Skateboarding and parkour are categorized as urban sports, which are a type of lifestyle sports that are primarily practiced within urban environments. Compared to regular sports, these sports have a focuson personal enjoyment and freedom to set your own goals. Sport and physical activity are an important factor in both physical health and the development of mental and social skills, but not all sports have the same needs, nor are they treated equally. To gain a better understanding for how the practitioners of urban sports view themselves and what their needs are in relation to sport, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted, where 6 participants were asked about factors relating to aspects of the sport, relationship to the spaces they occupy and how other practitioners and non-practitioners interacted with them to better understand the relationship between these practitioners and the spaces they occupy. The results of this study were then presented in relation to the theory of loose spaces to explain why these spaces are important to the practitioners, and how their needs for both space and sport can be met from a municipal perspective. The findings show that the participants have common themes between them, and that space becomes an important factor to the participants because it gives them a sense of reality in their practice. The participants describe that without this sense of reality the practice of urban sports becomes artificial and loses meaning to them.To encourage participation in these sports from a municipal perspective there are two key points, availability of space where practitioners aren’t exposed to bystanders and working with public acceptance of sport as a lifestyle activity that doesn’t have to be delegated to specific sporting arenas.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-185802 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Norgren Guldhag, Ludvig |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Pedagogiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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