ABSTRACT
To act generously is to act with kindness. It is an expression of care often acted out as a selfless donation. This donation is often accompanied by an assumption that the recipient will utilise the gift in a way that the donor would condone. This paper presents a situation where a relatively new type of engagement with the public was generously granted permission to erect a park for unveiling and developing its qualities by participating in civil life at the cost of normalization. The type of novel engagement with the civic presented herein is parkour.
Most recently the parkour community erected a parkour-facility in Gerlev, Denmark. This paper analyses how this articulation of generosity can be seen as a response to the debates on parkour and its inclusion into the normativity of the civic. This paper presents the developing architectural language which was deployed on-site as one which is approaching parkour in a novel way, and one which asks the free-runners to conform to the designers’ intent. The act of design herein showcases that generosity needn’t be a signifier of the giving and the needy and the boundary between the beneficiary and the donor is not always clear.
