Is your community ready for a parkour park?

By Heidi Lemmon

Parkour has been around for centuries and provides a full-body workout, which has led to the development of current fitness trails and military obstacle courses. Modern parkour consists of daredevils leaping between buildings, somersaulting off walls, and scaling tall buildings. This doesn’t really sound like an activity a recreation and parks director would be interested in, but it does sound exactly like a skatepark proposal from the 1990s: a wild idea presented by a ragtag group of kids and young adults to duplicate city obstacles for use in a public park.