, Kidder writes, most athletes (known as “traceurs” or “freerunners”) reject a “daredevil” label, preferring a deliberate, reasoned hedging of bets with their own safety—rather than a “pushing the edge” ethos normally associated with extreme sports.

Parkour and the City

Parkour and the City PDF Author: Jeffrey Lowell Kidder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813571966
Category : Extreme sports
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the increasingly popular sport of parkour, athletes run, jump, climb, flip, and vault through city streetscapes. In Parkour and the City, Jeffrey L. Kidder examines the ways in which this internet-friendly twenty-first-century sport involves a creative appropriation of urban spaces as well as a method of everyday risk-taking by a youth culture that valorizes individuals who successfully manage danger.

Parkour and the City

Parkour and the City PDF Author: Jeffrey L. Kidder
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813571979
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
In the increasingly popular sport of parkour, athletes run, jump, climb, flip, and vault through city streetscapes, resembling urban gymnasts to passersby and awestruck spectators. In Parkour and the City, cultural sociologist Jeffrey L. Kidder examines the ways in which this sport involves a creative appropriation of urban spaces as well as a method of everyday risk-taking by a youth culture that valorizes individuals who successfully manage danger. Parkour’s modern development has been tied closely to the growth of the internet. The sport is inevitably a YouTube phenomenon, making it exemplary of new forms of globalized communication. Parkour’s dangerous stunts resonate, too, Kidder contends, with a neoliberal ideology that is ambivalent about risk. Moreover, as a male-dominated sport, parkour, with its glorification of strength and daring, reflects contemporary Western notions of masculinity. At the same time, Kidder writes, most athletes (known as “traceurs” or “freerunners”) reject a “daredevil” label, preferring a deliberate, reasoned hedging of bets with their own safety—rather than a “pushing the edge” ethos normally associated with extreme sports.

A Burglar's Guide to the City

A Burglar's Guide to the City PDF Author: Geoff Manaugh
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374117268
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The city seen from a unique point of view: those who want to break in and loot its treasures At the heart of Geoff Manaugh's A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: the city as seen through the eyes of robbers. From experts on both sides of the law, readers learn to understand the city as an arena of possible tunnels and picked locks—and architecture itself as an obstacle to be outwitted and second-guessed. Never again will readers enter a bank without imagining the vault geometry, or visit a museum without plotting ways to bring their favorite painting home with them. From how to pick locks (and the tools required) to how to case a bank on the edge of town, readers will learn to spot the vulnerabilities, blind spots, and unseen openings that surround us all the time. This simultaneously allows us to view the city—from specific buildings and individual rooms to whole neighborhoods—through the privileged eyes of FBI investigating agents and security consultants, people dedicated both to solving and to preempting these attempts at devious entry. Full of absurd and marvelous stories of heists and capers, and offering a kind of criminal X-ray of the built environment, A Burglar's Guide to the City includes its own twist: the realization, hidden in its final chapter, that all along the book has been laying out the relevant details for plotting the perfect robbery, an ambitious and real proposal for robbing a bank in New York City.

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City PDF Author: Thomas Raymen
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1787438112
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book examines the contradictions surrounding popular lifestyle sports such as parkour and freerunning and their exclusion from our hyper-regulated city centres. The author combines ethnographic data and complex theory to move beyond tropes of resistance and acknowledge and explain the paradox of parkour against a backdrop of late-capitalism.

Routledge Handbook of Urban Public Space

Routledge Handbook of Urban Public Space PDF Author: Karen A. Franck
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000850129
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
Is it truly the "end" of public space? This handbook presents evidence that the answer is "no". In cities in different parts of the world, people still use public space to pursue activities of their choice. The book is divided into seven sections. The first section presents three emerging types of public space. Each of the subsequent five sections focuses on a type of activity: recreation, commerce, protest, living and celebration. These sections are international in scope, presenting cases of activities in Brazil, China, Colombia, DR Congo, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Libya, Taiwan, Turkey and the U.S. The closing section, composed of three chapters, presents research methods for studying public space. Graduate students, faculty members and researchers in social science, architecture, landscape architecture, geography and urban design will find the book useful for understanding, studying and designing urban public space.

