TEDx Seattle 2018 — Can I Parkour Near Your Entrance?
“The bars” were favorite play equipment when I was young. Schools installed 3" bars, many 15 feet long, set at a height of around 34–36", and anchored firmly into cement. The height was necessary so spinning children wouldn’t bonk their heads on the pavement. Sets of bars were generally found in the out of the way edges of elementary school playgrounds and in parks. I remember throwing one calf over the bar at View Ridge Elementary School and forming a muscular triangle by clasping my arms around the bent angle of my knee and jumping up to start my body spinning around and around that bar.
In truth, however barren the play landscape, children will find places to romp and ways to disport themselves. Taking my granddaughter to the playground has proven that children don’t care about purpose so much as possibility. Kids will hang from tree limbs or clamber up them. They will climb the slide, jump the stairs, and hang from the handrail. According to one TEDx Seattle speaker, that’s all a good thing.
Colin MacDonald, a parkour designer, channeled everyone’s inner-childhood at TEDx Seattle, 2018 as he walked across the stage carrying a portable parkour bar structure. Bars 40” high ran parallel to the ground and joined other, perpendicular support bars. A pair of large anchoring tubular triangles jutted out to the front and the left of the structure to keep it from tipping. A single high bar challenged the eye on the far side of the structure.
After placing the structure, Colin grinned wide, gripped the lower bar, and leapt gazelle-like over, then smoothly reversed the move and returned to his initial position. Not finished, he jumped, grabbed, swung, vaulted, spun, dangled, dropped and rolled, using every angle and slim curved surface on the structure, demonstrating an athleticism that had the audience gasping. In a word, Colin was having fun.
Colin is an unstructured play advocate, a man who believes profoundly that “movement and play makes us stronger, happier, and better adapted to our community.” A parkour expert who first learned about parkour in a video game, MacDonald understands that not everyone is ready to leap tall buildings in a single bound or to do a dive and roll off an overpass. Still, at the heart of parkour is good old-fashioned play, the kind of romping, cavorting, and gamboling that disappeared from our lives around age 12. Why twelve? Because in the U.S. playgrounds are built for kids up to eleven.
Remember “don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mother’s back?” In my neighborhood with its old, chipped streets and sidewalks, that meant a lot of leaping and hopping while walking home from school. Those silly little games constituted play, and they called on us to interact with the environment. “When things fall by chance into a useable pattern, it is alchemy,” says Colin. That big boulder in the park could be the foundation for “King of the Mountain,” or “Push Daddy Off the Rock.” A circular staircase, an ADA ramp and railing, those flowerbed slabs forming a path through the blooms, or a left-over cement pipe with a 4' diameter, all call to the child inside, says MacDonald, and beg us to engage, to move, to laugh, and to stretch our limbs.
Play in its true sense is purposeless. There are no scores, measures, or “shoulds”. Since evolution shaped humans as movers and pushed us across vast swathes of land, we are best served when we continue to make movement a regular part of our day. Granted, an urban landscape likes to constrain us, but not if we close our eyes and look for the playground that is secreted in our daily habitat.
Play is engaging, and if we think back, play is also, Colin says, “…an opportunity for cheerful transgression,” doing something that is slightly verboten but not felonious. He envisions cities that collaborate in the pursuit of play, that encourage citizens to look for and find moments of spontaneous frolic. One example he shared had railings, like the ones below, painted bright colors, possibly with alternating directions: “Over”, “Under”, “Swing”, and “Sit”. With a little color and a few words, city planners can transform a mundane urban pattern into an active social environment.
Or perhaps the staircase that looms steeply further along your walk to work could beckon you to test your skills. On the bottom step, a caring soul has stenciled, “Start Here.” On the first step a 0. Lame effort, no score. The second step offers 10 points for a mini-jump, and the third 20! And so on. Who could resist? Suddenly, the stairs take on a new, rambunctious personna, and the man or woman who bends at the knee and then springs up the steps is honoring both the child and its ancient human heritage.
Parkour or not, every city has curbs on which to balance, stairs for cardio, and rails for climbing. Messing around in the metalic urban forest will benefit the playful adult’s health and spirit says Colin MacDonald.
