Undisciplined spaces: lifestyle sports and sport-for-all policies in Italy

In the last decades, parkour as a urban bodily practice has gained an extraordinary visibility in the global sportscape, thanks to its precocious mediatization in blockbuster movies and documentaries, in internet video channels like Youtube, in websites and in social networks (Gilchrist and Wheaton 2011, 2012; Stapleton, Terrio 2010). In Italy too, it has rapidly become popular among young people. In the chapter we will examine the role of UISP – Unione Italiana Sport per Tutti (Sport for All Italian Union), the largest Italian sport-for-all organisation, in the diffusion and legitimation of parkour within the Italian context, which also becomes a way for UISP to legitimise itself as the hegemonic promoter of new/alternative sports in Italy (Ferrero Camoletto, Sterchele and Genova 2015). UISP managed to incorporate into its organisation a large portion of the parkour scene: in 2013 about 70 parkour groups and 1,400 traceurs were formally affiliated, including some of the most active parkour groups in the national landscape. Despite its seemingly niche dimension, parkour has undergone a fast development within UISP when compared to other lifestyle practices, crossing the symbolic threshold of one thousand members in only two years (whilst for instance it took six years for skateboarding memberships to grow beyond that number). In reconstructing the stages of the (partial and still on-going) co-optation and incorporation of parkour within UISP (Thorpe, Wheaton 2011; Coates, Clayton, Humberstone 2010; Dumas, Laforest 2008), we will in particular focus on the project known as “Spazio Indysciplinati” (Undisciplined Space): the name of this project refers to the challenging character of the practices involved as well as to the difficulties to fit them into any existing Discipline-Leagues in which UISP is structured. Through workshops in 2010 and 2011 aimed at creating a think-tank of leaders of sport associations, simple sport practitioners and young people, the project first identified the new actors, spaces, sensibilities and trends in sports, bodily expression and movement. By intersecting other UISP projects including various street activities (juggling, parkour, street theatre, capoeira, skateboarding), Spazio Indysciplinati progressively emerged as a cultural and organisational space as open and fluid as the kind of sport and bodily activities covered. In 2013, the platform gave birth to the educational project Percorsi Indysciplinati (Undisciplined Paths), funded by a law on Social Promotion and aimed at attracting young people to physical activity. New and potentially low-threshold activities were expected to contrast inactive lifestyles offering opportunities for social participation and integration. Spazio Indysciplinati as a general frame and Percorsi Indysciplinati as a specific project had been monitored by the research group using a mix of qualitative tools like: interviews, focus groups, documentary and social network analysis. By analysing them with a specific focus on parkour, we will show how the fluid and unstructured nature of lifestyle sports (Eichberg 2010) contributes to unveiling and problematising the rigidity of the organisational logics (Slack 1997; Chelladurai 2001) that characterise even an innovative organization like UISP, opening up an arena for the definition of its cultural politics (Wheaton 2013) in relation to youth participation, uses of urban space (Borgogni 2012), social inclusion and community-building effects (Bavinton 2007; Lebreton 2010; Kidder 2012; De Martini Ugolotti 2014).