Art, the Sublime, and Movement

Art, the Sublime, and Movement PDF Author: Amanda du Preez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100054091X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
This book is a critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary visual culture and image studies, exploring ideas about space and place and ultimately contributing to the debates about being human in the digital age. The upward and downward pull seem in a constant contest for humanity’s attention. Both forces are powerful in the effects and affects they invoke. When tracing this iconological history, Amanda du Preez starts in the early nineteenth century, moving into the twentieth century and then spanning the whole century up to contemporary twenty-first century screen culture and space travels. Du Preez parses the intersecting pathways between Heaven and Earth, up and down, flying and falling through the concept of being “spaced out”. The idea of being “spaced out” is applied as a metaphor to trace the visual history of sublime encounters that displace Earth, gravity, locality, belonging, home, real life, and embodiment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, media and cultural studies, phenomenology, digital culture, mobility studies, and urban studies.

City of Play

City of Play PDF Author: Rodrigo Pérez de Arce
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350032158
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
City of Play shows how play is built into the very fabric of the modern city. From playgrounds to theme parks, skittle alleys to swimming pools, to the countless uncontrolled spaces which the urban habitat affords – play is by no means just a childhood affair. A myriad essentially unproductive playful pursuits have, through time, modelled the modern city and landscape. Architect and scholar Rodrigo Pérez de Arce's erudite, original, and often surprising study explores a curiously neglected dimension of architectural design and practice: ludic space. It is an architectural history of the playground – from the hippodrome to the Situationist city – of space released from productive ends in the pursuit of leisure. But this is more than just a book about how architecture has incorporated play into its spaces and structures, it is a history of the modern city itself. The ludic imagination impregnated modernist ideals, and what begins with the playground ends with a re-consideration of the whole sweep of the modern movement through the filter of leisure and play. Because play is such a basic or fundamental human experience, the book re-grounds the architect's concerns with those of non-architects – and not only those of adults but also of children. It seeks to give everyone – architects and other ordinary city-dwellers alike – a better understanding about what is at stake in the making of the public spaces of our cities.

The Suffering Body in Sport

The Suffering Body in Sport PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1787560686
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This volume approaches the study of pain, risk and injury in sport from a variety of social scientific perspectives. Contributions focus on the manifestations of pain, risk and injury within sport cultures, and the degree to which the research is rapidly expanding to include new ways of thinking about risky and painful 'suffering' in sport.

Parkour and the Art Du Déplacement

Parkour and the Art Du Déplacement PDF Author: Vincent Thibault
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781926824918
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Parkour, the art of displacement, or freerunning--whatever the name, this new discipline born in the Paris suburbs is rapidly being adopted by people throughout the world. Not satisfied to suffer through urban life, these athletic artists or artistic athletes want to thrive in it, all the while earning dignity by daringly reappropriating three fundamental motor skills: running, jumping, and climbing. Vincent Thibault explores the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the art of movement and offers ideas on health, sports, urban living, and the relationship between the body and the environment. Reflecting on the culture of effort, he also avoids the misguided notion that depicts parkour as just another of those elitist extreme sports, instead providing a thoughtful, lyrical adventure into martial arts and chivalry in an urban setting.

Social Issues in Sport, Leisure, and Health

Social Issues in Sport, Leisure, and Health PDF Author: Sine Agergaard
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000955230
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
This book examines how social issues shape and influence our engagement with sport, leisure time physical activity, and health-promoting exercise. Connecting the personal with the public, it helps the reader understand how individual exercise, leisure, and sport participation are both facilitated and constrained by their social contexts. Presenting a series of in-depth descriptions of grassroots sport, urban lifestyle sport, physical activity across the life course, sport for children with special needs, and the development of creative climates in sport, this book seeks to encourage what C. Wright Mills described as the “sociological imagination”. Every chapter begins with an individual-level account centred on everyday challenges with accessing sport, partaking in leisure activities, and meeting guidelines for daily exercise before exploring the larger, socially determined patterns in which those experiences are located, establishing a vital template for the social scientific study of sport, leisure, and health. Touching on key contemporary themes including diversity, inclusion, health inequalities, and physical inactivity, as well as selection and intensification in sports, this book offers new case material and theoretical tools for understanding the relationships between sport, leisure, health, and the wider society. This is an indispensable companion for any course on the sociology of sport, exercise, leisure, or physical activity and health.