Photo Credit: THOR/Flickr

Vancouver is scoring a Canada-wide first with a public outdoor parkour space in Hastings Park as part of the 20 year multi-million dollar master plan for Hastings Park and the PNE. We spoke to Dave Hutch, park-board manager of research and planning to find out more.

How did the idea for Plateau Sports Park come about?

The idea was to transform the whole park into a series of connected open spaces and recreational amenities. In 2011 we began implementing the plan by going through a process of working with the community and identifying where people’s needs and desires were for activities. Empire Fields was already a sports field and we upgraded it to synthetic turf and a rubberised track. Plateau Park was envisioned as a place of active sport and recreation that would be complimentary to field sports. We were approached by a group of parkour practitioners who said, ‘Hey, they have parkour parks in Europe, could we do that here?’. How did you feel about the idea of a parkour space? When we sat down with them, first we had to understand what it was! There’s a sort of a view of parkour of that James Bond Casino Royale scene that everyone thinks of, but it’s much more than that, lots of people can do parkour: young kids, adults, men, women –many moves are done just a few feet off the ground, so we just needed to know what they required. Continue reading:
Canada’s First Parkour Park Open Now in Vancouver