A street game or street sport is a

sport Sport is a physical activity or game, often Competition, competitive and organization, organized, that maintains or improves physical ability and skills. Sport may provide enjoyment to participants and entertainment to spectators. The numbe ...

game A game is a structured type of play usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or video games) or art ...

that is played on city

street A street is a public thoroughfare in a city, town or village, typically lined with Building, buildings on one or both sides. Streets often include pavements (sidewalks), pedestrian crossings, and sometimes amenities like Street light, streetligh ...

s rather than a prepared field. Street games are usually simply play time activities for children in the most convenient venue. Some street games have risen to the level of organized tournaments, such as

stickball Stickball is a street game similar to baseball, usually formed as a pick-up game played in large cities in the Northeastern United States, especially New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston. The equipment consists of a broom handle and a rubber ...

. When street games are based on organized sports, the rules are highly modified to fit the situation, i.e. manhole covers for bases with cars or buildings for foul lines in stickball. When balls are used in street games,

Spaldeen A Spalding Hi-Bounce Ball, often called a Spaldeen or a Pensie Pinkie, is a rubber ball, described as a tennis ball core without the felt. These balls are commonly used in street games developed in the mid-20th century, such as Chinese handball (a ...

s are often used.

Street sports

Street sports are sports held in urban environments. Street sports are an expression of the spontaneous, improvisational and creative origins of sport adapted by human ingenuity to the urban environment. In historical terms their origins are traceable to the very earliest evidence of sports in Greek and Roman civilisation.''Urbanization and the Evolution of the City''; Reader, J.; Vintage; (2005) Street sports are a hybrid form of sport and reflect the adaptation of conventional sports to the cityscape. Viewing the city through as a living, bustling, and thriving organism helps to cast light on the nature of that which is urban and to begin to home-in on particular salient features of urban life. It is only with the advent of this relatively modern perspective on the urban that it has become possible to speak in terms of street sports.

Parkour Parkour () is an athletic Training#Physical training, training discipline or sport in which practitioners (called ''traceurs'') attempt to get from one point to another in the fastest and most efficient way possible, without assisting equipment ...

artist Sebastien Foucan has defined the sport of

Freerunning Freerunning is an athletic and acrobatic discipline incorporating an aesthetic element, and can be considered either a sport or a performance art, or both. Freerunning is similar to parkour, from which it is derived, but emphasizes artistry over ...

as a ‘physical art’.Foucan, S; ''Freerunning: Find Your Way''; Foucan, S.; Michael O'Mara Books Ltd.; (2008) In the words of Foucan, street sports are "...a philosophy concerned with the quest of personal and social realisation..." A similar point of view can be found in the notion of the philosophy of urban solo-climbing expounded by Alain Robert. Likewise, the high-wire walker,

Philippe Petit Philippe Petit (; born 13 August 1949) is a French highwire artist who gained fame for his unauthorized highwire walks between the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1971 and of Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1973, as well as between the Twi ...

, whose performance include walking between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, has described his 'interventions' on the urban environment as 'art crimes', suggesting their essence is creative and constitutes an expression—an interaction with the city.

Examples of street games

This is a list of games that are traditionally played by urban

children A child () is a human being between the stages of childbirth, birth and puberty, or between the Development of the human body, developmental period of infancy and puberty. The term may also refer to an unborn human being. In English-speaking ...

playgrounds A playground, playpark, or play area is a place designed to provide an environment for children that facilitates Play (activity)#Children, play, typically outdoors. While a playground is usually designed for children, some are designed for othe ...

, parking lots, and back streets. They are all games that may be played on a hard surface, like

asphalt Asphalt most often refers to: * Bitumen, also known as "liquid asphalt cement" or simply "asphalt", a viscous form of petroleum mainly used as a binder in asphalt concrete * Asphalt concrete, a mixture of bitumen with coarse and fine aggregates, u ...

. They are part of

children's street culture Children's street culture refers to the cumulative culture created by young children. Collectively, this body of knowledge is passed down from one generation of urban children to the next, and can also be passed between different groups of chil ...

, and are notoriously hard to classify rigorously.

Utilizing a rubber ball

Other games

In popular culture

* Street sports in the Middle East: ''The Kite Runner'' and '' The Kite Runner'' (the film adaptation) * Highwire Walking: '' Man on Wire'', film documenting the background to Petit's high-wire walk between the WTC Towers. * A 2010 PBS documentary, '' New York Street Games'', shows the best-known street games played in New York City in the twentieth century, as well as discussing the decline of those games in recent decades.

References

External links

StreetPlay.com

Parkour examples

Playing stickball
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