The Semiotics of Parkour

The present article is part of a vast research and publication project whose main purpose is to reveal some of the essential characteristics of the phenomenology and semiotics of belonging in contemporary societies and cultures. Such purpose is pursued through the analysis of the way in which these characteristics are manifested by various kinds of physical and conceptual (dis)placements across identity frontiers. The article, in particular, proposes a phenomenological and semiotic reflection on the dialectics between two opposite agencies. On the one hand, the agency of political power as it is expressed in the utopia of controlling the frontiers of belonging through centralized urban and architectural planning. On the other hand, the urban phenomenon of parkour as sum of individual agencies that seeks to defy political power, its utopia of centralized control, and the urban frontiers of belonging that it brings about. Such challenge is undertaken by means of a practice (and performance) of physical (dis)placement through space, which systematically defies its urban and architectural structure. The abovementioned dialectics also embodies a confrontation between the utopia of artificially recreating the ‘natural’ conditions of development of the urban space and environment of belonging (for instance, through the urban and architectural planning of French new towns in the 1960s and 1970s) and the opposite utopia of recuperating the feeling of ‘natural’ movement through space by defying the matrix of both motor possibilities and constraints offered by the urban fabric. These opposite utopias wind up revealing each the contradictions of the other: on the one hand, parkour unmasks urban planning and architectural utopias, showing that they are nothing but a travesty for the need to perpetuate an exploitative system of material and symbolical production and re-production; on the other hand, the liberating trend of parkour is soon cannibalized by media, show, and business trends that turn it into a stereotype of itself. As a result, parkour can be considered both as the urban trend that, invading the environments of belonging created and entrenched by centralized political and planning power, brings about new paths of nomadic identity in the urban fabric; and as the urban fashion that, invaded by the logics of media, show, and commercial exploitation, turns those same liberating movements into routines, into new confirmations of the political and spatial status quo.