Parkour parks as movement opportunities

INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN GESSINGER, TRACEUR AND PARKOUR ENTREPRENEUR

Martin Gessinger, German parkour pioneer, entrepreneur and specialist planner from Berlin, Germany, has turned his hobby parkour into a profession. In addition to his work as a coach and supervisor at ParkourONE, he plans activity areas with the design office TraceSpace.

sb: Martin, parkour is a big talking point. However, ideas about it differ widely. What do you understand by Parkour? Martin Gessinger: In our own history, we have witnessed an enormous change in the public perception of and interest in parkour. When we started, at the beginning of the 2000s, hardly anyone had heard of parkour. At that time, we already attached great importance to drawing attention to the principles and seriousness, but also to the huge potential of parkour – the “art of efficient movement”, as we called it. We noticed how we underwent positive change through training, became more confident, saw the world with different eyes, developed a compass of values, forged new contacts and simply also became fitter and healthier. We tried to keep this up and, with like-minded people, we founded “ParkourONE” as an organisation and parkour school.

During this time, there was also a lot of media coverage of our art of movement. With the aid of YouTube and the like, this resulted in the rapid and worldwide spread of parkour. Its coverage in advertising, action films, computer games, and in competitive and mass sports and the identification with highly successful parkour influencers has meanwhile brought about a highly diverse scene with a variety of ideas and training emphasis. What they all certainly have in common is the notion of individual and creative engagement with space, the desire to develop through working on one’s personal limitations and abilities, and also quite simply the fun of exercise and challenge.

Photo: TraceSpace

Parkour practitioners often use the existing environment for the sport. So why create parkour parks? A good question. Actually, parkour came into being precisely because existing spaces in the brutalist Parisian suburbs were differently and newly interpreted by young people – as a huge playground and training space. In a way, this is still the essence of parkour: being inspired by the space, interpreting the possibilities and adapting the moves to one’s own abilities – you don’t need anything planned for this.

From the designer’s point of view, there is now a bigger “but”: areas and spaces designed specifically for parkour more obviously stimulate people’s curiosity to engage with this environment by moving through it. In the best case, their versatile design creates “spaces for encounters” that allow different age groups and fringe communities to come together. Social interaction is thus directly promoted, and the parkour scene benefits several times over. These spaces also offer manifold opportunities for citizen participation in the design and utilisation phase. For us, the best “parkour parks” are movement spaces in which a broad target group gains ownership.

You design parkour parks, or movement spaces, as you call them. What is your philosophy and what do you pay attention to when designing parkour parks? Our movement spaces are designed to inspire, arouse curiosity, invite exploration and offer a space for as many different target groups as possible. For training, for play, for moving together. We build bridges between parkour, calisthenics, bouldering, fitness training and adventure playgrounds. We use a wide variety of materials and structures and, at best, plan a highly individual design with the aid of user participation formats. This allows us to develop a truly unique space that suits the needs of users and the conditions on site.

Photo: TraceSpace

So it’s possible to plan a parkour park that’s also attractive for many other groups? Definitely. Where traceurs (parkour practitioners) move hand over hand and swing, fitness enthusiasts can do pull-ups. Where boulderers climb, traceurs find demanding dynamic challenges. Where classic parkour movements are trained on walls, kids find a real adventure park. These are examples that illustrate the multi-perspective approach of our design pretty well. We automatically think and design across generations and target groups.

What’s a good approach if you want to develop a parkour park in your town or municipality? We’ve had very positive experience with genuine participation by future users at the design stage. In addition to generating mutual appreciation, i.e. the municipality vs. the citizen vs. the design office, we lay the foundations for a movement space that meets the wishes of users and the institutions and creates a high level of identification right at the design stage. In the end, these projects simply enjoy much greater acceptance and use, the money is well spent, and the contact between users and the municipality or developer has a positive effect on the area even after completion. Of course, the whole thing works best with genuine planning freedom and individual design. As specialist planners, we also wish to stress that it certainly makes a considerable difference whether one is prepared to go the extra mile in such design projects. In our opinion, this is the best way to tap the real potential offered by a parkour park or any other movement space.

Thank you for the insights into parkour and your work. My pleasure. Thanks very much for the opportunity.