Skateboarding, parkour, BMX, and extreme sports in urban environments. Street sports culture, action sports photography, and how athletes use the city as a playground. Movement, risk, and community in urban spaces.
Urban sports transform cities into playgrounds—skateboarding, parkour, freestyle BMX, and other action sports that use the built environment for creative movement. Discover how athletes turn architecture into opportunity, combining skill, creativity, and community.
This collection captures the energy of urban sports culture, from street skating to parkour exploration. Explore how these movements create communities, influence urban design, and represent alternative ways of engaging with public space through physical creativity and collective practice.
Urban Game: Journey to the End of the Year
Have you ever heard of “Journey to the End of the Night”? It’s an interesting, simple, free street game of epic proportion run by hard-working volunteers in cities around the world from London to Los Angeles.
Urban Game: Journey to the End of the Year
This year, there will be a New Year’s Eve special edition of that urban game, called “Journey to the End of the Year” in Berlin:
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Powdered Skateboarders
Ten skateboarders and a lot of powder - The idea for this short film is really extraordinary! Imaging, your skateboard and yourself are totally dusted with powder and you’re riding your board through a nice skate-park. The impressions for people around you must be great. The powder creates an unusual dust behind you after every move or jump and it seems that you disband yourself.
The ten minutes film “Wizard Smoke” presents this very interesting impressions. The Salazar Productions crew filmed pro-skateboarders, like Bradley Sheppard, Alien, Nate Lacoste, Chris Connolly, Nate Roline and others and recorded for this reason the colorful clouds in their wake.
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Underground Skatepark in London
I regularly ask myself, how to renew and use abandoned places, like old industrial areas, dead railway lines or uninhabited houses in the cities around the world.
A flagship project is the underground skatepark in London. Do you know? It’s called “White Grounds Skate Plaza” and open since April 2007. It’s located in an old, formerly disused service tunnel close to London Bridge station and was designed by the “Side Effects Of Urethane” crew.
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Largest Parkour Jam on Earth
Even if it’s some days ago, I can’t ignore the largest free running jam on earth!
On September 26, 2009, over 3,500 traceurs in 37 countries teamed up and called for a world with clean power. In over 217 cities around the globe, professional and amateur traceurs jumped, ran and climbed through the urban landscape and set a new Guinness world record!
This great urban acrobatics event, called “One Giant Leap” was organized by environmental action group Sandbag together with pro traceurs from Parkour Generations and the international parkour community.
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Freestyle Berlin Photos
There’s a good reason for not writing something last weekend - the phenomenal extreme sports event Freestyle Berlin!
Freestyle Berlin, that was impressing freestyle motocross (FMX), great freestyle skateboarding in a four meter vertramp, freeskiing and freestyle snowboarding on three days at the former airport Tempelhof in Berlin.
My friends, I and about 13,000 other visitors were fascinated by the extreme stunts, jumps and drops. I took a lot of photos there and made a nice black-and-white series out of them - take a look into my Flickr-photostream!
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Freestyle Berlin 2009
Next week, a phenomenal extreme sports event will taking place in Berlin - Freestyle.Berlin!
If you are interested in urban sports or other freestyle activities, you should read the next lines from the press release very carefully:
Freestyle Berlin 2009
“On a full weekend, the 60 world’s best athletes in the disciplines of snowboarding, freeskiing, FMX and skateboarding compete for cash prizes totaling more than US$ 110,000 and the titles “freestyle.champ” and “crossover.champ”.
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Bike Polo - Urban Sport
Some days ago, I read an nice article about urban sports in Berlin in a Berlin-based newspaper. The author of the article gave an introduction into new “in” sports like parkour, freerunning and an interesting one, I never had heard before - Bike Polo:
“Polo is thought to be the oldest team sport known to man, dating from the days when Persian warriors first rode horses into battle. Bicycle polo evolved a bit later, having had to wait for some clever chap to invent the modern bicycle.
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Urbanize - Urban Game
Do you know “Urbanize”? It’s an international urban game which can be played all around the world.
“In this game, backpackers compete with each-other in an unknown city. By executing task from locals, they meet them face-to-face and review the undiscovered places of the city.”
As the teaser describes, Urbanize is an urban game for travelers without much money. The aim of the game is to be faster as the opponent backpacker-teams. As a reward, free nights in a hotel are waiting for the best team.
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Freedom Of Space - Skateboard Culture in Public Space
Do you know the skateboarding documentation “Freedom Of Space”? I read about it some days ago and thought, it’s a bit dated, but who cares?!
When most people think of the word environment, say think of rivers, mountains and lakes - the natural environment. But for most of us, our environment is quite different. (The introduction)
Freedom Of Space is a very interesting film, by Steve Olpin and Tim Irvin, about skateboard culture in public space. It has a look at the street skaters and their social and political conflict with the urban environment and publicity.
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Samparkour - Parkour in São Paulo
When I think of São Paulo, I have mainly Pixação in my mind. What I didn’t know until I watched this video is, that the urban trend sport Parkour becomes more and more popular in the Brazil Metropolis.
“Samparkour” is an almost 7 minutes long short film, which was part of the Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival 2009 (LABRFF) and impresses with great pictures and impressions. It reveals the city of São Paulo under the look of Parkour.
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