Drawing on two years of participatory ethnography in the parkour scene in Newcastle, England, with members of the local parkour community and its associated professional coaching company, the author considers why parkour is excluded from urban space despite its hyper-conformity to the central values of consumer capitalism and its increasing celebration in mainstream media, advertising, and sport and lifestyle markets. He argues that this paradox is a product of late-capitalism and is a key component of capitalism's ideology and a key element in parkour's popularity, in which it appears that participants are fighting back against the system. He describes a broad theory of the changing nature of leisure and identity in late-capitalism; existing criminological and sociological theorizations of parkour and other forms of spatial transgression and their assumptions about human nature, subjectivity, and the relationship between structure and agency; the role of parkour within the pressures and realities of participants' lived experiences of consumer capitalism, particularly parkour as work and leisure; the issues of space and control and how cities attempt to create a veneer of life and the social in the dead-zone of contemporary public space, "zombifying” an urban ambience of living-dead; parkour's embodied practice and how participants move throughout urban space; and how parkour is policed and controlled by private security teams.

Thomas Raymen is Lecturer in Criminology at Plymouth University, UK. He is the co-founder of the Deviant Leisure Research Network and has published articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics including commodified leisure and social harm, crime control and urban space, and violence, consumerism and violent media. His research interests span the fields of criminology, leisure studies, moral philosophy, and cultural geography.

Chapter 1. The ‘Paradox’ of Parkour