‘We are rolling and vaulting tonight’: sport programmes, urban regeneration and the politics of parkour in Turin, Italy (original) (raw)
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Urban spaces in contemporary Italy are currently contested sites where competing images of society, politics and citizenship are constructed and negotiated. While at a national level widespread xenophobic discourses classify migration as a security and public order problem, and define immigrants and their children as alien bodies in Italian cities, at a local level the leadership and cultural entrepreneurs of Turin based the city urban renewal on an image of multiculturalism and inclusiveness with the aim to attract visitors and capital investments. As the intersection of such discourses shape the manifold ways through which (post)migrant bodies become represented, perceived and addressed in contemporary Turin, this paper will address how such dynamics are negotiated by groups of children of migration between 16 and 21 years old practicing capoeira and parkour in Turin public spaces. The focus on capoeira and parkour, two lifestyle sports which emplace the body in public spaces, enabled this study to highlight how groups of (post)migrant youth used these practices to negotiate spaces and processes of inclusion, and exclusion, in Turin's cityscape. Capoeira and parkour represented meaningful sites of analysis, as practices wrought with contradictions indicative of current trends within Turin's urban politics. Both disciplines are abundantly endorsed by public-private events celebrating Turin's renewal, vibrancy and diversity. However, the participants' spontaneous, and often unrequested, engagement with these disciplines in public spaces often creates frictions and conflicts between them and other members of the public in relation to what constitutes the public, how it should be used, and by whom. The analysis of the participants' engagement with capoeira and parkour in Turin's regenerating cityscape, enabled to illuminate the shifting meaning of citizenship in the context of research, and articulate it to the reciprocal constitution of bodies, spaces, and power relations in a less-thancoherent assemblage of neoliberal urban regeneration.
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This thesis illustrates the relationship between body and space in the process of identity construction amongst groups of young men of migrant origins between 16 and 21 practicing capoeira and parkour in Turin's public spaces. Urban spaces in contemporary Turin, Italy, are contested sites where competing images of society, politics and citizenship are (re)produced and negotiated. While at a national level, widespread xenophobic discourses define immigrants and their children as alien bodies in Italian cities, Turin leaderships and cultural entrepreneurs aiming to attract visitors and capital investments have based the city's urban renewal on an image of multiculturalism and inclusiveness. The intersection of such discourses shapes the manifold ways through which immigrant bodies, and identities, become valorised, pathologised and essentialised in Turin. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research conducted with a multi-method qualitative approach, this study explores h...
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Rather than being seen as citizens, the children of immigrants are portrayed as a population to be controlled and contained across Europe. In Italy today, debates about cultural authenticity and renewed nationalism accompany waves of moral panic that depict a country under siege by illegal and unwanted immigrants. Specifically in cities, immigrants and their children are imagined and portrayed as alien and out of place. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Turin, Italy, with children of immigrants aged between 16 and 21, Ugolotti and Moyer illustrate how these youth make use of their bodies through capoeira and parkour practices to contest and reappropriate public spaces, thereby challenging dominant visions about what constitutes the public, how it should be used and by whom. They analyse the 'body in place' to understand how the children of immigrants navigate unequal spatial relations and challenge dominant regimes of representation, while also attempting to improve their life conditions and reach their personal goals.
Parkour, Counter-Conducts and the Government of Difference in Post-industrial Turin
City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2018
The following paper aims to offer a critical discussion of the unfolding politics of belonging and exclusion taking place in Turin's regenerating cityscape as a way to illuminate the paradoxes, tensions and daily negotiations of emerging forms of social and spatial restructuring in the post-industrial city. In developing this analysis, we engage with an integrated methodological approach that privileges the voices and experiences of about 30 young men, mostly of migrant origins and aged 16-21, practicing parkour in the city's public spaces. In addressing these issues, we focus on the participants' engagement with one of the symbols of Turin's (multi)cultural, community-oriented and creative renewal, the post-industrial urban park of Parco Dora in order to unpack the processes of inclusion/exclusion and the conduct of conduct (Rose 2000) enacted in the creation, management and use of the city's regenerating areas. Our discussion of the participants' ambivalent and contested practices in Turin's cityscape enabled us to address how these young men re-inscribe tensions, instabilities and fault-lines relational to the " selective story-telling " (Vanolo 2015, 2) characterizing Turin's narratives of consensual transformation, post-industrial renaissance and (multi)cultural vitality. In particular, by engaging with the participants' bodily and spatial negotiations in Turin's public spaces through the lens of counter-conduct (Foucault 2007[1978]), we highlight the significance of recognising and examining partial, but productive forms of urban contestation within contemporary, pacified scenarios of urban regeneration.
