The recent infatuation of urban governance with the ideologies of creativity has led to many cities over the world being branded as 'Creative Cities'. This policy drive has been problematised of late as a neoliberal agenda, which critics argue aids in the gentrification of cities. One reaction to this has been the proliferation of community-orientated initiatives on a smaller scale that are (sometimes) conducted outside the official capacity of the city. So-called Tactical Urbanism draws from such activity and therefore has become a popular movement for people who have a desire to change and reconfigure their city and do so without governmental involvement. Championed by the urbanist Mike Lydon, this paper charts how Tactical Urbanism has become a brand in itself, with the term being used by urban governments as a means of continuing neoliberal policies of urban development in a post-2008 recessionary era. This paper will show how Tactical Urbanism is defenestrating the former, in favour of the latter. In so doing, it is fast becoming the latest political vernacular of the Creative City.

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Parkour, or l'art du déplacement, has become widely practised in recent years, with most of its participants (or traceurs) conducting it in urban environments. Studying parkour and those who practise it provides urban geographers with a new and fascinating way in which movement is perceived in the city. Using the theoretical idioms of ‘smooth and striated space’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus Continuum, London) and ‘the event’ (Badiou, 2005, Being and Event Continum, London), this paper will position parkour as an alternate way of theorising the city as an arena for capitalist versus subversive practices. Moving away from the idea of smooth space incorporating a ‘war machine’, the Badiouian event is a more appropriate lens through which to theorise parkour and its participants’ relationship with the city, in that it embraces a serene ethos of urban rediscovery.

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The paper analyses urban pastimes as rhizomes expanding prior work that predominantly examines urban 'subcultures' as oppositional to the world city paradigm and homogenised cityscapes. We discuss the process of what we call subculturalisation through which, after they have been marginalised and illegalised, urban practices become formalised as subcultures and incorporated into the fabric of consumption and profit making. However, the paper proposes, these crystallised moments, that are ossified and embedded to the world city paradigm, are only part of wider rhizomatic territories that continue to remain open fields inviting virtual urban identities and creative states of becoming.