Jumping, running and getting around: the body experience of public space from parkour practice in Talca, Chile

Abstract

In contemporary society, certain ways of moving bodily in public spaces have been promoted, limiting the ways of experiencing them. However, different practices have emerged that claim a place in the city. Among these stands Parkour, as a practice that uses the body to move around the city and its public spaces. In this sense, this research, through an ethnographic perspective, have focused their interest in understanding the way that Parkour practitioners experience the city bodily, through the uses that they give to public spaces and the corporal movements they perform in them. The main results found that: (1) parkour practitioners perform an imitation of animal movements to move around public spaces; and that (2) there is a process of imagination, whereby parkour practitioners turn space into a "heterotopy" to experience it bodily.