The following paper aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary debate between studies on “the physical” (Silk et al., 2015), the urban condition, migration and multicultural/super-diverse societies. It will do so by exploring how groups of young men of migrant origins practicing parkour in urban spaces engaged emerging forms of social and spatial restructuring characterizing the rebranding of cities like Turin, Italy. Taking cue from Lefebvre's argument that “space originates from the body” (1991, p. 242) this paper does not aim to address the practices of (post)migrant youth in cities, as merely containers of social practices and relations (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2011; Schmoll and Semi, 2013), but focuses on the relationship between young men of migrant descent and the city of Turin, thus exploring how participants practices negotiated, and were made part of the process of repositioning and restructuring of their city of settlement. The ethnographic exploration of participants' engagement with parkour in Turin's public spaces will enable to articulate local processes of urban redevelopment with emerging global patterns of transnational gentrification (Sigler and Wachsmuth, 2015) and surveillance orientations (Manley and Silk, 2014; Bauman and Lyon, 2013) taking place in (First World) regenerating urban areas. Addressing the relationship between processes of urban renewal, subjectivity and emerging unequal definitions of citizenship this paper will finally explore participants' ambivalent practice of parkour as a counter-conduct (Foucault, 2007 [1978]). Through this conceptual lens this paper will address the fault lines of the city's advanced government of difference, and account for participants' negotiation of (contingent) citizenship through their situational physical and spatial re-appropriation of urban spaces.
CONTESTED BODIES, CONTESTED CITIES: (POST)MIGRANT YOUTH AND CONTINGENT CITIZENSHIP IN TURIN, ITALY
Urban spaces in contemporary Italy are currently contested sites where competing images of society, politics and citizenship are constructed and negotiated. While at a national level widespread xenophobic discourses classify migration as a security and public order problem, and define immigrants and their children as alien bodies in Italian cities, at a local level the leadership and cultural entrepreneurs of Turin based the city urban renewal on an image of multiculturalism and inclusiveness with the aim to attract visitors and capital investments. As the intersection of such discourses shape the manifold ways through which (post)migrant bodies become represented, perceived and addressed in contemporary Turin, this paper will address how such dynamics are negotiated by groups of children of migration between 16 and 21 years old practicing capoeira and parkour in Turin public spaces. The focus on capoeira and parkour, two lifestyle sports which emplace the body in public spaces, enabled this study to highlight how groups of (post)migrant youth used these practices to negotiate spaces and processes of inclusion, and exclusion, in Turin's cityscape. Capoeira and parkour represented meaningful sites of analysis, as practices wrought with contradictions indicative of current trends within Turin's urban politics. Both disciplines are abundantly endorsed by public-private events celebrating Turin's renewal, vibrancy and diversity. However, the participants' spontaneous, and often unrequested, engagement with these disciplines in public spaces often creates frictions and conflicts between them and other members of the public in relation to what constitutes the public, how it should be used, and by whom. The analysis of the participants' engagement with capoeira and parkour in Turin's regenerating cityscape, enabled to illuminate the shifting meaning of citizenship in the context of research, and articulate it to the reciprocal constitution of bodies, spaces, and power relations in a less-thancoherent assemblage of neoliberal urban regeneration.
Crossing the symbolic boundaries: parkour, gender and urban spaces in Genoa
Modern Italy, 2015
This paper shows how girls and women who practise parkour cross the gendered divisions of space, sport and other symbolic territories that are brought into play by so-called risk-taking sports, and how it may therefore be considered a subversive action. The strategies of negotiation produced by such symbolic crossings are examined via the concepts of reproductive and resistant agency and of gender manoeuvring. In particular the concept of gender manoeuvring will be used to examine the mechanisms of inter- and intra-gender inclusion and exclusion which, within subcultures, pass through a recognition of authenticity. Indeed, in the culture of parkour the question of authenticity emerges when media dissemination produces a split into two distinct practices: art du déplacement and freerunning. The traceuses cross this boundary because of their different origin (they are from the streets as opposed to the gym), thereby building within their gender further discourses on authenticity.
Rather than being seen as citizens, the children of immigrants are portrayed as a population to be controlled and contained across Europe. In Italy today, debates about cultural authenticity and renewed nationalism accompany waves of moral panic that depict a country under siege by illegal and unwanted immigrants. Specifically in cities, immigrants and their children are imagined and portrayed as alien and out of place. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Turin, Italy, with children of immigrants aged between 16 and 21, Ugolotti and Moyer illustrate how these youth make use of their bodies through capoeira and parkour practices to contest and reappropriate public spaces, thereby challenging dominant visions about what constitutes the public, how it should be used and by whom. They analyse the 'body in place' to understand how the children of immigrants navigate unequal spatial relations and challenge dominant regimes of representation, while also attempting to improve their life conditions and reach their personal goals.