Parkour, Counter-Conducts and the Government of Difference in Post-industrial Turin.

Abstract

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.