The Movement Card aims to educate and inform all who have interactions with people in the public domain, and is a collaboration between Parkour Outreach, Ukemi, and Parkour Earth.
The project is picking up momentum and we’ve published cards for Scotland, Finland and New Zealand. We’re now working with Parkour UK to develop the Movement Card project to cover all of the UK jurisdictions as part of their Development Associates Programme.
We wrote a blog post for Parkour UK to cover the common issues faced by parkour practitioners when training in public spaces and what the success of the project would look like. You can read that post here.
In the meantime, Gordon thought it would be helpful to take a moment to reflect on the origins of this project and why it’s important to us.
Origins
Law Degree – 2010-2014
Law has always appealed to me as a mechanism for resolving problems. As an undergraduate law student and a parkour practitioner - I often thought about how the law applied to my practice of parkour.
One common problem that arose whilst practising parkour in public spaces related to encounters with property owners. We would be told by property owners that it was illegal to be there, that they would be liable if we hurt ourselves, and they would threaten to call the police. This always struck me as odd because the space was open to the public. The reasons given by property owners for us to move on didn’t always seem in line with my undergraduate studies – particularly in delict (tort), property law, and criminal law.
In the final year of my law degree, I pulled all of these points together into my dissertation in law – “A socio-legal analysis of Parkour”. The dissertation looked at whether practising parkour in public spaces was illegal and also why the public may perceive parkour as illegal. If you’re interested in reading the full dissertation – you can download it here
Movement Card – 2014-Present
Around the same time, David Banks was working on a concept called the Movement Card – a pocket sized card that had your legal rights relating to public space on it. I worked with David and a few others to boil down my 10,000 word dissertation into as few words as possible. The result was the first Movement Card.
The first Movement Card was well received by the Scottish parkour community but it didn’t go much further than that at the time. David went on to work on other projects, whilst I went on to coach parkour full-time and then start a career in law.
Fast forward to 2018 and David and I came together again - this time as Ukemi and Parkour Outreach - to bring this project back to life and take it to a global scale with the support of Parkour Earth. But this project needs the support of the global community in order to take it further.
Why get involved?
The Movement Card started off as a way to address the imbalance of power between property owners and parkour practitioners in Scotland. It empowered practitioners to understand their rights in public spaces and dispelled a lot of the misconceptions held by property owners. It can be really beneficial on a local level to understand the rights within each jurisdiction.
On a global level, it gives us an opportunity to draw comparisons between different jurisdictions on the right to move and the freedom of movement. This can then be used as a basis to advocate greater freedoms for individuals and rebalance the power between property owners and the individuals that use public spaces.
But in order to get to this point – we need more countries to get involved to create a global database.
Will this be an easy task? No.
Is it a worthwhile endeavour? We certainly think so.
If you’re interested in getting your country involved – please get in touch with us and we can help you to take the first steps and guide you through the process.
