Parkour: preventing crime through urban involvement
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- Category: Frontpage Articles
- Last Updated: Monday, 01 May 2017 09:11
- Published: Sunday, 03 May 2015 07:42
- Written by Janos Szakolczai
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Once the square was the vital organ of the City, its very essence and core for the harmony and interaction between citizens. However, in the modern city, the square has been taken over by the consumerist influence of the market, transforming its core into a place no longer dedicated to the exchange of ideas and ideals, but of consumer goods. Shops, entertainments, transports work tirelessly - bright, active, welcoming and un-resting - offering citizens and visitors the uninterrupted fulfilment of wishes and desires, with an overwhelming assault of surprises, shocks, sales, offers, emotions. Thus metropolitan reality, more progressive than ever, was morphed into a cold, hyper-individualistic, profoundly blasé attitude, where all social interactions and relationships are reduced to simple monetary exchanges. Urban spaces turn into simple areas of passage, resulting in a deep de-individuation and alienation from the surrounding privatized and highly-monitored environment, one that is filled with prohibitory signs and regulations, to which no-one relates to nor feels respect, and one that, without continuous monitoring, turns inevitably to decay and deterioration. Nonetheless there are alternatives: contexts where the energy and dynamism of the citizens is not wasted in consumption but creates instead an environment of interaction, frequency of the square, participative congregation, and an active, natural monitoring and care of common environmental spaces, beyond the commonplace of bivouac and degradation. One of these alternatives is represented by the practice of Parkour.
