Jump city: Parkour and the traces

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 107, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 251-263

  Thomson, David ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62249134357     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2007-065     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes Edmond Jaloux: A man who goes for a walk ought not to have to concern himself with any hazards he may run into or with the regulations of a city. If an amusing idea enters his head, if a curious shopfront comes into view, it is natural that he would want to cross the street without confronting dangers such as our grandparents could not have imagined. But he cannot do this today without taking a hundred precautions, without checking the horizon, without asking the advice of the police department, without mixing with a dazed and breathless herd, for whom the way is marked out in advance by bits of shining metal. If he tries to collect the whimsical thoughts that may have come to mind, very possibly occasioned by sights on the street, he is deafened by car horns. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Roy Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 434. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Arcades
2. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006)
3. and Anthony Vidier, "Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented," October 115 (Winter 2006): 13-30, 30
4. Situationist International Online, www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ (accessed August 3, 2007)
5. PKTO.ca: A Southern Ontario Parkour Community, http://pkto.ca/parkour.php (accessed August 3, 2007)
6. Slavoj Zizek, afterword to Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 78
7. Ibid
8. Graham, interview by author, Toronto, July 29, 2007
9. and Live Free or Die Hard, directed by Len Wiseman (Santa Monica, CA: Cheyenne Enterprises, 2007)
10. Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 27
11. On the significance of aerial views of the city to Situationist rhetoric, see Vidier, "Terres Inconnues"; and David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
12. I. Also see M. Christine Boyer, "Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformation in the 1930s and 1940s," Diacritics 33.3 (Fall-Winter 2003): 93-116
13. Richard Sennet argued for organic cities against Utopian planners of the 1960s who imagined renewed urban sectors first, then demolished neighborhoods and installed their "vision." At best, the results are comical. Sennet, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992)
14. See also Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (New York: Doubleday, 1999), on attempting to walk in the planned city of Milton Keynes, England
15. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 15. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Aesthetics
16. On two and three dimensions, Harvey paraphrases Stephen Kern (The Culture of Time and Space. 1880-1918 [London: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 144-52)
17. on the cubists, "whose tensions between 'the world of three dimensions that was their inspiration and the two-dimensionality of painting that was their art' generated canvases that were as fragmented and shattered in their appearance as the urban social landscapes that they often sought to depict." Harvey, The Urban Experience, 179
18. Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Soft Architecture
19. In 2007, for example, certain strata of the American working class have been off-shored so quickly they have not yet had time to mourn, and only practiced pessimists have been quick enough to chant the loss. See Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (New York: Crown, 2007)
20. "The contradiction between town and country" is a phrase from Marx and Engels quoted by Benjamin in "The Flaneur," Arcades, 432
21. Other phrases from Robertson's scaffolding that seem to more or less directly invoke parkour are "directional lability" and "the negative space of the building" (Soft Architecture, 165)
22. The notion of a structure without a center comes, at least, from Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 278-94
23. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1995), 14-15
24. Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (Toronto: Vintage, 2004), 217
25. Ricardo Piglia, The Absent City, trans. Sergio Waisman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 141
26. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Black-well, 1984), 270
27. Infiltration, "Warning Signs," http://infiltration.org/ethics- warning.html (accessed June 17, 2007). On general sewering techniques, see Urban Exploration Resource, "Sanitary Sewer," www.uer.ca/forum-showthread. aspfid=I&threadid=5703 (accessed June 17, 2007)
28. On Paris sewers, consult Joe Kissell, "Paris Sewers: Exploring the Dark Underbelly of the City of Light," Interesting Thing of the Day, January 17, 2005, http://itotd.com/articles/432/paris-sewers/. Paris sewers are wide, and the system parallels the city above it, including street signs at intersections. Benjamin's (inevitable) set of quotations on Paris sewers can be found in Arcades, 411-12