Why Parkour Parks?

Parkour parks offer a unique space where children, teens, and adults can participate in unstructured play and natural, human movement. Unlike team sport fields or skateparks, a parkour park requires no equipment to be used.

As a recreational activity, parkour engages participants physically and mentally through jumping, crawling, balancing, and climbing. Parkour parks are made of multi-use structures that encourage open play and creative collaboration amongst children, and create inviting fitness spaces for adults.

The self-driven nature of parkour creates a supportive community, where participants encourage each other to continually progress at their own pace to overcome fear and achieve greater athletic feats.

Parkour is a recreational athletic discipline where participants challenge themselves by effectively and creatively navigating obstacles in their environment.  The term ‘parkour’ was coined in Lisses, France in the 1980s by a group of young adults who called themselves the Yamakasi. They would challenge each other in various physical feats, rooted in Le Methode Naturalle principles used for French military obstacle course training. Through years of continued practice, they began to perform jumps and climbs that would look at home in a Jackie Chan action movie.

In the early 2000s, parkour became popularized through news features by the BBC highlighting the physical feats of the Yamakasi. This inspired many young adults to start training on their own. Through online forums, followed by the rapid growth of youtube, parkour spread across the globe. These early adopters coordinated online, began growing local communities, and traveled across the world to meet up together to train at parkour ‘jams’.  As the physical capabilities of the parkour community grew, some of these early adopters began doing professional stunt work, motion capture for video games, or competing in reality shows like Ninja Warrior. This brought parkour to even wider audiences, who were eager to start training themselves.  To meet this demand, veteran practitioners started opening gyms and after school programs, catering to excited youth, misfit teens, and adventurous adults.

Today parkour has cemented itself in popular culture, serves as the foundation for thousands of careers, and inspires countless people to become fit.

Unlike a playground, parkour parks do not confine the imagination of those in the play space. Instead they provide ample opportunities for play through obstacles that encourage natural human movement patterns.  These include running, jumping, climbing, brachiating, balancing, and crawling.  These movements, which have been popularized in functional fitness, yield robust and transferrable strength and dexterity.

The nature of parkour parks encourage continual risk assessment through play, which is essential for healthy child development as highlighted in The New York Times.

The obstacles in parkour parks: bars, railing, blocks, and ledges, can equally engage adults disinterested in parkour.  The apparatus is perfect for calisthenics and bootcamp-style workouts.  With the growing trend of equitable and outdoor exercise, parkour parks uniquely meet these current community needs.

Parkour parks can also activate spaces. Pop-up installations have been used to engage communities in areas without playgrounds and one of the few US parkour parks was built under a highway, leveraging the cover to keep the obstacles accessible in all weather conditions.

Parkour parks can be considered the most inclusive element of any park. They require no equipment, nor do they limit accessibility by age. With intergenerational spaces being the future of public parks, parkour elements invite parents and grandparents into the playscape (instead of on the sidelines with their phones), increasing community connection and supervision. Functional and natural fitness afforded by parkour parks are familiar to all ages, since the movements are intuitive and the designs are inclusive.

Children
The unguided structure of a parkour park encourages children to creatively engage with the space and collaborate with one another in an open play environment.

Teenagers
Unlike traditional playgrounds, teens do not age out of parkour parks. Instead, as they grow, the obstacles afford new challenges.  A 6 ft. gap between blocks is an impossible jump for a child, but becomes an exciting physical challenge for a teenager.

Adults
Since the obstacles are not age specific, parkour parks grant parents the opportunity to play with their children.  With parkour being popular for over 20 years now, many seasoned parkour practitioners continue to train as adults. Like skateparks, parkour parks create a socially acceptable space for them to continue pursuing their fitness hobby.  And for adults who have no interest in parkour, the obstacles of a parkour park are still perfect for bodyweight exercise.

Just as parkour creates adaptable athletes, the nature of parkour parks is quite adaptable as well.  Unlike sport courts which have regulated sizes, or skateparks which need a large lot, parkour parks can be modular in nature.  Parkour parks also can be built in underutilized spaces, like under a highway overpass or on hills.

According to parkour park designers, the minimum cost per square foot is roughly $20, but can increase depending on the desired park surfacing.  An ideal size for a parkour park would be 3000 sq. ft, but parkour elements can easily be added to existing play structures. Parkour parks can be classified as outdoor exercise equipment under ASTM-3101, making it easy for designers to incorporate into their park designs.

See a Parkour Park in Action

Notable North American
Parkour Parks

Panzer Park

Langley, BC

The massive, 10,000 sq. ft. parkour park is the centerpiece of Langley’s major overhaul of Panzer park.  While the park also features pump tracks, multiple sport courts, and other playgrounds, the news and popularity have continuously focused on the novel parkour obstacles. Opened in 2017, the park became so popular that soon after they needed additional parkour and washroom facilities.

Lincoln Park

Sommerville, MA

The addition of this parkour park was a coordinated effort between Parkour Generations Boston and the Boston suburb of Sommerville. Parkour Generations Boston has been teaching outdoor parkour classes in the area since 2012, and has cultivated a vibrant, active community.  With no gym location, they rely on park reservations for consistency in their outdoor training locations. The parkour park has provided this consistency and a location for the parkour community to gather outside of classes to train, enabling it to grow in Boston.

Rhodes Park

Boise, ID

Rhodes Parkour Park activates otherwise underutilized space by taking advantage of a highway overpass to shelter the park from rain and sun. By doing so this parkour park is a consistent location for active recreation and fitness, regardless of the weather.

“I am a forty year old dad with three kids. My 11 and 13 year old sons and I love Parkour. It is something we can do together. Healthy for our bodies and our family bond. We can’t often afford to visit the private gyms, so we are left in public places and kids playgrounds. As an adult, I’m not always a good fit for playgrounds, and my boys are quickly outgrowing them too. We need playgrounds for teens and adults, and that’s Parkour. “You don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.”

Glenn Mathewson

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