Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City by Thomas Raymen

Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City by Thomas Raymen

Author:Thomas Raymen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787439863
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00


The Function of Space in a ‘Symbolic Economy’

David Harvey (2007, 2012) has long argued that the city and urbanisation processes have always been a key means for the absorption of surplus capital. This is particularly pertinent in the contemporary context where capital, as Smith (1996) observed, is increasingly flowing back to the central urban areas of the city. For cities like Newcastle, this is partially a result of the deindustrialisation of Western economies and the subsequent degradation of central urban areas and their land values (Smith, 1984). As industrial production moved elsewhere due to the pervasive new orthodoxy of neoliberal capitalism’s disciplining of labour, post-industrial cities like Newcastle had to make what Winlow and Hall (2013, p. 124) describe as the shift from municipal socialism to municipal capitalism. This involved local authorities fleeing from social democratic municipal governance and throwing their hopes into the bosom of consumer markets. The inter-competitiveness of cities and the governing logic of ‘creative cities’ (Mould, 2015) rich with opportunities for consumption meant that there was a need to ‘regenerate’, ‘redevelop’ and ‘rehabilitate’ city centres as commercial spaces of consumption. Theoretically, this would enable these cities to appeal to affluent young professionals and therefore remain economically viable in a new hyper-competitive post-industrial reality (Hollands & Chatterton, 2002; Minton, 2012; Robinson, 2002). Sharon Zukin (1995) observed this trend two decades ago when she talked about culture displacing politics in defining the direction of cities; what she pithily described as ‘pacification by cappuccino’.

Nevertheless, looking at cities in a purely economic sense does not do justice to capital’s use of culture and the visual display of the city to create a wider ‘symbolic economy’, which provides the multi-sensory spatial ambience conducive to consumption. Politics, economics and culture must all be read in collaboration with one another to look at how they collectively shape, produce and re-produce the urban environment and thus influence the response to and governance of practices like parkour. This can be seen in the push for BIDs (see Minton, 2012) in which local businesses in a demarcated central urban area pay a levy to an independent limited company (for Newcastle it is ‘NE1’ www.newcastlene1ltd.com) to collaborate in responsibility and maintenance of the area to maximise commercial interest. As Neil Smith (1996) observed over a couple of decades ago:

Uneven development at the urban scale therefore brought not only gentrification in the narrowest sense but the whole gamut of restructurings: condominium conversions, office reconstructions, recreational and service expansion, massive redevelopment projects to build hotels, plazas, restaurants, marinas, tourist arcades and so on. All involve a movement of capital not simply into the built environment in general…but to the central and inner urban built environment in particular. (p. 83)

This is what Zukin (1995) would refer to as the ‘symbolic economy’ of cities. As Mould (2015) notes, when neoliberal urban strategies sell off land to private real estate investors who accumulate capital through land rent from hotels, restaurants, high street retailers, bars and urban shopping malls; such spaces also become increasingly securitised.



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