In 2019, Colin MacDonald passed on a complaint he had heard from parkour athletes about a park he designed. Penzer, the complaint goes, “would be cool if there weren’t 300 kids on it all the time.” As he describes it, Penzer is a multisport park in Langley, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, where his parkour park sits alongside a mountain bike skills park, a pump track, a nature playground, and a court for soccer and basketball.

The show introduced him as a parkour athlete and coach “best known for his work designing public play spaces.” He calls the park a “victim of its own popularity a little bit.” “I did not design it for kid use in mind, but I knew that that would be how a lot of people would experience it.” And he does not share the complaint:

“I think overall, I’m happy that it’s getting used. I think it’s important to acknowledge as we build spaces for parkour that the parkour community is small.”

The athletes and the designer are counting the same crowd. To the athletes, the kids are what keeps the park from being theirs. To the designer, the kids show that it works, because a public park was never going to belong to one group. “If you’re building a public park,” he says, “you have to think like, who else is this going to serve?”

The numbers are not on parkour’s side. Few people, he says, will come to a space announcing that they are parkour athletes there to do parkour; they are a “small part of the population.” “It’s significant but we are a niche sport.” A park built for them alone would be a large piece of public ground set aside for a few. He weighs details the same way. He objects to a playground standard that keeps equipment twelve feet apart, because a gap that size is for “5%, 6% of the parkour community and 0% of the average people walking by.”

His case for the parkour park is what else it can do. Compared with a skate park, he says, a well-designed parkour park “has the potential to serve a lot of populations”: people who “just happen upon it,” who “use it for fitness,” or who “experience it as aesthetically interesting space and wander through it.” A skate park asks its users to bring a board. A parkour park asks only for a body, and every child on Penzer’s timbers brought one.

He wants more of that mixing, not less. He likes the idea of “user groups clashing and figuring their differences out and training on each other’s stuff.” He calls one goal “a bit of a grail”: “intentionally building a found parkour spot that’s not a parkour park.” That would be ordinary public ground of the kind practitioners find and adopt, made that way on purpose. He thinks “public space that is designed for multiple modes of movement is a better space.”

If you train in shared places, you may know the scene from the athletes’ side. A spot you love fills with people who are not there to train, and they look like a crowd between you and your line. The next time it happens, ask of the spot what he asks of a park: who else is this going to serve?

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Colin MacDonald: Parkour design, dream builds, and inspiration,” published November 20, 2019.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.