Download e-book for iPad: Parkour and the City: Risk, Masculinity, and Meaning in a by Jeffrey L. Kidder

In the more and more renowned activity of parkour, athletes run, bounce, climb, turn, and vault via urban streetscapes, comparable to city gymnasts to passersby and awestruck spectators. In Parkour and the City, cultural sociologist Jeffrey L. Kidder examines the ways that this recreation consists of an artistic appropriation of city areas in addition to a mode of daily risk-taking by means of a early life tradition that valorizes people who effectively deal with danger.
 
Parkour’s glossy improvement has been tied heavily to the expansion of the net. the game is necessarily a YouTube phenomenon, making it exemplary of latest varieties of globalized communication. Parkour’s harmful stunts resonate, too, Kidder contends, with a neoliberal ideology that's ambivalent approximately danger. additionally, as a male-dominated activity, parkour, with its glorification of energy and bold, displays modern Western notions of masculinity. even as, Kidder writes, such a lot athletes (known as “traceurs” or “freerunners”) reject a “daredevil” label, who prefer a planned, reasoned hedging of bets with their very own safety—rather than a “pushing the sting” ethos as a rule linked to severe activities.