A “parkour” look at Beijing

Beijing Parkour‘s four booklets

Parkour, the art of taking the quickest, most efficient path across whatever obstacles happen to be lying in the way, turns up in the title of a new book about Beijing.

Beijing Parkour isn’t really about running, as it explains in a glossary of terms. Instead, it borrows the trendy concept to describe a novel way of looking at the city:

Parkour (跑酷) is the extreme sport of street running, which turns an entire city into a training ground: every wall and rooftop, particularly those belonging to abandoned buildings, becomes a target for climbing or vaulting. Parkour was born in France in the 1980s, and the name “parkour” comes from the French “parcour,” which refers to an obstacle course. Utilizing this concept, the present volume adopts a new attitude toward Beijing’s spaces and architecture and shows them off from an entirely new perspective.

For the multinational street observation teams that assembled the book’s material, “parkour” turned out to be more of an overriding philosophy than an actual style of movement.

The book was commissioned by Goethe-Institut China, designed by ISreading (一石文化), and is published by Sanlian. The project also involved Japanese architects Momoyo Kaijima (貝島桃代) and Tsukamoto Yoshiharu (塚本由晴) of Atelier Bow-Wow, whose Made in Tokyo is an obvious inspiration for the visual style of Beijing Parkour.

Nanluogu Xiang

Eighteen neighborhoods are covered in three booklets that divide Beijing into three vertical strips: east, west, and central. The booklets feature photos, maps, exploded diagrams, pull-out panoramas, floor-plans, graphs, and other visualizations to depict how Beijing’s public spaces are used today and how that usage has changed over time. Shown here is one illustration that accompanies the chapter on trendy cafe street Nanluogu Xiang: a tourist takes a photograph and a Beijinger shops, with just a thin wall separating them from local residents of the street.

The text mostly consists of concise introductions to the history and current make-up of the various neighborhoods or landmarks, interspersed with interviews with local residents such as a shop clerk, a restaurateur, and a retiree.

In lieu of a preface, the introductory booklet kicks off with an interview of Michael Kahn-Ackermann, director of the Goethe Institute in China, who first came to the country as an exchange student in 1975. He helped found the institute in 1988, was transferred to Moscow in 1994, and returned to Beijing in 2006.

In the interview, conducted by Shi Jian and Cui Qiao, the institute’s Commissioner for Cultural Programs, Kahn-Ackermann discusses his own cross-cultural experiences:

Shi Jian: What had you imagined China would be like?

Michael Kahn-Ackerman: It was a jumble of things, on the one hand, an idealized Old China, like in the Ming and Qing, but on the other hand, a kind of socialist utopia where everyone was happy, worked hard, and believed in the future. But we quickly discovered that it was neither of those things, it was an entirely different China. Many of my colleagues were the same, and even felt a kind of resentment for China, as if it had cheated them, and they felt disappointed and went home. Then, I felt that the real problem wasn’t with China, but with how you looked at the world, and I began to become interested in Beijing. I rarely went to class, reading Confucian texts quickly became boring. I rode my bike all over Beijing all day, so I’m fairly well-acquainted with the Beijing of the 1970s, at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

I saw two Beijings: one Old Beijing, within the old city, which was basically entirely hutongs, and another between the (present-day) second and third ring roads, but in those days it was mostly 5-storey buildings constructed in the 70s. And, I remember very clearly, the first time I went to Haidian there were still camels, they really had camels, not just for fun, but for hauling things.

SJ: There were still camels in the 70s?

MKA: In 1975, absolutely, it made a big impression on he. I remember the first night after I came to Beijing, out on the road in Wudaokou watching people ride bikes, and it felt incredibly strange to me, I noticed that Chinese people rode bikes differently from westerners. Westerners do everything with a sense of purpose, they’re very clear about where they’re going and want to get there as fast as possible. Chinese people seem to have a different concept of time, a particularly harmonious and comfortable feeling. In those days, people’s movements while riding a bike — maybe it had something to do with what they ate, and they didn’t have much energy — always seemed slow without actually being slow, and the biggest impression I got was one of comfort.

Beijing in those days was conspicuously dilapidated. After I arrived in Beijing in 1975, I came to know an Old Beijing that was fundamentally changing, and another New Beijing with its big, emblematic 1950s and 60s buildings. I’m not a Beijinger, and I didn’t grow up in a hutong, but Beijing in those days was an absolutely beautiful city. To me, 1970s Beijing was a part of the heritage of humanity, the heritage of humanity no matter how tattered.

He also addresses the many changes that the past three decades of development have brought to the capital:

Cui Qiao: What do you think Beijing is lacking?

MKA: Beijing lacks – I’m not sure what it’s called in Chinese, but it’s the urban atmosphere of a major metropolis. Beijing has it all except for that particular atmosphere of its own. Shanghai can’t compare to Beijing in many respects, and from a cultural perspective Shanghai is a desert, but it has that atmosphere, which you can sense if you’re walking around. Beijing’s problem is not one of size but one of space. It’s empty, regardless of the area you’re talking about.

SJ: Not the notion of emptiness in traditional Chinese culture, but geniune emptiness.

MKA: Pure emptiness.

SJ: There’s no urbanity.

MKA: Right, no urbanity. I feel that the fundamental issue is that old Beijingers have a sense of mission. In the 70s, Beijingers could still feel that it was “my Beijing” – they “administered” the city; sure, they way they administered it was not by demonstrating, not like the citizens of metropolises in the west, where if you want to put up a tall building, a crowd will form immediately in opposition. Not that type, but it still was absolutely an identification with the city. No matter how large the city grew, you could have that sense of mission: this is my city, this is the city I want, this is where I was born, where I grew up, and I will die in this city. Today, because of Beijing’s changes, that sense of mission is gone: these changes have nothing to do with me, I’m someone whose life has been transformed, entirely involuntarily. I feel that this is not a problem unique to Beijing, it’s shared by all of China’s major cities.

Guomao: elevation