Parkour and skateboarding, territorial resources for urban tourism policies ? Case studies from France and Belgium.

Research binding action sports to sports tourism or urban tourism focuses on mountain activities and surfing, but very little on urban sports outside of the event prism. The goal of this article is to partially fill this gap. Our aim is to understand how the tourism institutional stakeholders use two urban sports, skateboarding and parkour, to attract visitors to their territory. To complement the work showing that these activities are similar to tourism, we use the territorial resource framework. We conducted an interview survey with fourteen officials and elected representatives linked to tourism in six French and Belgian cities. Our results show that while almost all of these actors are familiar with and interact with the skateboarding and parkour scene, they do little to integrate it into urban tourism policy, but more to city branding. These urban sports are therefore not fully activated as territorial tourism resources in the cities investigated. Finally, we identify two spatial tipping points for their activation: the form of their integration into the city branding strategy; and recognition of the symbolic value of local spots.